The moment is right for fresh thinking to dispatch the old and stale Palestinian-Israeli conflict. With Arabs focused on other issues — the Iranian nuclear weapon build-up, civil wars in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Turkey going rogue, the Islamist surge and the water drought — hoary anti-Zionist taboos have lost much of their pungency. A prosperous and strong Israel has lost hope in decades’ worth of “peace process”. The cowboy in the White House likes breaking with precedent. And the global left’s turn towards anti-Semitism, exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party, adds further reason for urgency; when it eventually holds power, the implications for Israel will be dire.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Arab-Israeli conflict will end only when the Palestinians’ grievances are sufficiently satisfied so that they accept the Jewish state of Israel. This paradigm has reigned almost unchallenged since the Oslo Accords of September 1993; yet that 25-year period also has made clear that Palestinians in overwhelming numbers (I estimate 80 per cent based on scholarship and polling data going back a century) seek not peaceful coexistence with Israel but the brutal elimination of the “Zionist entity”. With such attitudes, it comes as no surprise that every round of much-hyped negotiations eventually has failed.
I shall propose an entirely different approach to resolve the conflict, a reversion to the strategy of deterrence and victory associated with Zionism’s great strategist, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940): Israel should aim not to please its enemies but to defeat them. Counter-intuitively, I shall show why Palestinians need precisely such an Israeli victory to slough off their current oppression, extremism, and violence, and to become a successful people.
An understanding of today’s situation requires going back to the aftermath of World War I and the emergence of Amin al-Husseini, the first modern Palestinian leader. He initiated a policy of rejectionism, of absolute refusal to accept any aspect of Jewish presence in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.
A century later, that rejectionism remains the dominant strain of Palestinian life. Political differences tend to be tactical: better to eliminate Israel by negotiating with the Israelis and winning benefits from them, or stick to the consistency of pure rejectionism? The Palestinian Authority deploys the first tactic, Hamas the second.
Across a 75-year period, from 1918 to 1993, the Jewish community in what is now Israel responded to rejectionism with deterrence, the policy of dissuading its enemies from aggression by threatening painful retaliation. However imperfectly applied, deterrence helped Israel evolve from the prospective prey of 1948 into the military powerhouse of 1993.
Yes, even as Israel became a democratic, innovative, affluent, and mighty country, the basics stayed in place. Ideologies, tactics, strategies and personnel changed, wars and treaties came and went, but Palestinian rejectionism stayed stagnantly constant.
By 1993, frustrated with the slow-moving and passive nature of deterrence, Israel’s impatient citizenry opted for an immediate resolution with the Palestinians. In the Oslo Accords, each of the two parties promised the other what it most wanted: recognition and security for Israelis, dignity and autonomy for Palestinians.
In their haste to end the conflict, however, Israelis made three profound mistakes that summer morning on the White House lawn: granting Yasser Arafat, leader of an unofficial, dictatorial, and murderous organisation, diplomatic parity with Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of a democratic and sovereign state; believing Arafat when he claimed to recognise Israel when in fact he (and his successors) still sought Israel’s elimination, now enhanced by his controlling the West Bank and Gaza; and making concessions under the illusion that wars conclude through goodwill, when concessions actually had the contrary effect of signalling weakness and thereby amplified Palestinian hostility. These mistakes, tragically, turned a would-be peace process into a counterproductive “war process”.
Read the full article by Daniel Pipes in The Weekend Australian.