Peace of the Victor

... October 7, 2023, was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of imagination. It was the final, bloody refutation of a doctrine that had governed Israel for fifty years. The doctrine of the strong fence and the quiet life. The doctrine of deterrence... It was a doctrine that assumed a rational enemy. It was a doctrine that believed one could contain a firestorm with a garden hose.

In 1928, writing from Paris, Ernest Hemingway observed that “the first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.” The Middle East has tried both. Neither worked. Now comes a third option: Pax Israeliana. An Israeli Peace...

As Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum have long argued through the Israel Victory Project, the fundamental error lay in seeking to manage rather than win. For decades, Israel was the defender. It absorbed the first blow. It managed the conflict. It sought ceasefires. It accepted a level of violence that no other Western nation would tolerate for a single afternoon...

The Western mind, particularly the comfortable, post-historical European mind, is addicted to a single, fatal fallacy: the belief that all Palestinians are, at their core, rational in a way the West understands..

Instead, they built a fortress of terror. They elected Hamas. They dug tunnels not for subways, but for slaughter. They used the cement given for schools to build bunkers for their leaders...

Their goal is not a state alongside Israel. Their goal is a state instead of Israel. It is a theological imperative, not a political dispute over borders...

The Israeli response [to October 7] marked a turning point as decisive as any in the nation’s history... The goal was not degradation but elimination. Not management but victory...

The enemy had spent fifteen years turning Gaza into the most formidable terrorist fortress in human history...

The world... counted the dead in Gaza but forgot to count the living in Sderot and Kfar Aza who could finally sleep without fear...

For decades, the West, and often Israel itself, made another critical error. It treated the symptoms while ignoring the disease. The disease has a name: The Islamic Republic of Iran...

The 12-Day War established the second pillar of Pax Israeliana: Israeli hegemony is the new organizing principle of the Middle East. The American security umbrella is tattered and unreliable. The only hard power that can and will act to neutralize a regional threat is the State of Israel...

The message to Washington is clear: Israel is not requesting charity but offering strategic value. The annual American military aid to Israel—approximately $3.8 billion—represents less than what the United States once spent in Afghanistan every two weeks. In return, America gains a regional stabilizer that requires no American boots on the ground...