Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, has written a timely book, one that should be required reading for all those stunned by October 7, who suddenly realized that the Palestinians were not “freedom fighters” demanding their human rights and dignity. Pipes is immune to these kind of post-colonial narratives; he keeps his eye on the historical ball, namely the bizarre and distinctive combination of Israeli appeasement and Palestinian irredentism that characterizes this conflict: “Conciliation is to Zionists as rejectionism is to Palestinians, a constant and unique mentality that goes back to the Ottoman period.”
In an outstanding case of good intentions paving the wrong road, he documents the way Israeli efforts to befriend and benefit their hostile (but subdued) neighbors have repeatedly backfired, paving the way to the jihadi hell that is today’s Gaza. Instead, Pipes offers his solution: a victory strategy (and mentality) that makes it clear to the Palestinians (and the world) that Israel has won, and the Palestinians (and other Muslims in the region) have to recognize they cannot destroy her and stop their extraordinary rejectionism. “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over,” he writes.
The first half of the book lays out the basic dilemma: the contours of what he calls Palestinian rejectionism: “an unconditional refusal to accept any aspect of Jewish presence in Palestine,” and an Israeli conciliation that believed that by being fair and generous with their neighbors, they would be able to live with them at peace. In the exchange, Israel repeatedly lost ground in their war with this rejectionism. Pipes documents in painful detail the ways in which Israelis and Westerners not only ignored and denied this irredentism but contributed to its aggravation.
Pipes then reviews the disturbing correlation of Moshe Dayan’s efforts to enact a version of the Marshall Plan for the Palestinians after 1967, and the consequent rise in Palestinian hostility. Dayan tried to modernize the West Bank by attempting to win over the Palestinians with enlightened and generous attitudes. The economic success of his policies can be seen in how, in the 1970s and 80s, the West Bank was the fourth fastest growing economy in the world. Dayan’s “Jewish mother” approach to the Palestinians, however, while surprising them initially (they expected slaughters and expulsions as they would have done), ultimately registered as weakness. Israel did not demand reciprocity, turning a blind eye, for example, to the hate-filled school books used by Arabs during and under Israeli occupation.
By 2000, Palestinian spokespeople who, the author suggests, project onto Israel every accusation they know will tarnish them in the eyes of the world, continue to illustrate the zero-sum maxim, No good turn goes unpunished.
These longstanding tendencies then crystallized during the Oslo “peace process” which “began a new era, the one we still live in, characterized by Palestinian perfidy, Israeli folly, and foreign ineptitude.” This section, especially for someone who has been following the follies Pipes documents, is a walk down memory lane, often with new companions, with new (to me) examples of the foolish things that Israeli and Western leaders say and have said.
The Israeli leadership during Oslo wanted so badly to believe the Palestinians were ready to make the compromises necessary for peace (win-win), that they ignored decisive deeds and (Arabic) discourse that made it clear that Yasir Arafat (or any Palestinian “leader” seeking honor), had no intention of making peace. “Palestinian political culture,” Pipes notes, “is unique in its undying genocidal radicalism. In all the world and in all of history, nothing resembles the fanaticism of the campaign by Palestinians against Jews near and far.” This reviewer, an historian of medieval Europe, knows of some extended periods of fanatic Jew-hatred, but certainly in the post-modern era, that assessment is sadly accurate.
Oslo was a predictable failure because it counted on Arafat giving up on total war and accepting some land in exchange for peace. But Arafat, to those paying attention, considered Oslo a process of land for war. When the Trojan Horse of Oslo released its suicide terrorists in the ensuing “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” the very people who should have repented their unwarranted faith in a peaceful outcome then doubled down and blamed the failure on Israel’s reluctance to make more concessions. Pipes quotes President Bill Clinton’s bewilderment in 2000, saying of Arafat’s refusal, “the deal was so good I couldn’t believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go.” (A French journalist who had been at Camp David tells me that the entire press pool had already written its stories about the attainment of an historic agreement – and then Clinton announced its failure.)
With the consensus that giving land will bring peace, the author argues, “a diplomatic process began that placed nearly the entire burden of concessions on Israel. Satisfying Palestinian grievances became key to ending the conflict.” Despite decades of (predictable) failure, this approach shoulders on, fueled in no small part by a guild of international peace makers, “oblivious to history, wrong in their assumptions, amoral in the pursuit of an agreement, over-confidant about their abilities, childishly delighted by their high status, and paying no price for repeated failures.” In the dissonance of their fantasies, they blame Israel for their failures.
Pipes documents and wonders at the folly of pursuing Israeli concessions, even as they contribute to Palestinian leaders’ all-out war. Commenting on the survival of this self-destructive attitude even in hostage negotiations with Hamas in 2024, he quotes Talleyrand on the Bourbons, “they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.”
And yet, at least for passionate and open-hearted Israelis, the only way to peace is to improve Palestinian lives, what Pipes calls a “Zionist eccentricity.” It’s not so eccentric as a human impulse in itself, but it is eccentric in its persistence in the face of a permanent Palestinian rejectionism. For a century and more, Palestinians have made it clear, as Amin al-Husseini put it, “We want no progress, no prosperity deriving from Jewish immigration.”
As a Hamas leader put it in 2021, “Israel, expecting that economic solutions would cause the people to abandon their goals of liberation and return, does not understand the Palestinian people.” Ignoring such statements, conciliation survives, even prevailing in Netanyahu’s “far right-wing” government before October 7, which pursued what Israelis call the konzeptsia and which Pipes defines as the “something to lose” doctrine that “sees well-being as a sedative.”
All of these often-deliberate misreadings of the Palestinian leadership and its “street” spelled a steady deterioration of the Israeli condition. In his own way and without presenting it as such, Pipes has laid out a key battlefield in the “clash of civilizations,” between a positive-sum civilization and a zero-sum one, both persistent in their approach. His analysis offers a close-up look at how, if each side assumes the other shares its mindset, then those who assume egalitarian, positive-sum values will lose to those who assume supremacist, zero-sum rules.
Having outlined the problem, Pipes puts it in a larger perspective: even though Israel beat the Arab military assaults, it has been a prisoner of a widespread, post-World War II reluctance in the West to act like victors. In this case, the roles are reversed:
Which brings Pipes to the second half of his book: how to escape this defeatist mindset and instead strive for the kind of victory that will both bring respite to Israelis and free the Palestinians from their predatory elite and genocidal fantasies. It is a worthy and even urgent task. His answers, however, do not carry the same force as his critique.
Ironically, Pipes’ solutions testify to just how strong the liberal hope that moves even this self-identified “conservative,” illustrating both to his ultimate commitment to the positive-sum approach, and proving how hard it is for Westerners to keep their eye on the Middle Eastern zero-sum ball.
The author’s cultural policies, in particular, assume a responsive audience for his “liberal” message: “Forget about destroying Israel, a strong, determined country. Further, you don’t even want to because it’s decent, normal, and your only lifeline out of oppression and poverty.”
He still assumes a “Western,” “rational,” calculus that a decent normal life is preferable to poverty and death for the sake of honor. To be sure, he is not so naïve as the peacemakers who assume the Palestinians have already made that civil-society leap (and that to suggest otherwise would be racist), but he is still looking for them and trying to help them become the majority. Despite all the flaws of this approach that he himself documents, he is still committed to the decent, positive-sum vision of prosperity.
He even, occasionally, forgets his own advice. Intent on winning over the population, he seems to think (paraphrasing favorably the work of Joseph Braude), that
And yet we have read pages of analysis about how the Palestinians are exceptional among autocrats:
In predatory dictatorships, a majority not only has no say, it serves a sacrificial function. As the author himself illustrates, that level of depravity is hard to keep in focus.
Whether or not one agrees with either the feasibility or the anticipated results of Pipes’ policy recommendations, he has asked the right question and set a policy goal for the next generations. It is up to critics to come up with better suggestions for how to implement victory. What we cannot do is turn away from the challenge posed by Daniel Pipes. His strategic goal must be accomplished if there is to be a peaceful outcome to this in which both Muslims and infidels live in dignity and freedom.
