Israel Victory. How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated
By Daniel Pipes
(Wicked Son, 336 pages, $31)
Dr. Daniel Pipes is an academically elegant as well as a bold and strategic thinker. He is the founder and President of the Middle East Forum and an historian. Pipes’s new book is titled “Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.”
Pipes’s knowledge of Middle Eastern history and of the Israel-Palestine issue is impressive. Whether or not his carefully considered suggestions will be heeded remains to be seen. I certainly hope that leaders everywhere read this volume.
“Israelis tend to over-focus on Palestinian violence while underestimating the danger of Palestinian slander.”
Pipes argues that Palestinian “rejectionism” can only be defeated if Israel is victorious, if Palestinians finally understand that their obsession to exterminate Israel can never be realized. They must first lose this self-destructive “hope” before they can begin to create a more stable and viable society. (READ MORE from Phyllis Chesler: Immigration of Cultures Hostile to the West Must End)
“The role of hope among Palestinians, actually inspires intransigence, extremism, and violence. Hope that the Jewish state can be destroyed keeps rejectionism alive, inspires continued murderous attacks, and motivates the international hate-campaign.”
He further notes that the massive aid donated to Hamas and to the “Palestinians fuels terror, not peace.”
Pipes is a common sense realist. He understands that “ending the conflict means that one side wins, the other loses.” Israel’s policy of “conciliation” towards Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has led to countless deaths and to the savaging of Israel’s reputation in the world. The deep funded and long-term campaign of “slander” against Israel has worked; but that is also due to Israel’s refusal to fight back or to even engage in the cognitive war. He writes:
This form of anti-Zionism (that Israel is the world’s most horrid and bellicose country) poses an existential threat to Israel no less than Iran’s nuclear weapons. Indeed, just as lawful Islamism poses greater danger than Muslim violence, so the Palestinian delegitimization threatens Israel more than their violence.
I agree. With sadness, based on my own experience, I can confirm that for more than 50 years, both American Jewish organizations and the Israeli government were indifferent to the importance of hasbara, “messaging,” setting the record straight, countering the Big Lies.
In 1980, I tried to persuade a number of American Jewish organizations and Israeli government officials in sponsoring programs to train their staff in the language of “liberation and oppression,” because, I said, “they will come after us using such concepts. My suggestions went nowhere.
In 2003, I published The New Antisemitism which held the Western intelligentsia and Western progressives as well as Islamic Jew hatred as all responsible for the war against the Jews. I was treated as a Thought Crime traitor by the rising “wokesters,” not only in the left-liberal media but also among major Jewish American organizations. With a mere handful of exceptions, they preferred to focus on right wing , Caucasian Jew hatred. This was especially true of the Anti-Defamation League.
In 2005, I was publicly mocked as the Jewish Cassandra on a panel by a Jewish Organization official.
“Sir,” I said, “No one listened to her, Troy fell, and she became Agamemnon’s sex slave. If this is really how you see me, or view my words, why not heed me and my colleague’s warnings about the importance of the cognitive war against the Jews before it’s too late? Why not consider an Iron Dome against the propaganda?”
He walked away in a huff. (By the way, this panel took place at Columbia University.)
Pipes is 1000 percent correct when he states, “Israelis tend to over-focus on Palestinian violence while underestimating the danger of Palestinian slander.” He also believes, “Palestinians are more open to accepting Israel than is generally realized” — and he gives examples. Pipes fully understands that the IDF is as restrained by the “slander” against Israel as it is by America’s decisions to fund Iran and to slow down promised arms shipments to Israel.
Pipes not only criticizes Iran and Palestinian terrorists. He calls upon the Israeli leadership to “make a major shift (by acknowledging) historic errors (such as) enrichment (of Hamas to keep them quiet), placation, and overconfidence.” The Israeli leadership must wrestle with its own “conciliatory” mentality.
Whether or not a policy of “demoralization,” or the use of reason, can stop a “would-be martyr in his tracks” remains to be seen. Whether Israel’s military victory on the ground and a new and never-before tried campaign of “messaging” to the Palestinians will lead to Pipes’s desired “change of heart” also remains to be seen.
But it must be tried.
And Pipes offers a step-by-step series of strategies, both economic, and cognitive. He places great faith in the “role of ideas.” He quotes journalist Khalid Abu Toameh: ‘”The only way to change the hearts and minds of the Palestinians … is by ending the anti-Israel rhetoric of Palestinian leaders and media outlets.’” Pipes himself writes: “The PA and Hamas must be eliminated to create the space for new, constructive ideas to replace rejectionism.”
He names many Muslim Palestinian and Arab Israeli truth-tellers and peace seekers such as writer Madji Al-Wahhab, journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, Gaza Youth Committee founder Rami Aman, professor Mohammed S. Dajani, human rights activist Bassam Eid, outspoken gay activist, Mohammed Zoabi and his mother Sarah Zoabi.
Let me add some more women’s names to Pipes’s Honor Roll.
Since 10/7, a small group of religious Muslim American women, (not Palestinians), were funded to visit southern Israel, returned, and strongly condemned what Hamas did on 10/7; supported Israel’s right to exist; and opposed Jew hatred in the most principled of ways. They spoke at synagogues, at the UN, in Washington D.C., and they also joined the March of the Living in Poland on Yom Hashoah. (READ MORE: Snowflake Work Habits)
Most recently, Canadian religious Muslim women organized a press conference to state their support for Israel and their opposition to antisemitism. I have interviewed, and worked with some of these women including Soraya Deen, Anila Ali, and Raheel Raza. They have been welcomed by Jewish communities, have not yet been assassinated — but have yet to be embraced or funded by religious Muslims.
In an interview I did with Deen and Ali, they said, “We must set the example. I don’t know why the Palestinians are still playing victims. We all have to move on.”
“Defeat” the Palestinians
This is the idea of one of the most astute observers of the region, Daniel Pipes. Once again, this is a rare case where I disagree with his assessment. He makes a good point when he argues that peace can only be made with enemies that have been defeated, but his prescription for victory will not succeed because it is not sufficiently ruthless. Pipes calls for “a policy of commensurate and graduated response.” Minor transgressions, he says, merit moderate reactions while more serious actions should trigger more severe consequences.
Though his examples are different, Israel already has a similar policy to what Pipes advocates. His suggestions, such as taking money from the PA to repair damage caused by “martyrs,” burying terrorists anonymously or seizing weapons from PA security forces used against Israelis are not going to coerce the Palestinians to accept Jews, Zionism, and Israel.
No, to defeat the Palestinians Israel would have to apply the Powell Doctrine, which says that “every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy…and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.”
Israel would have to be prepared to kill every terrorist with little regard for collateral damage; the Air Force would have to bomb refugee camps and other targets that would result in thousands of casualties rather than hundreds. The United States did not flinch from killing tens of thousands of Iraqis to defeat Saddam Hussein and is unapologetic when bystanders are killed in drone strikes (never mind examples such as the Allied bombing of Dresden or the US use of the atomic bomb). Israel would have to be equally callous to “defeat” the Palestinians.
Israel has been unwilling to follow Powell’s guidance because the public would see the action as disproportionate and immoral, the international community would condemn Israel and the United States would force Israel to cease military operations before total victory out of moral indignation and fear of Arab/Muslim reaction. Israel has learned the hard way in battles with the Palestinians and Hezbollah that it does not have the same freedom as a superpower to use decisive force and therefore cannot militarily defeat the Palestinians.