review of The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East

by Daniel Pipes  •  Fall 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

Referring to the "past, present, and future" may sound trite but it succinctly defines the three distinct parts of Cook's pleasingly short yet ambitious and persuasive book.

Past: Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that Washington "successfully secured its interests in the Middle East throughout the Cold War. Those interests were preventing the disruption of oil exports from the region, helping to forestall threats to Israeli security, and, during the Cold War, containing the Soviet Union."

Present: Since the Cold War's end, however, the U.S. record has been a disaster. Starting with the Clinton years, the U.S. government "sought to transform politics and society in the Middle East," which amounted to a grotesque over-reach. Indeed, he argues that from the perspective of 2024, "many of the ideas and assumptions that functioned as pillars of U.S.-Middle East policy over the preceding three decades were little more than ambition-fueled delusions."

Future: Reviewing the two eras, Cook concludes that "when the United States sought to prevent 'bad things' from happening to its interests, it succeeded. However, when Washington sought to leverage its power to make 'good things' happen in the service of its interests, it often failed."

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Reactions to "Israel Victory," the Book

by Daniel Pipes  •  June 20, 2024

This weblog entry collects useful responses to my book, Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.

Martin Kramer responds to the notion of Israel sponsoring a "decent Gaza":

Israel has never had any capacity or interest in building up Arabs. It is very good at wrecking things, as we've seen in Gaza. It's very good at putting up walls and doing operations against bad guys. It completely loses interest in the kind of nation-building you advocate. The last people who talked about it were the socialists in the 1920s, who proposed to raise up the Arab proletariat as an alternative to the effendi class – and even they didn't really invest in it. Oslo wasn't nation-building, just out-sourcing the work to something that already existed, the PLO, despite its opposing Israel's existence, in the vague hope it would change, thereby relieving Israel of the need to build anything itself. That attitude persists: since Oct. 7, Israel hopes to fob Gaza off on the Gulf Arabs. So what you advocate cuts deeply against the grain.

(June 20, 2024)

Daniel Greenfield notes the implications of not winning:

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A Decent Gaza Is Possible
But first, the Palestinians must lose

by Daniel Pipes  •  June 19, 2024  •  Washington Times

American friends of Israel tend to admire policies of the Jewish state as heroic and blame foreign governments, especially their own, when Jerusalem makes errors vis-à-vis the Palestinians, notably 1993's Oslo Accords, 2005's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the catastrophe on Oct. 7, and the Israeli military's eight-month failure to defeat Hamas.

I beg to differ. Without defending Washington's actions, Israelis make their full share of mistakes. In particular, their government and security establishment tend to be overly reliant on technology, prone to short-term fixes, and too conciliatory.

On that last point: although Israel enjoys a huge economic and military edge over its Palestinian enemy, Israel's leaders have, with few exceptions, sought to conciliate it rather than defeat it. The Jewish state tactically deploys violence but strategically seeks to end the conflict through a curious combination of enriching and placating Palestinians. This approach accounts for its current predicament.

Although I am not Israeli, a 55-year witness to the heartbreaking mistakes by America's only genuine Middle Eastern ally prompted me to develop an alternate paradigm for it, one that replaces the postmodern goal of conciliation with the traditional one of defeat.

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Dr. Zuhdi Jasser
Congress' Potentially Most Important New Member

by Daniel Pipes  •  June 3, 2024  •  Washington Times

As everyone knows, the growth of a Muslim population in the United States, roughly three-quarters immigrant and one-quarter convert, has led to an unfortunate growth of extremism and violence.

A murderous spree of jihad going back to 1977 provides one indication of this neglected problem; the recent anti-Israel encampments on college campuses provides another. Possibly even more alarming, all four Muslims thus far elected to Congress – Keith Ellison, André Carson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib – represent the far-left, friendly-to-Islamism, Israel-hating wing of the Democratic party.

Happily, however, the U.S. population of born-Muslims is not homogeneous but includes substantial numbers of moderate, patriotic, and anti-jihad Americans. Some practice Islam, others have left the faith; all of them deeply understand the problem. Prominent names include the basketball player Enes Kanter Freedom, Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the Hoover Institution, Husain Haqqani of the Hudson Institute, and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani.

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review of The History of Turkey: Grandeur and Grievance

by Daniel Pipes  •  Summer 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

Reinkowski, professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel and a specialist on the late Ottoman and modern Middle East, means by "Turkey" not Turks going unto the distant past but the Republic of Türkiye going back a century.

In keeping with the "grandeur and grievance" theme of the subtitle, he starts by portraying the country as strong, difficult, magnificent, and torn – in other words, a place of great contrasts. Reinkowski fleshes these out through three fundamental contrasts that "shape the depiction of Turkey" in his view: the Kemalist secularist camp and the conservative Islamic camp, the established urban strata and a population anchored in rural Anatolia, and the grandeur-grievance dynamic of what he calls "the political-emotional economy."

Reinkowski interestingly views "The road that Turkish politics has taken since the early 2010s [as leading] into a new Republic," a successor to the one founded by Atatürk. He sees the final collapse of the first one lying in the "wholesome exchange of elites in administration, military, judiciary, and even the university." He argues for 2013 as the decisive turning point, being the year of the Gezi Park protests and their suppression, the falling out between the Gülen movement and the ruling AK party, and the demise of hopes for the "Arab Spring."

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A Muslim Aliyah Paralleled the Jewish Aliyah
Part I, to 1948

by Daniel Pipes  •  Summer 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

"So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country
[Palestine] and multiplied till their population has increased."
— Winston Churchill in 1938

"[T]he Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded
the total Jewish immigration during this whole period."
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939

Famously, Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, called aliyah, is centuries old and took on an organized form in 1882. Described as "the central goal of the State of Israel" (in the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), it provides the demographic basis on which the entire Zionist enterprise rests. Both very public and highly controversial, it has inspired millions of Jews to move to territories now under Israeli control.

Much less famously, a large and diverse non-Jewish immigration to Palestine (meaning here, roughly Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern half of the State of Israel), mostly Muslim, has also taken place. These immigrants included Arabs, Muslims, and many others. They and their descendants probably make up a majority of the population now called Palestinian. Palestinians, in other words, are not an aboriginal, autochthonous, first, indigenous, or native people; most of them are as recently arrived as Zionists. They are also as ethnically diverse.

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My Six-Step Plan for a Two-State Solution

by Daniel Pipes  •  April 4, 2024  •  Boston Globe

Has the time come to implement the two-state solution – that is, to recognize the semi-sovereign Palestinian Authority (PA) as a state, as "Palestine," alongside Israel?

President Biden says yes – "the only real solution is a two-state solution" – and 19 Democratic senators call for "two states for two peoples." Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says no – "Israel will continue to oppose unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state" – and Republicans, in the words of The Washington Post, "hug Netanyahu tighter." This high-profile clash threatens to damage both countries' interests. Fortunately, common ground exists that offers a way to move the topic forward. It has two components.

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review of Hijab: Word of God or Word of Man?

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

"The subject of sitr or covering is far more nuanced than we have been led to believe. The spectrum of opinion is far more vast, tolerant, and permissive than most have imagined in their wildest dreams." With this, Morrow (or Ilyas 'Abd al-'Alim Islam), a prolific Canadian convert to Islam, opens the small but also vast topic of Islamic strictures on the need for women to cover up. His definition of hijab makes his own view evident: "the religious prison created for women by men inflicted with numerous psychological and theological diseases, including ignorance, arrogance, and polytheism."

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Building a Decent Gaza

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

"A significant portion of Palestinian people do not share the views of Hamas."
— U.S. President Joe Biden

Netanyahu's Plan

On Feb. 22, 2024, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented his Security Cabinet with a short document, "The Day After Hamas." His office calls it "principles reflecting a broad public consensus on the goals of the war, and the civil alternative to the terrorist organization's rule in the Gaza Strip." Its key passage states that the Government of Israel plans to work primarily with Gazans to rebuild their territory, secondly with friendly Arab states.

Civil affairs and responsibility for public order will be based on local actors with "management experience" and not identified with countries or organizations supporting terrorism or receive payments from them; a de-radicalization program will be promoted in all religious, educational, and welfare institutions in the [Gaza] strip with as much as possible the involvement and assistance of Arab countries that have experience in promoting de-radicalization.

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review of Charles Huber: France's Greatest Arabian Explorer

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

Huber (1847–84) tends to be overlooked in the pantheon of great European explorers of Arabia. Several reasons help account for this obscurity: he wrote in French, a minor language of this topic; indiscretions in his youth; a lone-wolf character; being murdered aged 36 limited his output; and because his dry style of cataloging meant, in the words of Christian Julien Robin, that he "sought recognition above all else as a leading geographer and explorer among his fellow-professionals, and had no ambitions for literary success or public admiration." Nonetheless, as his biographer, the historian Facey, shows, Huber deserves to be remembered for the documentary contributions made during his two Arabian journeys between 1880 and 1884.

Huber's primary interest, Facey explains, lay in "mapping a region of which Europe had almost no geographical conception." Although he had uneven relations with the French government and fellow explorers, his "explorations and the scientific data he collected were recognized immediately by the French geographical establishment as a major contribution to knowledge." He managed this despite hostile relations with his main European partner, the German Julius Euting, for Huber "was possessed to an extreme degree by classic 'explorer's syndrome': the ambition of the pioneer in unknown lands to claim 'firsts' for himself."

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Netanyahu's Bold, Realistic Plan for "the Day After Hamas"

by Daniel Pipes  •  March 3, 2024  •  Wall Street Journal

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month presented Israel's security cabinet with a short document: "The Day After Hamas." Its key passage states that Jerusalem plans to work primarily with Gazans to rebuild their territory. "Civil affairs and responsibility for public order will be based on local actors with 'management experience,' " it says, and not identified with nor receiving payments from countries or organizations supporting terrorism.

In a step toward this program of self-rule, the Israeli military has begun an informal pilot program of what it calls "humanitarian pockets" in parts of north Gaza cleared of Hamas. These local governing bodies consist of community leaders, whose duties will include distributing humanitarian aid and revising school curricula.

The concept of Israelis working with Gazans is brave, bold and contested. It faces two main criticisms. First, the U.S. and other governments want to hand Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, which rules most of the West Bank and seeks Israel's destruction. Second, many Israelis and Palestinians alike insist that Jerusalem won't find those "local actors" to work with.

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2023's Biggest Hits at DanielPipes.org

by Daniel Pipes  •  January 16, 2024

I spent most of my writing hours in 2023 working on a book, so the articles declined in number from recent years. Traffic statistics at DanielPipes.org indicate that the following ten articles are my most read writings published in 2023, in ascending order. (Gary Gambill of the Middle East Forum kindly provided the tabulations and assisted with the summaries.)

10. How Can Israel Win the Palestinian Conflict? (January 7)

In a Jerusalem Post interview, I argue that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "requires the Palestinians to lose hope." This reasoning "precisely contradicts the premise of the Oslo Accords," which held that economic benefits "would vest the Palestinians in prosperity, deradicalize them, and make them true partners for peace." But 30 years later, "Palestinians retain the fantasy of eliminating the Jewish state," a goal that "must be fought by making them abandon it, not by fueling it with hope."

9. Violence Is Not the Biggest Palestinian Threat to Israel (February 2)

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The Government Cannot Fix Universities
Letter to the Editor

by Daniel Pipes  •  December 22, 2023  •  Wall Street Journal

To the Editor:

What Sen. Dan Sullivan found - anti-Israel signs and symbols in the reading room of Harvard's premier library - is indeed shocking ("An Antisemitic Occupation of Harvard's Widener Library"). Bravo to him for pointing this out and condemning the university's "craven, morally bankrupt" leadership for allowing such antics.

Mr. Sullivan, however, offers the wrong solution to this problem when he contends that "It is time for Congress to save these important and once-respected [universities] from themselves and their weak leaders." Harvard is a private institution. Government must not attempt to "save" it. That way lies state control over everything and ultimately totalitarianism.

True, the taxpayer funds students, research, and more at universities, but these monies must not be weaponized to force them to do the government's bidding. That way lies perdition.

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More on Israel's Rapid Return to Disastrous Policy

by Daniel Pipes  •  December 1, 2023

In "The Rapid Return of Israel's Disastrous Policy," I document how - despite repeated calls for victory - the Government of Israel has in many ways returned to its failed pre-Oct. 7 ways. This weblog entry continues that documentation.

Dec. 1, 2023 addenda: (1) The Alma Research & Education Center published a report arguing that "Hezbollah's Radwan unit is capable of carrying out an invasion of the Galilee at any given moment."

Comments: (1) When added to Hamas' invasion on Oct. 7 and the Regavim report cited above, this means that three of Israel's borders were or are in imminent danger of invasion. (2) Ironically, the borders with police states - Egypt, Jordan, Syria - are relatively safe.

(2) A New York Times investigation adds information to the paragraph beginning "When Hamas drilled in plain sight." Its opening:

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The Rapid Return of Israel's Disastrous Policy

by Daniel Pipes  •  Winter 2024  •  Middle East Quarterly

Judging by the way Netanyahu has managed Gaza in the last 13 years,
it is not certain that there will be a clear policy going forward.
— Tal Schneider, Times of Israel

By Daniel Pipes

"Everything changed" in Israel on Oct. 7. But did it? Understanding the mistakes that led up to the Hamas massacre provides a basis to evaluate Israel's long-term response to that day. Contrary to general opinion, I shall argue that the presumptions behind those mistakes remain in place and will not change unless Israelis adopt a radically different attitude toward the Palestinians.

The Road to Oct. 7

Israeli military planners coined a Hebrew term, conceptzia, "the concept," in the late 1960s. It held that Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat would not go to war until 1974, when his military had acquired advanced Soviet fighter jets that permitted it to take on the Jewish state's air force. Israel's Agranat Commission, which investigated how the Egyptians and Syrians surprised Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, largely blamed the conceptzia for a blindness to the preparations taking place before its very eyes.

The future commission inevitably analyzing Israel's unpreparedness on Oct. 7, 2023, will surely blame that surprise on a second erroneous conceptzia. It held that, David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explains,

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