'Israel Victory': A courageous, progressive, and pragmatic plan to end the conflict - review

More than a year before the Oct. 7 invasion and massacre, Daniel Pipes began work on his new book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.

Since Oct. 7, the word heard most from the lips of Israel’s highest political and military echelons is “victory.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has barely given a speech or issued a communiqué over the last nine months without mentioning the word. While this might seem obvious during a time of war, the term has been unfashionable in the West for three generations and nearly absent in Israel for 30 years.

Its return to Israeli parlance might well be largely down to Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, former Harvard lecturer, and member of five US presidential administrations between 1982 and 2005. Having witnessed the failure of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s step by step, Pipes understood that the reason peace had not been achieved was that the Palestinian side retained its goal of destroying the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. 

As a historian, Pipes finds that wars end when one side understands it has lost and passes “through the bitter crucible of defeat,” like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. He asserts that they end, the historical record shows more broadly, not through goodwill but through defeat. Victory means successfully imposing one’s will on the enemy, compelling him through loss to give up his war ambitions. He who does not win, loses.

In 2017, Pipes published an article in Commentary titled “The Way to Peace: Israeli Victory, Palestinian Defeat,” in which he laid out his key concepts. 

Over the following seven years, Pipes met and laid out his strategy to many of Israel’s leading decision-makers, including Netanyahu, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, former defense minister Avigdor Liberman, and many other ministers and members of Knesset.

As with the overall concept of Israel needing to defeat its enemies, and the necessity of not ignoring the Palestinian threat while focusing just on Iran and Hezbollah, Pipes is prescient in his prescription of Israel’s challenge and the formula to meet it. In his book, he provides an honest appraisal of the history of the conflict and defines Palestinian rejectionism as the prime obstacle throughout, and the one that requires defeat if the over-100-year war is finally to end. 

Pipes pulls few punches when describing historic Zionist and then Israeli responses to Palestinian rejectionism, largely representing conflict resolution through enrichment and placation, leading to a series of policy failures that grasped failure from the jaws of victory. 

With a forward by incoming Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, the book’s central thesis is that true resolution, which benefits both Israelis and Palestinians, can only be achieved through a clear Israeli victory, a concept he describes with great detail.

After surveying the history and necessity of victory, the latter part of the book is Pipes’s road map toward its attainment.

His plans are courageous, progressive, and pragmatic. 

An innovative approach

AS THE author of 17 previous books, over a half century of writing, and the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy for his honesty and clear-sightedness, Pipes will not please everyone with his “day after” plan.

First as a student and then as professor of Islam and the Middle East, he believes that Israel can find Gazans to work with, but only after they have understood their defeat. He counsels ruling the Gaza Strip not as a liberal democracy but with an iron fist, comparable to most other Arab territories.

For those fiercely wedded to their own peace or war formulas, or stuck in the Left-Right paradigm, this argument broadens the debate significantly and provides an outside-the-box formula that aims to enhance any approach, from those who espouse full withdrawal to full annexation of the territories.

Pipes, as he often has, is taking the road less traveled and is challenging Israelis from the outside to reconsider our conceptions about the conflict and make some hard choices.

It is easy to see why many policy and political decision-makers’ doors in Israel and the US are open to him because he has almost uniquely been able to see the problem before most and was thus able to provide the solution ahead of time.

Israel Victory is a must-read for all those who care about Israel’s future or aspire to a more peaceful region. It challenges preconceptions and provides tantalizingly important but difficult answers to the questions we have been asking ourselves since the dawn of Palestinian rejectionism in the 19th century.

Post-Oct. 7, it offers a vital template to ensure that nothing comparable happens again. 

The writer is a global strategic communications and campaigns adviser and former senior Israeli government adviser.

• ISRAEL VICTORY: HOW ZIONISTS WIN ACCEPTANCE AND PALESTINIANS GET LIBERATED
• By Daniel Pipes
• Wicked Son
• 336 pages; $21