Israel’s war goals are preventing success vs Hamas, says historian – here’s what he thinks can be done

Destroy Hamas and PA, try to convince more Palestinians, says Richard Pipes

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The historian and commentator Daniel Pipes has taught and written about the history of the Middle East, Islam, and America’s foreign policy for the past several decades.

Recently, ALL ISRAEL NEWS Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg sat down with Pipes to talk about his new book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, on The Joshua Fund's The Epicenter Podcast.

“The core of your premise, as I understand it, is that unless Israel achieves true victory and total victory over the Palestinians and they feel like they've been defeated, the Palestinians are not going to be ready to make peace - and Israel should not be offering peace,” Rosenberg began.

“That is a provocative premise to many,” he added. Pipes replied by noting that rather than provocative, he calls the premise “intuitive.”

“If you and I are fighting, we're going to keep fighting until one of us gives up. In all likelihood, that's generally the way it works,” Pipes said.

While noting certain historical exceptions, like the 750-year-long conflict between Great Britain and France, Pipes argued that conflicts usually continue until one side wins and the other side gives up.

However, “The Israeli side has never really been interested in or aspired to convince its Palestinian enemy, the people we now call Palestinians, that it lost.”

This is the core premise of Pipes’ new book: Israel must understand that it needs to achieve true victory to end the conflict, which it hasn’t done so far.

“In fact, the Zionists and the Israelis have aspired to win the goodwill of the Palestinians, and this has utterly failed,” Pipes noted.

Among the Palestinians, the historian says this failure has given rise to a unique attitude toward Israel.

“It is a more total rejection, a more genocidal intent than anything else you'll ever see. It's gone on for over a century. I compare it to the French Revolution or Soviet Russia… This is a smaller scale, to be sure, but it's something new that requires an understanding, and the Israelis have not understood it. They've tried to win favor. And I'm saying, no, it's not going to work.”

According to Pipes, this might sound provocative to most modern ears but once, it was the norm to seek victory. “Every thinker from ancient Greece and ancient Rome and the Bible for that matter, to World War two, saw victory as the goal. It only became provocative in the last 80 years when something other than victory became the goal.”

One of the reasons for this lack of conceptual understanding, Pipes said, is the lesson drawn from the Second World War among the U.S. and other Western nations, including Israel.

“Nuclear weaponry in 1945 caused American thinkers to come to the conclusion that with the advent of nuclear weapons, you could no longer win a war… all you can do is adjust and find accommodations, and that has become the standard.”

Turning to the ongoing Gaza War, Pipes argued that Israel has been “stymied by the fact that they have adopted … two paramount goals that are in direct contradiction to each other.”

Rather than seeking victory over Hamas, Israel lost time pursuing two contradictory aims, and now probably lost the ability to create an alternative, non-hostile Palestinian administration for Gaza by not protecting its potential allies there, Pipes contended.

“My main goal in the book is to present victory as a goal for Israel to pursue,” Pipes emphasized, quipping that he generally only answers the question of how to get there “under gentle duress.”

“The first part is to get rid of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. These are foul, obnoxious, violent, ugly institutions that Israel spawned and Israel should get rid of. And in their stead create new administrations that are decent,” said Pipes.

Secondly, he noted Israel’s “considerable effort” of what is called hasbara in Hebrew, which is explaining Israel’s position around the world.

“But that effort at presenting the Israeli message, while useful and important when directed towards Middle Eastern states, towards great powers, towards American students on TikTok, has so far always ignored the key people, namely the West bankers and the Gazans and the Muslims of eastern Jerusalem, the Palestinians.”

“There are substantial numbers of West bankers, Gazans and East Jerusalem who are willing to talk, who have had enough. And I hope that the Israelis will take advantage of that opportunity. So those are my two ideas,” Pipes concluded.