Daniel Pipes: Understanding Israeli and Palestinian Mentalities

John J. Miller: Hello, and welcome to The Bookmonger. I’m John J. Miller of National Review. Thanks for listening. This show is a production of National Review, and we’re recording from the studio at WRFH, the campus radio station of Hillsdale College. Our guest is Daniel Pipes, author of Israel Victory, How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated. Daniel, welcome to The Bookmonger.

Daniel Pipes: Thank you, John. As you may know, I’m a regular listener.

JJM: Well, thanks for being a listener, and you are always welcome as a guest. Daniel, your book is called Israel Victory. What does victory for Israel mean today, both in the conflict that erupted last year on October 7^th, but also in its wider struggle as a Jewish state in the Middle East?

DP: Victory for Israel means convincing the Palestinians that Israel is there, it’s permanent, it’s tough, it’s got friends, and they should accept it. They should realize their goal of eliminating Israel is impossible. In short, convincing the Palestinians that they’ve been defeated.

JJM: Daniel, how did the Israelis and Palestinians find themselves in the situation they’re in right now at war with each other? And I don’t mean just October 7^th, but what’s the history there?

DP: The Palestinians, or the people we now call Palestinians, and the people we now call Israelis, developed mentalities towards each other 140 years ago in the 1880s that made some sense, made plenty of sense back then, and are completely strange and counterproductive today.

On the Palestinian side, it’s what I call genocidal rejectionism: “No, no, no, we hate you, we want to kill you.” On the Israeli side, perhaps more interestingly, it is conciliation: “No, don’t hate us, we’ll bring you good things – clean water, deep water ports, and so forth.”

That made sense in the 1880s. It’s somewhat absurd today. And yet, that is the situation we’re in. The Israelis are trying to convince Palestinians, “We’re okay, you know, you can live with us. We’re not such bad people.” Palestinians are saying, “No, you’re a horrible people. Get out of here. We want to kill you.”

JJM: So why has conciliation failed?

DP: It hasn’t worked because it can’t work. If your enemy wants to eliminate you, telling him that you’ll get him clean water is not going to convince him otherwise. What’s so striking is that the Palestinians have retained this genocidal impulse for such a long period. I would argue, as an historian, that this is unique. No other people have ever retained that kind of hostility for such a length of time.

Likewise, the Israeli attempt to conciliate is also unique. You don’t find it anywhere else. No, when Putin invades Ukraine, we don’t say, here, take some money and become bourgeois. We cut things off. We make him poorer, and that’s the usual approach. So the Israelis came up with a very strange approach 140 years ago. It’s even stranger today.

What I advocate against that background: Israelis need to change, need to adopt the standard definition of victory and defeat, which is the one I articulated earlier, where you convince your enemy that he’s lost. That is the normal way of the world. That’s what the Israelis should adopt.

JJM: How do the Israelis achieve that today as a practical matter? How do they convince the Palestinians that they’re lost and they should move away from their rejectionism?

DP: Let me start by saying that my first purpose in writing this book is to present victory as a goal for Israel. I’m not so eager to give them exact ideas, a blueprint on how to do it. But you’ve asked and many others have asked, so I’ve come up with a couple of ideas.

One is to get rid of the foul institutions of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. These are horrible institutions that Israel in fact itself spawned. Do away with them. Get rid of them and replace them with what I call a decent Gaza, a decent West Bank, places that are okay to live in, not great, not places you and I, used to democracy, would want to live in, but places which are a whole lot better than what is now present in the West Bank and Gaza.

Secondly, I argue that Israel has focused a lot of attention worldwide on trying to improve its reputation, show people it’s a good place, but it hasn’t focused at all on the Palestinians, on the West Bankers and Gazans, the proximate enemy. In fact, I do believe that if it did so, we would find a pretty good reception, that Palestinians are, a lot of them are sick of their circumstances and would be open to working with Israel. So, I’m saying to Israelis, “Give it a try.”

JJM: A lot of people question Israel’s right to exist. Certainly Hamas does, many Palestinians do, but so do a lot of Americans. What do you say to an American who challenges Israel in this way? Why does Israel have a right to exist?

DP: Well, there are two levels in which to answer that. One is that here you have a thriving country of almost 10 million people, where there’s the rule of law, democracy, freedom of expression, economic accomplishments and so forth. So why in the world would you want to destroy it? What justification could there be to destroy a successful country?

The second, deeper one is that Israel is an incredible reestablishment of a sovereign Jewish state some two millennia after it disappeared. And it has done extraordinarily well by the Jews themselves and also by the Muslim neighbors, Christian neighbors who have accepted it. It is a force for good in the larger sense, not just the immediate one.

JJM: You wrote this book, Israel Victory, before the massacres of October 7^th, 2023. And then you rewrote the book. Have your ideas stayed the same, or did October 7^th change in any way what you believe about the circumstance Israel faces now?

DP: In the immediate aftermath of October 7^th, the Israelis were very determined and speaking my kind of language. And I was saying to my friends, “Who needs my book? They’ve already made this change.” But then, within about three weeks, they reverted back to the same old notions of conciliation. So, I thought, “Well, yeah, they do need this book.” And I did some updates, nothing terribly profound, but I did bring it up to date and address the issues that arose due to the October 7^th massacre. The principles, of course, remain the same in the book.

JJM: And now we’re having this conversation in the second half of August of 2024. What should Israel do right now? Is it engaged in a kind of quagmire in Gaza? Is there a path to Israel victory?

DP: It’s unclear to me. The Israelis had a great opportunity about ten months ago. I’m not quite sure if that opportunity is still there. That opportunity was to create, as I mentioned earlier, a decent Gaza, by which I mean a Gaza in which not the Israelis, but the Gazans themselves are ruling the territory under the Israelis’ watchful guidance. But it would be Gazans who administer, run the police and the other aspects of modern life.

I worry that the time has gone by, and the Israelis have lost that opportunity, because they have allowed Hamas to retain a hold over the Gazan population. I worry that the Israeli assault on Hamas has not been successful. There’s a lot of dispute about that now. I tend to be convinced by those who say the Israelis haven’t really done the job very well.

JJM: Daniel, you’re a national security expert. You know all about the Middle East. Let’s discuss at least briefly the other major threat to Israel right now, which is Iran. Is there a path to victory there for Israel, or how should they deal with Iran?

DP: The Israelis have been faced twice before with potential nuclear enemies, being Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, the Israelis destroyed the nuclear reactor in 1981, then in Syria in 2007. Both of those were fairly minor threats in the sense that they had a smaller footprint and less invested than Iran.

The Israelis have shown the way and they could once again, if not eliminate entirely as they did in Iraq and Syria, at least reduce and postpone the kind of threat that the Iranian nuclear program presents them with. There’s a lot that’s underground. It’s going to be further away. It’s more difficult. But the Israelis can and should deal with the Iranian threat directly. No one else is going to do it for them. In particular, the US government is not going to do it. So it’s up to the Israelis. And I think they need to do it.

JJM: Let’s wrap up with one more question. Israel is at war in Gaza. It faces the threat of Iran. This is a real moment of peril for Israel. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of this country?

DP: In general, I’m optimistic. Nuclear weaponry is wild card. But I think that Israel has been a very successful experiment over the past three quarters of a century. It faces a unique hostility, which we’re seeing these very days. But at the same time, it has a record of success that I think will continue. Therefore, I am fundamentally optimistic.

JJM: The author is Daniel Pipes. The book is Israel Victory, How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated. Daniel, thanks for joining us on The Bookmonger.

DP: Thanks for the invitation.

JJM: Thanks all of you for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review. Your reviews help new listeners discover us, and that helps us keep this show going. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of The Bookmonger.