PIPES: WHO WANTS TO WIN?

Peace Process or War Process?
Israel and Its Enemies

by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2009, pp. 37-42

http://www.meforum.org/2469/peace-process-or-war-process

When Barack Obama announced in June 2009 about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, "I'm confident that if we stick with it, having started early, that we can make some serious progress this year," he displayed a touching, if naïve optimism.

Indeed, his determination fits a well-established pattern of determination by politicians to "solve" the Arab-Israeli conflict; there were fourteen U.S. government initiatives just during the two George W. Bush administrations. Might this time be different? Will trying harder or being more clever end the conflict?

No, there is no chance whatever of this effort working.

Without looking at the specifics of the Obama approach — which are in themselves problematic — I shall argue three points: that past Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed; that their failure resulted from an Israeli illusion about avoiding war; and that Washington should urge Jerusalem to forego negotiations and return instead to its earlier and more successful policy of fighting for victory.
I. Reviewing the "Peace Process"

The two hands of September 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands with President Clinton watching.
It is embarrassing to recall the elation and expectations that accompanied the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993 when Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. For some years afterward, "The Handshake" (as it was then capitalized) served as the symbol of brilliant diplomacy, whereby each side achieved what it most wanted: dignity and autonomy for the Palestinians, recognition and security for the Israelis.

President Bill Clinton hosted the ceremony and lauded the deal as a "great occasion of history." Secretary of State Warren Christopher concluded that "the impossible is within our reach." Yasir Arafat called the signing an "historic event, inaugurating a new epoch." Israel's foreign minister Shimon Peres said one could see in it "the outline of peace in the Middle East."

The press displayed similar expectations. Anthony Lewis, a New York Times columnist, deemed the agreement "stunning" and "ingeniously built." Time magazine made Arafat and Rabin two of its "men of the year" for 1993. To cap it off, Arafat, Rabin, and Peres jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1994.

As the accords led to a deterioration of conditions for Palestinians and Israelis, rather than the expected improvement, these heady anticipations quickly dissipated.

When Palestinians still lived under Israeli control, pre-Oslo accords, they had benefited from the rule of law and a growing economy, independent of international welfare. They enjoyed functioning schools and hospitals; they traveled without checkpoints and had free access to Israeli territory. They even founded several universities. Terrorism declined as acceptance of Israel increased. Oslo then brought Palestinians not peace and prosperity, but tyranny, failed institutions, poverty, corruption, a death cult, suicide factories, and Islamist radicalization. Yasir Arafat had promised to build his new dominion into a Middle Eastern Singapore, but the reality he ruled became a nightmare of dependence, inhumanity, and loathing, more akin to Liberia or the Congo.

The two hands of October 2000, when a young Palestinian showed off his bloody hands after lynching two Israeli reservists.
As for Israelis, they watched as Palestinian rage spiraled upward, inflicting unprecedented violence on them; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that more Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorists in the five years after the Oslo accords than in the fifteen years preceding it. If the two hands in the Rabin-Arafat handshake symbolized Oslo's early hopes, the two bloody hands of a young Palestinian male who had just lynched Israeli reservists in Ramallah in October 2000 represented its dismal end. In addition, Oslo did great damage to Israel's standing internationally, resurrecting questions about the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state, especially on the Left, and spawning moral perversions such as the U.N. World Conference against Racism in Durban. From Israel's perspective, the seven years of Oslo diplomacy, 1993-2000, largely undid forty-five years of success in warfare.

Palestinians and Israelis agree on little, but with a near universality they concur that the Oslo accords failed. What is called the "peace process" should rather be called the "war process."

II. The False Hope of Finessing War

Why did things go so badly wrong? Where lay the flaws in so promising an agreement?

Of a multiplicity of errors, the ultimate mistake lay in Yitzhak Rabin's misunderstanding of how war ends, as revealed by his catch-phrase, "One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy." The Israeli prime minister expected war to be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents. In this spirit, his government and those of his three successors — Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak — initiated an array of concessions, hoping and expecting the Palestinians to reciprocate.

They did not. In fact, Israeli concessions inflamed Palestinian hostility. Palestinians interpreted Israeli efforts to "make peace" as signals of demoralization and weakness. "Painful concessions" reduced the Palestinian awe of Israel, made the Jewish state appear vulnerable, and incited irredentist dreams of annihilation. Each Oslo-negotiated gesture by Israel further exhilarated, radicalized, and mobilized the Palestinian body politic to war. The quiet hope of 1993 to eliminate Israel gained traction, becoming a deafening demand by 2000. Venomous speech and violent actions soared. Polls and votes in recent years suggest that a mere 20 percent of Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Yitzhak Rabin's understanding that "One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy" led Arab-Israeli diplomacy fundamentally astray.
Rabin's mistake was simple and profound: One cannot "make peace with one's enemy," as he imagined. Rather, one makes peace with one's former enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to be defeated and thus give up its goals.

Wars end not through goodwill but through victory. "Let your great object [in war] be victory" observed Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist. "War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will," wrote his nineteenth-century Prussian successor, Karl von Clausewitz in 1832. Douglas MacArthur observed in 1951 that in "war, there is no substitute for victory."

Technological advancement has not altered this insight. Fighting either continues or potentially can resume so long as both sides hope to achieve their war goals. Victory consists of imposing one's will on the enemy, compelling him to give up his war ambitions. Wars typically end when one side gives up hope, when its will to fight has been crushed.

Defeat, one might think, usually follows on devastating battlefield losses, as was the case of the Axis in 1945. But that has rarely occurred during the past sixty years. Battlefield losses by the Arab states to Israel in 1948-82, by North Korea in 1953, by Saddam Hussein in 1991, and by Iraqi Sunnis in 2003 did not translate into despair and surrender. Morale and will matter more these days. Although they out-manned and out-gunned their foes, the French gave up in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War ended, notably, with barely a fatality. Crushing the enemy's will to fight, then, does not necessarily mean crushing the enemy.

Arabs and Israelis since 1948 have pursued static and opposite goals: Arabs fought to eliminate Israel; Israelis fought to win their neighbors' acceptance. Details have varied over the decades with multiple ideologies, strategies, and leading actors, but the twin goals have remained in place and unbridgeable. If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win. Either there will be no more Zionist state or it will be accepted by its neighbors. Those are the only two scenarios for ending the conflict. Anything else is unstable and a premise for further warfare.

The Arabs have pursued their war aims with patience, determination, and purpose; the exceptions to this pattern (e.g., the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties) have been operationally insignificant because they have not tamped hostility to Israel's existence. In response, Israelis sustained a formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948-93. Over time, however, as Israel developed into a wealthy country, its populace grew impatient with the humiliating, slow, boring, bitter, and expensive task of convincing Arabs to accept their political existence. By now, few in Israel still see victory as the goal; almost no major political figure on the scene today calls for victory in war. Uzi Landau, currently minister of national infrastructure, who argues that "when you're in a war you want to win the war," is the rare exception.
The Hard Work of Winning

In place of victory, Israelis developed an imaginative array of approaches to manage the conflict:

* Territorial compromise: Yitzhak Rabin (and the Oslo process).
* Develop the Palestinian economy: Shimon Peres (and the Oslo process).
* Unilateralism (build a wall, withdraw from Gaza): Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and the Kadima party.
* Lease the land under Israeli towns on the West Bank for 99 years: Amir Peretz and the Labor Party.
* Encourage the Palestinians to develop good government: Natan Sharansky (and George W. Bush).
* Territorial retreat: Israel's Left.
* Exclude disloyal Palestinians from Israeli citizenship: Avigdor Lieberman.
* Offer Jordan as Palestine: elements of Israel's Right.
* Expel Palestinians from lands controlled by Israel: Meir Kahane.

Contradictory in spirit and mutually exclusive as they are, these approaches all aim to finesse war rather than win it. Not one of them addresses the need to break the Palestinian will to fight. Just as the Oslo negotiations failed, I predict that so too will every Israeli scheme that avoids the hard work of winning.

Ehud Olmert speaking for the Israel Policy Forum in June 2005, where he announced that Israelis "are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies."
Since 1993, in brief, the Arabs have sought victory while Israelis sought compromise. In this spirit, Israelis openly announced their fatigue with warfare. Shortly before becoming prime minister, Ehud Olmert said on behalf of his countrymen: "We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies." After becoming prime minister, Olmert proclaimed: "Peace is achieved through concessions. We all know that." Such defeatist statements prompted Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center to characterize Israelis as "an exhausted people, confused and without direction."

But who does not win, loses. To survive, Israelis eventually must return to their pre-1993 policy of establishing that Israel is strong, tough, and permanent. That is achieved through deterrence — the tedious task of convincing Palestinians and others that the Jewish state will endure and that dreams of elimination must fail.

This will not be easy or quick. Due to missteps during the Oslo years and after (especially the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza of 2005 and the Lebanon war of 2006), Palestinians perceive Israel as economically and militarily strong but morally and politically weak. In the pungent words of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel is "weaker than a spider's web." Such scorn will likely require decades of hard work to reverse. Nor will it be pretty: Defeat in war typically entails that the loser experience deprivation, failure, and despair.

Israel does enjoy one piece of good fortune: It need only deter the Palestinians, not the whole Arab and Muslim populations. Moroccans, Iranians, Malaysians, and others take their cues from the Palestinians and with time will follow their lead. Israel's ultimate enemy, the one whose will it needs to crush, is roughly the same demographic size as itself.

This process may be seen through a simple prism. Any development that encourages Palestinians to think they can eliminate Israel is negative, any that encourages them to give up that goal is positive.

The Palestinians' defeat will be recognizable when, over a protracted period and with complete consistency, they prove that they have accepted Israel. This does not mean loving Zion, but it does mean permanently accepting it — overhauling the educational system to take out the demonization of Jews and Israel, telling the truth about Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and accepting normal commercial, cultural, and human relations with Israelis.

Palestinian démarches and letters to the editor are acceptable but violence is not. The quiet that follows must be consistent and enduring. Symbolically, one can conclude that Palestinians have accepted Israel and the war is over when Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel).
III. U.S. Policy

Like all outsiders to the conflict, Americans face a stark choice: Endorse the Palestinian goal of eliminating Israel or endorse Israel's goal of winning its neighbors' acceptance.

To state the choice makes clear that there is no choice — the first is barbaric, the second civilized. No decent person can endorse the Palestinians' genocidal goal of eliminating their neighbor. Following every president since Harry S Truman, and every congressional resolution and vote since then, the U.S. government must stand with Israel in its drive to win acceptance.

Not only is this an obvious moral choice, but Israel's win, ironically, would be the best thing that ever happened to the Palestinians. Compelling them finally to give up on their irredentist dream would liberate them to focus on their own polity, economy, society, and culture. Palestinians need to experience the crucible of defeat to become a normal people — one whose parents stop celebrating their children becoming suicide terrorists, whose obsession with Zionist rejectionism collapses. There is no shortcut.

This analysis implies a radically different approach for the U.S. government from the current one. On the negative side, it puts Palestinians on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then — no diplomacy, no discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly no financial aid or weapons.

On the positive side, the U. S. administration should work with Israel, the Arab states, and others to induce the Palestinians to accept Israel's existence by convincing them that they have lost. This means impressing on the Israeli government the need not just to defend itself but to take steps to demonstrate to Palestinians the hopelessness of their cause. That requires not episodic shows of force (such as the 2008-09 war against Hamas in Gaza) but a sustained and systematic effort to deflate a bellicose mentality.

Israel's victory also directly helps its U.S. ally, for some of its enemies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran — are also America's. Tougher Israeli tactics would help Washington in smaller ways, too. Washington should encourage Jerusalem not to engage in prisoner exchanges with terrorist groups, not to allow Hezbollah to re-arm in southern Lebanon or Fatah or Hamas in Gaza, and not to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank (which would effectively turn over the region to Hamas terrorists and threaten Hashemite rule in Jordan).

Diplomacy aiming to shut down the Arab-Israeli conflict is premature until Palestinians give up their anti-Zionism. When that happy moment arrives, negotiations can re-open and take up anew the Oslo issues — borders, resources, armaments, sanctities, residential rights. But that is years or decades away. In the meantime, an ally needs to win.

Daniel Pipes is publisher of the Middle East Quarterly and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Posted: 22 Sep 2009 07:22 PM PDT BY SULTAN

Every now and then bewildered Israeli politicians and outreach professionals call conferences to wonder why the Hasbara is failing and why Israel can't get its story across. They are given the usual advice of hiring more PR firms, finding innovative ways to get the message through, using the internet in smarter ways and of course that all time favorite, rebranding Israel. Naturally they follow this advice, only to call another conference a year later wondering why nothing has changed.

The answer is simple enough. Defensive PR, like defensive warfare, never works. And Israeli PR and Israeli warfare has been on the defensive for decades now. If you break down Israel's message to a single sentence, it's "We didn't do any of the things we're accused of." That is the kind of message you expect to hear from criminal defendants, and it's a message that impresses no one. The only thing it does is produce a debate about the validity of the accusations themselves, which is to PR what Stalingrad was to the Russian front.

The recent Aftonbladet case represents a classic scenario that demonstrates why Israel's defensive PR is doomed to fail over and over again. The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers were killing Palestinian Arabs in order to harvest their organs. The Israeli government pointed out that the article presented no evidence whatsoever, that no such thing had ever happened and demanded a retraction from the newspaper and condemnation of it by the Swedish government. The only thing Israel accomplished was to popularize the false allegation thus creating a debate over whether or not Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian Arabs to harvest their organs. Pleased by his newfound fame, the author of the article has only escalated his allegations and gone on to do a tour of the Arab world. Leftist propagandists can only watch the fallout and chuckle, because once again Israel has been suckered into playing the mug's game of defensive PR.

Defensive warfare of any kind is reactive. For the last few decades Israel has run itself ragged because it has been reactive. And by reactive I mean that Israel keeps responding to attacks against it, rather than taking the offensive. In the Six Day War, Israel responded to Nasser's planned assault, by preempting him and taking the offensive. The result was Israel's finest hour. In the Yom Kippur War, Israel waited and watched, and was nearly destroyed.

Few nations can afford to be purely reactive and play defense alone, Israel least of all because it is outnumbered by larger and more numerous enemies who can wear it down through sheer brute force. And that is exactly what has been happening on both the media and the military front. The terrorist campaign, planned, financed and executed first by the USSR, and then by the Arab and Muslim world, has worn out Israel both militarily and politically.

Israel's greatest asset was its innovation, its mobility and brilliance. Qualities that are best employed on the offensive. Instead Israel has been restricted to the defensive, constantly retreating, giving up both physical and ideological territory to its enemies, while wondering how much to give up in order to stem the bleeding. Which is the one reaction certain to put it even further on the defensive.

Israel wants a solution to the conflict. So do its enemies in both Islam and on the left and far right. A final solution. Each attempt by Israel to offer a solution has only brought Israel closer to that final solution. The more Israel has tried to show its goodwill, the more it has gotten stuck on the defensive. The goal of successive Israeli governments is no longer to be a great nation or a strong nation, but to be a nation that everyone likes.

The fallacy there is that "everyone" consists of a billion Muslims and a sizable number of leftists who view Israel's very existence as an insult to their deeply held beliefs. And then there are the Western business interests who think Ahmed would be much friendlier to them if Israel weren't in the way. And Russia which cultivates wars in the Middle East the way gardeners cultivate flowers. Finally there's the rest of the world which isn't too keen on embracing losers who keep apologizing for their existence and cutting their own country to pieces in order to win the favor of the terrorists trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.

To boil down the problem simply enough, the more Israel goes on the defensive, the weaker it becomes, not just militarily, but politically as well. Reactive conflicts are hugely draining. They require endlessly watching for an attack and then trying to counter it. The advantage in such a scenario is always to the attacker who has more lead time to plan an attack, and room to retreat if the attack fails.

Strike and vanish into the desert, and then strike again, was the classic raiding strategy of the Arab bandit, including a charming head chopping fellow named Mohammed. The British General Orde Wingate, who helped pioneer much of the doctrine of the future IDF, responded to such attacks in the mandate era, by taking the battle to the enemy with small, fast moving and mobile units. To go on the offensive.

The following section from the official Wingate site says it best;

While impressed with the devotion & willingness to sacrifice in the Haganah, Wingate was exasperated by the defensive nature of the Jewish forces. He realized that they could not halt the violence with their defensive tactics of fortified settlements. The policy of restraint meant the Haganah was ceding the initiative and mobility to the Arab guerillas.

The British were trying to balance an active defense with mobile sweeps & strikes, with holding important static positions in order to maintain effective government control. Mobile columns & patrols were sent out to deny the rebels any sanctuary and to hunt them down. They became consistent and routine in their movements and their actions. With the enemy often indistinguishable from their civilian base and troops often quartered near Arab civilian areas, "it was very difficult to keep operations conducted in a largely hostile civilian milieu secret, and so the element of surprise was lost; at the same time, reliable information about the enemy was hard to come by."

Commented one Jewish official on a big sweep by British forces, "They marched over hills and valleys, and in the end emerged with some rusty Turkish pistols and a few empty rounds of ammunition...The Arab gangsters just hid their arms and mingled with the population of the villages. Not only did the huge British army find absolutely nothing, it discredited and ridiculed itself in the eyes of the whole population." In 1938 General Archibald Wavell, the temporary acting commander of British military forces in Palestine, was forced to admit these and other actions such as aerial bombing had only "a temporary effect."

Wingate envisioned carefully selected, small and mobile units of volunteers to fight aggressively and unconventionally...

"There is only one way to deal with the situation, to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into a government gang which is determined to destroy them, not by exchange of shots at a distance, but by bodily assault with bayonet and bomb." This new unit was to carry the war to the enemy, taking away his initiative and keeping him off-balance. And so it was, "to produce in their minds the belief government forces will move at night and can and will surprise them either in villages or across country." The force would be a mixed British-Jewish one operating under his command, moving primarily at night in areas of guerilla activity with the allies of the night: deception, surprise, shock.


Since then Israel has forgotten Wingate's lessons that helped make the IDF into the fearsome force that it was. Instead Israel has reverted to the fortified settlements and cities, the home guards maintaining watch... as well as the British assault teams thundering across the desert in a spectacular show of force that accomplishes absolutely nothing. And this applies not only to Israel, but to the United States post-2004 as well.

You cannot win through defensive tactics. You can only bleed. And Israel is bleeding badly. The nation that once executed Entebbe, rescuing hostages on another continent, can no longer even rescue one of its soldiers held captive within its own borders. The country that was once hailed as a symbol of rebirth has been internationally demonized. And the worst part of it all is that Israel sat back and let it happen.

Israel is too small to be able to keep on bleeding indefinitely. Its soldiers and citizens have tired of always being on watch, and always waiting for an attack. Its citizens and its defenders around the world are tired of being expected to answer increasingly outlandish charges. This cannot go on forever. Israeli leaders understood this, but they drew the wrong lesson, determining to go even further on the defensive by cutting deals with the enemy. They were wrong. Disastrously wrong.

To survive against larger enemies, a small country must be quick, it must be feared, it must use surprise and cultivate an aura of inhuman abilities. Israel used to be all of these things. Now it is none of these things. But if it is to survive, it must become those things again.

Israel does not have a terrorism problem, it has a defensiveness problem. Israel has the capability to destroy every terrorist group within its borders in a matter of a month. Israel does not have a PR problem. Its PR problem is created by an ongoing conflict with terrorist groups, who have extensive sympathizers abroad. Destroy the terrorist groups, regain control over the disputed areas, and the PR problem shrinks to a fraction of its former size. More importantly it ceases to have any useful meaning.

The media war against Israel, the lawfare and the other various non-military tactics require an investment of resources. For those resources to be worth investing, there must be a visible payoff. The more Israel stays on the defensive, and its enemies make territorial and political gains, the more those tactics seem to be paying off. Reverse that scenario, and the resources will be reinvested somewhere else because they are not achieving tangible results.

It has been demonstrated that the demonization of Israel is not significantly altered by the nature of Israeli tactics against terrorism. Whether Israeli tanks smash through Arafat's compound, or Israel builds a non-violent defensive border wall-- the demonization of Israel remains constant. That is because the demonization is not a moral response to specific policies, but an ongoing state of hostility directed against Israel in support of Muslim and Marxist terrorists. The only way to stop the demonization is to remove the incentive for it, by removing the terrorists.


The Oslo Accords did not lesson the global demonization of Israel. Instead after a brief honeymoon, it significantly worsened it. That is because it was closer to achieving its purpose. The more Israel has compromised, the worse its international status has become. That is because by compromising, Israel demonstrated its weakness to both its enemies and allies, emboldening its enemies and making its allies reevaluate its ability to survive. The more Israel has gone on the defensive, the worse the terrorism and the demonization has become. That is only natural. If you retreat, the enemy's fire will only increase in severity.

To many Jews and Israelis, and sympathizers with Israel as a nation battling Marxist and Islamist terror, the problem seems impossible. The political and military situation is a Gordian Knot of tangled complexities. Which is why it takes an Alexander or a Wingate to cut the knot. Israel's media and military problems are born of a defensive strategy that have allowed the country to be tied into a Gordian Knot. To survive Israel must go on the offensive to cut the knot and save itself, or be choked to death by the knot its enemies have tied around it.