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Articles and Blog Posts by Daniel Pipes
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October 7 changed everything in Israel, they said. But did it?
The immediate reckoning was brutal. "So many policies and paradigms," David M. Weinberg of the Misgav Institute wrote, "have been proven faulty, phantastic, illusory, and grotesque." The idea of a Hamas-governed Gaza placated by economic well-being, Martin Sherman of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies concluded, was but "a hallucinatory pipe dream."
Politicians abruptly and radically changed their tune. Netanyahu spoke repeatedly of victory and winning. "Victory will take time. ... now we are focusing on one goal, and that is to unite our forces and storm ahead to complete victory." He told soldiers "The entire people of Israel are behind you and we will deal harsh blows to our enemies to achieve victory. To victory!" And: "We will emerge victorious.
Many others in government followed suit. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant quoted himself informing President Joe Biden that Israel's victory "is essential for us and for the United States." To his soldiers, Gallant declared, "I am responsible for bringing victory." Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, announced the halt "of all budgetary outlays and redirected them to one thing only: Israel's victory." He called the goal of Israel's war with Hamas to be "a crushing victory." Benny Gantz, a member of the War Cabinet, deemed it "the time for resilience and victory."
Continue ReadingIsrael's Two Archenemies, Iran and the Palestinians
The array of threats facing Israel make it unlike any other contemporary state
by Daniel Pipes • October 5, 2024 • Australian
What followed the Oct. 7 massacre clarified a reality: while most people and governments around the world accept the existence of Israel and wish its people well, two determined sets of enemies with different qualities and posing distinct threats want it and its Jewish inhabitants destroyed. Each of them, Iran's regime and the Palestinians, has a network that makes it fearsome in contrasting ways.
Context. The Jewish state has faced a unique barrage of six threats. These include, going from most to least violent:
Questioning Israel's War on Hezbollah
by Daniel Pipes • September 28, 2024 • MEF Observer
Like any normal person, I celebrate the demise of the evil but capable Hassan Nasrallah. He headed Hezbollah, the Islamist organization that dominates Lebanon as an agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran and he turned it into the country's most powerful force. The world is a better place without him. Kudos to the Israelis for pulling off yet another brilliant intelligence and air force miracle.
With that praise out of the way, I shall criticize this step as a likely error: It distracts from the main theater of warfare, that of Gaza against Hamas.
For a year now, Israel has responded to the Oct. 7 atrocity. Not only was it unprepared on that day itself, but the government lacked plans for attacking Hamas, had relatively meager intelligence on its assets or leadership, and faced a powerful domestic and foreign lobby that urged making the return of hostages the first priority.
These limitations have rendered Israel's operation in Gaza only tolerably successful. Yes, military technicians may praise its tactics, but Hamas' leadership remains cohesive, its fighters remain active, its control over the population fairly intact, and its international support higher than ever. Not to put too fine a point on it, the middling progress over a year's duration contrasts dramatically with dispatching the three large state armies in six days in 1967.
A Muslim Aliyah Paralleled the Jewish Aliyah
Part II, Since 1948
by Daniel Pipes • Fall 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
"When I saw the Israeli soldiers, I nearly fainted from happiness. I fell on the floor and kissed the earth before their feet. It was as if I was born all over again...I saw a country that cared about its citizens, something that would not happen to such an extent even in Western cultures like the United States." – Yusuf Samir
Yusuf Samir
No, the exuberant statement above was spoken not by a Jew making aliyah (lit. going up; fig. immigration to the Land of Israel) but by an Egyptian journalist and poet, Nabih Sirhan, who changed his name in Israel to Yusuf Samir to hide his identity. Samir likely has the distinction of being the only Muslim twice to flee for his life to Israel. He did so first in 1968 when, after criticizing Egyptian media inaccuracies, he fled the country and, via Libya and Greece, found refuge in Israel, working at Israel Radio's Arabic service, eventually becoming a citizen.
At 75, Staying Healthy Is My New Career
Financial, emotional, mental, nervous and physical requirements lie ahead
by Daniel Pipes • September 9, 2024 • Washington Times
I turn 75 years old today and two facts loom. First, the Social Security Administration reports that over 40 percent of my male American peers are already deceased. Second, 75 marks the accepted point when physical and mental abilities begin markedly to decline.
I mark this birthday by starting a new career: that of extending my health-span. ("Health-span" means a life without serious disease or disability, when a person can do the things important to him). This goal may sound obvious, even banal, but this new career has its own distinct character, with specific challenges, just as did my former career.
That one began precisely as I turned 20 years old. I announced it to my parents in a September 1969 letter: "My studying this year is ... a complete break with the past. I have gone into the Middle East business with totalness." Indeed, my college classes consisted of Arabic language, medieval Islamic history, Saharan anthropology, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Studying the Middle East defined my life for the next 55 years, including an undergraduate degree, three years in Cairo, a Ph.D., teaching at four universities, working at the State and Defense departments, heading one think tank and founding another.
review of Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy
by Daniel Pipes • Winter 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
Jewish Muslims? The Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College explains his oxymoronic title as follows: "Premodern Christians fully understood that Muslims are not Jews. Precisely for this reason, many found it useful to allege that Muslims are Jewish – or, if you prefer, "Jew-ish" – as a means of defining Muslims and Islam as the enemies of Christians and Christianity. This intentionally counterfactual assertion of similarity bordering on identity, like the insult, 'you're a pig!,' is metaphorical: it adds value to rhetoric by distorting reality. ... The assertion that Muslims are Jewish is also an intentional distortion that, many Christians believed, increases the value of their rhetoric by applying to Muslims familiar negative ideas about Jews."
Freidenreich finds that premodern Christian polemicists resorted to portraying Muslims as Jewish for three related purposes: to place Muslims in a biblical context, to justify assaults on Muslims, and to formulate proper Christian behavior. The last goal has greatest importance: His book, the author explains, concerns "Christians who intentionally misrepresented Muslims as Jewish because they believed that such rhetoric would spur their audiences to become better Christians."
review of In Obscura: Adventures in the World of Intelligence. Part I
by Daniel Pipes • Fall 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
Theroux made an unusual set of career transitions from journalist (Wall Street Journal) to feature story writer (National Geographic) to book author (Translating LA) to translator from Arabic (Cities of Salt) to intelligence analyst (Central Intelligence Agency) to bureaucrat (Department of State) to policy advisor (National Security Council). In this preliminary part of a two-part book, he focuses on the latter two roles, offering a cynical but genuine take on government work, "without sensationalism or score-settling."
As befits a literary man, Theroux tosses off one-liners through the book. Noting that Syrian propaganda rarely calls Israel by its name, preferring Occupied Palestine, the Zionist Entity, or the Zionist Usurping Power, he comments that, "Like Allah, Israel seemed to have ninety-nine names." As an intelligence agent, he felt "a kinship with the stunt actors, who worked in the shadows, whose names would never show in bright lights, but who made the mission work." The CIA has the unenviable task of just delivering problems "with the awkwardness of being the bad-news people without solutions." "The hardest part about the White House job was ... not global crises, but getting clothes dry cleaned" (because of lack of time). "Lifers in the policy world often did outlive the revolving-door tribe who were their supposed superiors."
review of A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity
by Daniel Pipes • Fall 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
"How does one write a single volume about a history that extends in time over fourteen centuries and in space from Morocco to Mindanao? The answer, of course, is by leaving most of it out." Thus does Cook, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, introduce his doorstopper of a study of the Muslim experience over twelve (not fourteen) centuries, until around the year 1800. The author helpfully advises the reader not "to try to get through it in one sitting."
As the rare historian in English to dare to take up this massive topic in the near-half-century since the 1975 publication of Marshall G.S. Hodgson's three-volume Venture of Islam,[1] Cook (b. 1940) focuses on "the making and unmaking of states, and really major cultural shifts that affect large populations," while paying less attention to such topics as economics, society, intellectual life, and non-Muslims. He admits to a bias "to the articulate and the opinionated to the virtual exclusion of the silent, the tongue-tied, and the anonymous mass of the population."
The result is an original, somewhat quirky, always interesting near-thousand pages (when all the extras are counted).
review of Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East
by Daniel Pipes • Fall 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
Kuran of Duke University has established himself as one of the very most creative historians of Middle Eastern Muslims. This book makes up the second volume of a two-part study of the reasons for Middle Eastern political underdevelopment; the first, on economic underdevelopment, appeared in 2011 as The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. In both parts, Kuran develops original and convincing ideas with an emphasis on the Shari'a (Islamic law). As he puts it, "Islamic law remains deeply rooted in the region's politics Patterns of civic engagement, understandings of religious liberties, distributions of political power, and relative economic capabilities all bear influences of the Middle East's legal history."
Kuran summarizes his main message thus: "Though the region has achieved vast transformations since the 1800s, insufficient experience holds back grassroots politics. That legacy is rooted in Islamic institutions. Meanwhile, personal freedoms remain limited because of inabilities, also grounded in legal history, to assert and defend individual rights." Looking to the future, he is pessimistic about the short term (because liberalizers "cannot organize effectively") and optimistic about the longer term (because "modernizing Islam's interpretation is by no means impossible").
by Daniel Pipes • Fall 2024 • Middle East Quarterly
As with most episodes of only moderate political violence, the drama that took place over forty hours and three days, March 9-11, 1977, in various spots around central Washington, D.C., once dominated the news. Over time, however, it has dropped into the public's memory hole, in part due to its sheer complexity, what with multiple goals (avenging a family's murder, stopping an allegedly sacrilegious film from showing, fighting an alleged Jewish conspiracy) and multiple locations (a District of Columbia governmental building, the main mosque of Washington, the headquarters of B'nai B'rith International).
Fortunately, this episode has found its rightful chronicler in Mufti, a professor of journalism at the University of Richmond. He provides the full background of the siege, telling about the personalities, their ideologies, and the developments that climaxed in the death of two individuals, the injury of three, and the taking of over a hundred hostages. In particular, Mufti follows three narratives: the biography of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis (né Ernest Timothy McGhee, 1921-2003), caliph of the Hanafi Movement and perpetrator of the 1977 violence;[1] the saga behind the making of The Message: The Story of Islam, a feature movie made by Moustapha Akkad (1930-2005); and the evolution of the Nation of Islam from its mysterious beginnings to its split under Warith Deen Mohammed (1933-2008) and Louis Farrakhan (1930-).
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."
How to Think About Orbán and Hungary
Letter to the Editor
by Daniel Pipes • August 26, 2024 • Wall Street Journal
To the Editor:
Meg Hansen's op-ed "America's Right Got Hungary's Viktor Orbán Wrong" (Aug. 22) offers an important corrective to those like me who have viewed Hungary's prime minister as an ally. We thought this because of his bold and welcome stand on issues of great importance, such as limiting illegal migration and standing for traditional Western values.
Ms. Hansen focuses on Hungary's appalling ties to the Chinese Communist Party. She doesn't mention its egregious, nearly neutral stance on the war in Ukraine, in return for cheap energy imports from Vladimir Putin, or its repulsive "enhanced strategic partnership" with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's rogue Türkiye.
American conservatives need to retain their critical facilities. Just because an Orbán or El Salvador's Nayib Bukele shares some of our policies doesn't mean we should admire them, encourage them or ally with them. Let's keep it transactional, not emotional: applaud the good, condemn the bad.
Daniel Pipes
President, Middle East Forum
Philadelphia
Enriching Palestinians
A Zionist Eccentricity
by Daniel Pipes • August 18, 2024 • Jerusalem Post
From the 1880s until today, Zionist leaders have pursued a highly unusual, if not unique, policy toward their Palestinian enemy: wanting it not to suffer economically but to become prosperous, to adopt middle-class values, to settle into bourgeois good citizenry, and perhaps even to thank its Jewish neighbors. Whence come this strange idea and how successful has it been?
I deem this strange because conflict nearly always include an element of economic warfare: to weaken, demoralize, and punish the enemy, to turn the population against its rulers or to incite a palace revolt. To take a recent example, after Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West instantly minimized trade with Russia to weaken its war effort. That is the near-universal norm.
What Does Haniyeh's Assassination Imply?
Israel has wavered between 'total victory' over Hamas and pursuit of a deal. The strike in Iran may end that argument.
by Daniel Pipes • July 31, 2024 • Wall Street Journal
Israel followed two opposite policies toward Hamas since Oct. 7: destroy the organization and make a deal with it. This unfortunate two-track approach resulted in many costs to Israel. The killing of Ismail Haniyeh Wednesday perhaps marks the end of this protracted indecision.
The former policy, victory over Hamas, has wide appeal and is articulated often by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I count 182 mentions by him of "victory" in 63 discrete statements. "Our victory is your victory," he said June 6 on French television. "Our victory is the victory of Israel against antisemitism. It is the victory of Judeo-Christian civilization against barbarism. It is the victory of France."
Mr. Netanyahu speaks of "complete victory," "total victory," "clear victory," "absolute victory," "decisive victory" and "full victory." He wore a "Total Victory" baseball cap on his flight to the U.S. last week and at his visit with Donald Trump.
The Uniqueness of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
by Daniel Pipes • July 16, 2024 • Jerusalem Post
Israelis and Palestinians have mentalities toward the other that are both weird and unique, wildly out of sync with reality, and equidistant from the norm for parties to a conflict. Given their relative strengths, Israeli and Palestinian positions reverse what one expects; Israel should be demanding, Palestinians pleading. One can debate long into the night which of them is the more absurdly inappropriate. Their origins go back nearly 1½ centuries.
At the very start of the Zionist enterprise in the 1880s, the two parties to what is now called "the Palestinian-Israeli conflict" developed distinctive, diametrically opposed, and enduring attitudes toward each other.
Zionists, from a position of weakness, making up a minute portion of Palestine's population, adopted conciliation, a wary attempt to find mutual interests with Palestinians and establish good relations with them, with an emphasis on bringing them economic benefits. Symbolic of this mentality, Israel is the world's only country created not through conquest but via the purchase of land. David Ben-Gurion eventually turned conciliation into communal policy and major Israeli figures such as Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres continued with variants of it.
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