By Daniel Pipes
Saturday, December 31, 2016
The U.S.-sponsored Israeli–Palestinian “peace process”
began in December 1988, when Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir
Arafat met American conditions and “accepted United Nations Security Council
resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced
terrorism” (actually, given Arafat’s heavily accented English, it sounded like
he “renounced tourism”).
That peace process screeched to an end in December 2016,
when the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 2334. Khaled Abu Toameh,
perhaps the best-informed analyst of Palestinian politics, interprets the
resolution as telling the Palestinians: “Forget about negotiating with Israel.
Just pressure the international community to force Israel to comply with the
resolution and surrender up all that you demand.”
As 28 years of frustration and futility clang to a sullen
close, the time is nigh to ask, “What comes next?”
I propose an
Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. That is to say, Washington should
encourage Israelis to take steps that cause Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashal, Saed
Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and the rest of that crew to realize that the gig is up,
that no matter how many U.N. resolutions are passed, their foul dream of
eliminating the Jewish state is defunct, that Israel is permanent, strong, and
tough. After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population
at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading
to a resolution of the conflict. Palestinians will gain by finally being
released from a cult of death to focus instead on building their own policy, society,
economy, and culture.
While the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East
policies remain obscure, President-elect Trump himself vociferously opposed
Resolution 2334 and has signaled (for example, by his choice of David M.
Friedman as ambassador to Israel) that he is open to a dramatically new
approach to the conflict, one far more favorable to Israel than Barack Obama’s.
With his lifelong pursuit of winning (“We will have so much winning if I get
elected that you may get bored with winning”), Trump would probably be drawn to
an approach that has our side win and the other side lose.
Victory also suits the current mood of Israel’s prime
minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He’s not just furious at being abandoned in the
United Nations, he has an ambitious vision of Israel’s global importance.
Further, his being photographed recently carrying a copy of historian John
David Lewis’s Nothing Less than Victory:
Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History signals that he is explicitly
thinking in terms of victory in war: Lewis in his book looks at six case
studies, concluding that in each of them “the tide of war turned when one side
tasted defeat and its will to continue, rather than stiffening, collapsed.”
Finally, the moment is right in terms of the larger
trends of regional politics. That the Obama administration effectively became
an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran scared Sunni Arab states, Saudi Arabia
at the fore, into being far more realistic than ever before; needing Israel for
the first time, the “Palestine” issue has lost some of its salience, and Arab
conceits about Israel as the arch enemy have been to some extent abandoned,
creating an unprecedented potential flexibility.
For these four reasons — Security Council Resolution
2334, Trump, Netanyahu, and Iran — the moment is right to meet the new year and
the new administration with a revamped Middle East policy, one aiming for the
Palestinians to “taste defeat.”
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