An Israeli man once spoke to American scholar, activist and Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes and said words to the effect that “My grandfather, my father, I and my son all fought the Arabs. I don’t want my grandson to have to do it.”
And that attitude, Pipes told an audience of about 40 on Nov. 20, is the problem with Israel today and why Israel is facing reenergized threats to its existence.
Speaking at the Joseph and Rebecca Peltz Center for Jewish Life in Mequon, Pipes contended that Israeli governments since 1993 have been operating under a fallacious assumption, articulated by the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, that “you don’t make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies.”
In truth, said Pipes, “you only make peace with your former enemies, people who are no longer trying to destroy you.” And in a warfare situation, the best way to make enemies into former enemies is to defeat them, he said.
“The logic is that there is a war underway, not a diplomatic process,” Pipes said. “Israel’s goal should be to impose its will on its enemies” because its enemies’ goal “is to win the elimination of Israel.”
And these antithetical goals cannot be compromised. “There is no ‘peace process’ here,” Pipes said; it is a matter of “win or lose.”
The Arabs and the Iranian government today understand this, but Israel no longer does, Pipes contended. However, he said, Israeli leaders used to understand this situation.
Deterrence or appeasement
From Israel’s founding in 1948 to the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli leaders followed a policy of “deterrence” against its enemies, Pipes said. And “the goal of deterrence was victory,” he said.
But despite all its tactical victories, Israel has never been able to convince the Arabs, whether Palestinians or the Arab states, that they were truly defeated, the way the Allies convinced Germany it had been defeated in World War II or the North Vietnamese convinced the United States it had been defeated in the Vietnam War, Pipes said.
And as the years passed, Israelis began to find deterrence to be “slow, passive, expensive and boring,” and frustrating, Pipes said.
So Israeli governments began seeking for something they could do actively to bring peace and decided to see if “they could convince the enemy to leave Israel alone with timely concessions, with a ‘peace process.’”
The name for such a policy, Pipes said, is “appeasement,” and history has shown it “does not work with totalitarian thugs interested in making you disappear.”
This policy has made Israel appear as though its leaders and people no longer have the will to fight to victory, which has energized its enemies and their allies and brought a new surge of threats and demands “that Israel be extinguished,” Pipes said.
And these demands range from “rude,” like the Iranian government’s effort to develop nuclear weapons, to “polite,” like calls for “a one-state solution” from some intellectuals, journalists and activists, Pipes said.
Pipes contended that Israel should return to the deterrence policy it followed before 1993; for even though it was “slow, primitive and boring, it worked,” he said.
However, he said in response to a question from this reporter, he does not advocate any particular means to the end of defeating Israel’s enemies. The kind of “total war” that brought about the defeat of Nazi Germany may not be necessary; Pipes pointed out that North Vietnam did not have to invade and conquer the United States in order to defeat it in that war.
What is important now is for Israel to decide to make victory the goal, Pipes said. Until that is done, it is “premature to debate the whys and wherefores, the tactics of victory,” he said.
The organizers of this event, the Advocates for Israel of Milwaukee, had originally tried to have Pipes speak at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in cooperation with the Conservative Union there.
A problem with funding compelled the event to be relocated, according to Robert Breslauer, the project manager. The Zionist Organization of America-Milwaukee District helped with the change, according to its president, Warren Jacobson.
Pipes’ appearances have sometimes resulted in protests and tensions. During his previous appearance in Milwaukee, in April 2003 at Nicolet High School, demonstrators marched outside the school and some audience members tried to disrupt his talk.
Pipes recalled that his appearance in Madison later that same year was “a zoo” and was “the worst” along with one in February 2004 in Berkeley, Calif.
However, Pipes said that there were “no disturbances” during his speaking appearances in the past year, and he didn’t know why. “Is it the zeitgeist? Somebody’s conscious decision?”
But he suspected that it might partly be because some of the disturbances have been recorded and broadcast on the Internet and national television, which did not make the perpetrators look good.
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