Israel's Only Path Forward
Middle East expert Daniel Pipes delivers a profound and piercing reality check: Israel has not won because it has never pursued outright victory.
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This is a guest essay written by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Israel has never lost a war, yet it has never truly won.
For decades, it has fought with one hand tied behind its back, indulging in the illusion that appeasement could bring peace. President of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, in his 2024 book, “Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated,” delivers a profound and piercing reality check: Israel has not won because it has never pursued outright victory.
Victory in war is not about mutual compromise; it is about breaking the enemy’s will. As Pipes puts it, a war does not end until one side concedes defeat. This does not mean leveling Gaza or the West Bank — Israel is more than capable of that. True victory is achieved only when Palestinians, and their backers, accept the permanence of the Jewish state and abandon their century-old war to erase it.
For decades, Palestinians have refused to concede defeat because Israel has never imposed it upon them. Compare this with postwar Germany and Japan — societies that renounced their militaristic, expansionist ideologies only after their absolute defeat made further resistance unthinkable. Palestinian rejectionism must be shattered in the same way.
So how does Israel impose defeat?
Pipes is clear:
1) Dismantle the institutions of rejectionism.
The Palestinian Authority, Hamas, UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian “refugees”) — the entire ecosystem that sustains the fantasy of Israel’s destruction — must be dismantled. No more foreign funding, no more Israeli electricity and water, no more Israeli-provided medical care.
2) Make rejectionism unsustainable.
No more glorification of terrorists, no more pay-for-slay salaries, no more textbooks indoctrinating children to hate Jews. The incitement machine — from school curricula to state-run media — must be dismantled.
3) A New Message to Palestinians: You lost.
Their leadership has fed them a lethal fantasy — that Israel is a temporary inconvenience, that Palestinian “resistance” will inevitably prevail. The message must be reversed: Israel is permanent, powerful, and unshakable. You will never win.
4) Break the will to fight.
This requires a psychological war on rejectionism. Israel’s response should not be mere public relations aimed at the West, but a direct, unceasing psychological campaign targeting Palestinian consciousness: Forget destroying Israel. It is here to stay. And if you drop your war, you might actually have a future.
5) This is not genocide.
And it is not ethnic cleansing. Indeed, Pipes promotes a strategy of “minimal violence, maximal messaging.”
It is war — but it is a war for the mind of the Palestinian people. And like all wars, it ends only when the defeated side understands the futility of further resistance.
As Pipes puts it:
“A Palestinian change of heart — and here comes the central paragraph of this book — should be Israel’s central war goal. That entails the end of rejectionism. This means not just the absence of violence and the ending of delegitimization but acknowledging definitively and unequivocally, fully and irrevocably, in deed as well as in word, consistently over a protracted period, Jews’ historic ties to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, recognition of Jews’ right to live in their ancestral Jewish land, Israel’s legitimacy, and its permanent identity as a Jewish state.”
“That outcome entails Palestinians enduring the bitter crucible of defeat, accepting that further war on Israel is hopeless and inconceivable, and living in harmony with it. They must renounce the use of force and incitement, domestic and international; drop the foul goal of destroying their Israeli neighbor; stop the demonization of Jews and Israel; and refute antisemitism.”
It is simple: Until the dream of Israel’s destruction dies, the war continues.
As Pipes asserts, dismantling Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, rather than propping it up, is a necessary step toward victory:
“The Palestinian Authority’s demise brings many benefits to Israel: an end to its ubiquitous incitement to violence, from school textbooks to wall posters to mosque sermons. No more rewards for murder, officially recognizing attackers of Israelis as ‘soldiers’ whose welfare and that of their families are looked after. No more international campaign of delegitimization coming out of Ramallah. The global Left is deprived of its mascot.”
“Perhaps most importantly, to quote (Israeli journalist) Khalid Abu Toameh, the only way to ‘change the hearts and minds of the Palestinians … is by ending the anti-Israel rhetoric of Palestinian leaders and media outlets.’ The Palestinian Authority and Hamas must be eliminated to create the space for new, constructive ideas to replace rejectionism. Their continued existence virtually excludes such a possibility.”
To a considerable extent, Palestinian endurance is a direct result of Israeli policies. It has the power to win, but it has often lacked the will. Since its founding, Israel has fought its wars halfway, always stopping short of outright victory — because Western pressure, American aid, and its own sense of self has rendered absolute victory.
We saw it play out again after October 7th. For a moment, it seemed as if Israel understood the stakes. The rhetoric was there — no more Hamas, no more terror state in Gaza. But what actually happened? Then-U.S. President Joe Biden dictated Israel’s war strategy.
Humanitarian pauses.
Foreign-imposed red lines.
Resupply of only the “right” weapons.
The return of a failed strategy — negotiating for hostages, lifting the siege on Gaza, limiting military action in the name of “restraint.”
These are the decisions of a nation that still does not grasp what it must do to survive. The problem is not just Hamas. It is Israel’s own elites, the NGOs, the academic class, the so-called humanitarians — those who have spent decades undermining victory pursuing policies of enriching and placating Palestinians based on “the hope that being nice will win reciprocal gestures. Each has spectacularly failed,” as Pipes put it.
Far too many Jews in Israel and across the West believed the purpose of Israel was to allow Jews to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, to be fully accepted as a member of the multicultural world. As former Israeli politician Einat Wilf points out, Zionism has not even fully achieved Jewish sovereignty as long as there are systems, civilizations, and religions that have the idea that Jews cannot be equal, that Jews cannot be sovereign.
A true Israel victory is not just a military triumph over Hamas. It is a wholesale rejection of the suicidal ideology of conciliation. The real threat to Zionism is the embrace of disastrous policies that promote concessions and include funding and arming our enemies to ensure our survival.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has given Israel more freedom to defeat the Palestinians than at any other time in its history. It appears that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shelved conciliation in favor of victory.
However, Pipes is deeply concerned about Israel’s current strategic approach, which prioritizes hostages over decisive action against Hamas. Israelis support striking a deal to get all the hostages back because it assumes that the IDF can take military action once they are released.
At the same time, conciliation still involves enriching and replenishing the ranks of terrorists. It remains to be seen whether the Israeli public will support pursuing victory or if they are still driven by, as Pipes put it, a “masochistic eagerness to make painful concessions” (meaning unilateral surrenders).
Peace will not come from diplomacy. It will come when the Palestinian national movement tastes defeat — and not a second before.
Israel will have peace only when Palestinians know they cannot win. And as “Israel Victory” shows, Palestinians will not accept defeat until Israel itself believes it must win.
The only problem with Mr. Pipes' proposals is a little book called the Koran, which states on over 100 occasions that Jews and Christians should be subjugated to Islamic Shariah rule, and therein lies the crux of the matter. Until this little issue is resolved, no progress is ever likely to occur.
Yes, absolutely true. But all the other terror groups must be eliminated or close to it as well, because they will simply pick up where Hamas leaves off (war on Jews, and other "infidels") if they are allowed to continue recruiting fighters and spreading insanity.