In his recent book Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, Daniel Pipes makes the case that the strategies pursued by both the Jewish state and Western countries to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will never succeed, and argues for a very different approach. Michael Mandelbaum writes in his review:

The people of Gaza have not—unlike the Israelis Hamas attacked on October 7—been targeted for massacre. Gazans have, however, lost their homes on a large scale. Hamas’s tactics have obliged the IDF to damage or destroy an appreciable proportion of the buildings in Gaza. That may diminish the commitment to rejectionism there.

In the West Bank, [Pipes] recommends that the fall of the Palestinian Authority be followed by “tough Israeli rule . . . along the lines of what exists in Egypt and Jordan,” which should be accompanied by a concerted, protracted campaign to change Palestinian attitudes toward Israel. This exercise in what was once called “winning the hearts and minds” of the target population forms the second component of the author’s formula for Israeli victory.

The prospects for the Pipes strategy’s success are uncertain. What is certain however—and what emerges from Israel Victory with a clarity that is either bracing or dismaying, depending on one’s point of view—is that the other, prevailing ways of ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict have failed.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.