In the months after Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Tzvi Raski, the Israeli military governor of Jenin, realized that the war between Israel and Jordan had disrupted the grain harvest for local Palestinians.
Raski ordered five modern combines to help farmers collect their crops and put his soldiers to work. One of them recalled: “I was among those who conquered the place. [...] A month before I was risking my life, and now here I was helping them harvest their grain.”
“We are incapable of being conquerors,” the man commented.
The anecdote is highlighted in a new book by prominent Islam historian Daniel Pipes, titled “Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated,” released in June.
Pipes’s use of this story aims to illustrate how generations of Israeli political and military leaders have pursued a policy of conciliation and placation toward Palestinians by providing them with material prosperity and engaging in negotiations and concessions instead of pursuing victory.
That peacenik approach is in stark contrast to Middle Eastern cultural codes of conflict, Pipes posits, and has made the Jewish state appear feeble in the eyes of its foes.
The scholar instead calls on Israeli leaders steering the war against Hamas to follow the traditional path to a conflict’s end: victory of one side and capitulation of the enemy. They ought to abandon any attempt at winning Palestinian acceptance, Pipes claims, since their past endeavors have invariably crashed against the wall of Palestinian rejectionism of Israel as a Jewish state.
Read the full article at the Times of Israel.
Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and author of Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.
