Posted on 08/10/2024 12:23:39 PM PDT by Uncle Miltie
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 last month.
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 “total 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.
In 2018, the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, the think tank Pipes presides over, launched a media campaign called “Israel Victory Project” aimed at resolving the century-old conflict by convincing Palestinians to give up their war against Israel. His latest book expands on the idea.
“I’m a historian and I am aware of how wars end. They generally end with one side giving up. So long as neither side gives up, then the war goes on,” Pipes explained in a phone interview with The Times of Israel.
The scholar, now 74, has previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He served in different roles under five US administrations between 1982 and 2005.
Pipes’s roadmap to terminate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based on his observation of the historical evolution of modern conflicts.
“Look at the American Civil War, World War II, or the Vietnam War. These ended when one side gave up and it was over and everybody moved on,” he said. “I believe that the key is one side accepting that it has lost and working with that and making the necessary changes.
“Applied to Israel and the Palestinians, this means convincing the Palestinians that they have lost. They do not have a hope of destroying Israel. They need to accept Israel, and by the way, that would be good for them,” he said.
Dueling parallel visions The dynamic of incompatible visions between Israelis and Palestinians — between conciliation and rejectionism — dates back to the early days of Zionism, Pipes maintained, and is deeply entrenched on both sides.
“When the very first dozen or so young Zionist men landed in Palestine in 1882, they didn’t know Arabic. They weren’t farmers or soldiers. They were very few in number. They were idealists,” he said.
“The local population, which we now call Palestinians, didn’t want them there and told them to get out. And [the Zionists] responded by saying no, we are modern Westerners, we can bring you clean water and electricity. But Palestinians engaged in rejectionism, and said, ‘No, we want to kill you, we’re going to drive you away.’”
The conflict will persist as long as the Israelis fail to realize their misinterpretation of Palestinian aspirations over the past 140 years, Pipes said. “Instead of being conciliatory, they should say, ‘We are in charge and you will bend to our will.’”
By his own admission, Pipes’s approach is not new. It was championed by Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who opposed the “peace mongers” of his time and advocated an “iron wall” to defend Zionism against local Arabs.
The dovish camp has long since ceased being the powerful force it was in Israeli politics during the Oslo peace process of the mid-90s. Today, it is a mere shadow of its former self, while right-wing hardliners have surged to the mainstream.
Firebrand ministers use inflammatory rhetoric against Palestinians as they appear to compete for the title of most unyielding cabinet member in the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, while the Knesset recently overwhelmingly approved (68-9) a bipartisan resolution opposing Palestinian statehood.
Today, only a small minority in the Knesset, composed of the center-left Yesh Atid party, the embattled Labor party and the Arab faction (Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al), formally supports a two-state solution.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addresses the media following a meeting of his Religious Zionism faction in the Knesset, April 30, 2024. (Sam Sokol/Times of Israel) Therefore, Pipes appears to be preaching to the choir in today’s Israel. The scholar, however, is far from being ideologically aligned with the contemporary Israeli right and the global pro-Israel camp: In 2020, he came under fire from right-wing pundits for opposing the proposed annexation of the West Bank.
In response to those who have accused him of softening his positions with time, he told The Times of Israel that “Kahanist ideas” among sections of the Israeli right to expel Muslims would be “catastrophic” for Israel’s image.
“It’s rather that the pro-Israel world has become more hawkish,” he added. “My views have not changed.”
‘You defeat them, and then you change them’ Pipes’s arguments, while not new to Israeli audiences, may find resonance with Israel supporters abroad, exasperated with an intractable conflict and with the “liberal temper of the times, [which] demands that Western states use great caution in deploying superior power when fighting a non-Western insurgency,” as he wrote in his latest work.
Pipes described his proposal as a “miniature version” of the approach adopted by the United States toward Germany and Japan after World War II, thoughts shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to Congress on July 24.
“You defeat them, and then you change them. If it can be done with aspiring world conquerors, it can be done with this small, weak population [i.e., Palestinians],” Pipes told The Times of Israel.
International scrutiny should not be an impediment in targeting Palestinians with “messaging, not violence, to convince them — be it the security prisoners in jails, children in the schools, or the general public.”
Israel has successfully adopted this approach in the past with the Palestinian minority granted citizenship inside its borders, Pipes recalled. From 1948, when the state was founded, to 1966, Arab citizens were subjected to military rule: Their movement inside the country was severely limited, their political organizations were prohibited and their publications censored.
Those restrictions were only lifted when military and political leaders deemed the risk of insurrection to have subsided, Pipes said.
Military rule, while ensuring that Israel’s Arab minority remained docile, was morally and legally problematic for the newly established state, as restrictions imposed on Israeli citizens put in question the democratic nature of the country. It was also the source of “significant resentment” among Arab Israelis, as the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian conflict research noted in a research project on that era.
A golden opportunity for change in Gaza The ongoing war in Gaza, Pipes wrote, could provide Israel with a golden opportunity to transform the coastal enclave into a “decent” place, thanks in part to the fact that 17 years of Hamas’s “torment” of the local population turned it against the terror group and consequently “eroded their anti-Israel vehemence.”
“Israel now controls nearly all of Gaza,” Pipes explained over the phone. “It needs to take advantage of this to work with Gazans who are ready to cooperate to build an administration, a police force and everything else that goes with civilized life, education, hospitals.”
A veteran analyst of Middle East politics, Pipes believes that a new regime in Gaza should follow the same path to stability as Israel’s larger Arab neighbors Egypt and Jordan, “countries where one can lead a normal life so long as one stays out of trouble and never, ever criticizes the ruler.”
“I would see [the new regime in Gaza] as a tough police state, not as a gentle inducement,” he said.
Israelis should have “learned the lesson of 1993,” the year the Oslo accords were signed. In that framework, Israel made concessions, including agreeing to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, intended as a precursor to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The peace process, however, was derailed and Israel soon found itself confronted with a massive bloody uprising, the Second Intifada, and hundreds of civilian casualties in terror attacks.
“It’s time to approach this [Israeli-Palestinian conflict] in a different way, and to attempt to convince Gazans and West Bankers that is over. They’ve lost and it’s time to move on, in the time-honored way that wars end,” Pipes said. “They don’t end with peace conferences while the war is still taking place.”
Good enough for the Nazis and the Japs, good enough for "palestinians".
>> Middle Eastern cultural codes of conflict
Islam is a war plan — not a pejorative, but a fact of original intent
I’ve known and worked with a lot of “Palestinians.” Of the group there was just one I’d have said had “normal” intelligence. For the most part they experience magical thinking such as, “If I say something then that makes it true.” This despite copious evidence otherwise. I suspect that a thousand years of cousin marriage and their family/clan structure has and will continue to hold them back culturally and genetically.
A group of us were at lunch with our Palestinian fellow worker. It turns out there was a word he’d never, ever said. I finally got him to write it down. That word was “divorce.” If you say it five times, then you’re divorced. So, he couldn’t say it by himself in the shower and he couldn’t ask anyone because he didn’t know if you had to say it five times in a row or the effect was cumulative. He was dead serious. I asked him who would be keeping count, and he pointed up and said, “Allah.” That wasn’t the first time he’d said something that left us all slack-jawed and astounded. When asked why he planned to have fifteen children he said, “My dad had fifteen and we need soldiers for the Jihad.” This was said mater-of-factly over pizza with those of us he openly said, “You won’t like it we take over. You will be my slaves. You will pay me taxes.” But he was the guy any liberal would point out as a “moderate Muslim.”
“ to work with Gazans who are ready to cooperate to build an administration, a police force and everything else that goes with civilized life,…”
No such Gazans exist. Trying to find or create them is a fools errand.
L
Islam is a war plan — not a pejorative, but a fact of original intent
____________________________________
How is it possible to ever have peace with a people who worship a ‘God’ that instructs his followers in his Book to conduct a perpetual Jihad to exterminate all Jews and non-believers?
I’d have had his ass in front of HR so fast his head would have spun clean off.
L
Pipes’ bottom line: Avoid the “’catastrophic’ for Israel’s image”! He’s a loser secular European-stye appeaser right there.
“I’d have had his ass in front of HR so fast his head would have spun clean off.”
Apparently, you haven’t been in the corporate world recently. HR was THRILLED to demonstrate their diversity by hiring him and a few others like him. He got promoted well passed his level of competence.
You could pretty well model what any modern corporate HR office will do by asking, “What would Barak Obama do?” Besides, they’d say he was joking. This despite the fact he was unable to fathom any jokes. He’d laugh but his humor was entire of the prat-fall variety. Absolutely, totally humorless. And absolutely honest. He casually mentioned once that when the Jihad happened, he’d be taking a few of his neighbor’s houses.
When we invite people like this into our culture, and he’d been an American much longer than he’d been Palestinian, we seed our communities with land mines that can be activated by a strong breeze. It doesn’t matter how nice we are to them or how profitable and comfortable their lives are because of us. When the event, whatever they’re waiting for, happens, they’ll kill us.
I guess that's why they get along so well with the left. They both have the same end goal.
A double tap will solve the problem.
That is indeed the problem. And it’s a theological prison for those not interested in the Jihad mandate.
Oh, they don’t have to exterminate them
They can enslave them
Probably worse
“ When the event, whatever they’re waiting for, happens, they’ll kill us.”
Not if we kill them first. And had I been sitting at that table the conversation would have taken a very different turn.
L
The Confederacy, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany
Not just unconditional surrender but a humiliation and pacification of the population.
We experienced the same thing in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We also ended their militaristic totalitarian ideologies.
With morons like Dubya, we got “It’s a peaceful, friendly religion.”
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