Imagine that after Sept. 11, American and European leaders had proposed negotiating with Al-Qaeda rather than destroying it. The discussion would not have centered on dismantling its terrorist infrastructure, but on what concessions the West should make to persuade Osama bin Laden to stop attacking it. Perhaps recognition of a new Islamic caliphate. Perhaps acceptance of sharia law.
The idea is absurd. No serious American leader suggested bargaining with Al-Qaeda or ISIS to moderate their ambitions. The United States hunted down and killed bin Laden and his comrades, helped uproot ISIS and destroy its caliphate, and rejected the Islamist objective of world domination. The lesson was clear: Movements committed to religious conquest and perpetual jihad cannot be appeased. They must be defeated.
This lesson has been forgotten by those who believe that America can appease Iran and that sanctions relief can moderate its behavior.
Iran’s rulers are not interested only in regional hegemony. They view themselves as leaders of a revolutionary Islamic movement whose mission extends well beyond Iran’s borders. They sponsor terrorist organizations across the Middle East, call for Israel’s destruction, seek the expulsion of American influence from the region, plot against neighboring Sunni regimes and present their revolution as a model for the broader Muslim world.
What separates them from Al-Qaeda is not ambition. It is capacity: territory, an industrial base, oil revenue, embassies, a seat at the United Nations and a nuclear program. The Trump administration is willing to ease pressure on the regime for temporary and reversible concessions on the Strait of Hormuz without producing any change in the regime or its objectives.
Washington is negotiating from a position of weakness because of the asymmetry of how the West and Iran perceive time. We are told the war has dragged on too long—all of five months—and must be wrapped up before the midterms as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday. Iran’s rulers preside over a civilization that ruled empires for a thousand years and envisions reversing the defeats of Islam’s expansion—not the setbacks of the last election cycle.
Israel, the “Little Satan,” is a speed bump. Europe is the horizon. A movement that thinks in centuries can outwait a movement that thinks in news cycles.
Trump, like former President Barack Obama before him, thinks that he can out-trade men whose ancestors were outwitting foreign buyers in the bazaar before the United States existed. Both also misjudged Iran’s pride. A nation that remembers being great does not accept that it should be denied what Pakistan, North Korea and Israel are presumed to possess. The battering by Israel and the United States has confirmed that conviction. The lesson Tehran drew from being struck is that only a nuclear bomb deters. Obama was willing to buy a temporary respite for cash, emboldening the mullahs. Trump cannot afford to make the same error.
As with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Iranian Islamists cannot be defeated without cutting off not only their heads but the roots and branches as well. The ideology may survive, but stripped of state sponsorship, it can be contained.
The foreign-policy establishment and the Democratic Party demand that Israel accept Hamastan on its borders and call it a peace process.
Too many observers also fail to recognize the role that Islamist ideology plays in Palestinian politics. Hamas explicitly defines the conflict with Israel in religious terms and has proven its goal is the murder of Jews and destruction of their state. The Palestinian Authority markets itself as the moderate alternative while paying salaries to convicted murderers, naming schools and squares after them, teaching children through its curriculum and media that Jewish sovereignty is a crime to be erased, and printing maps replacing Israel with Palestine. Oct. 7 was celebrated in the streets, and its repetition was promised.
This doesn’t mean every Palestinian shares those views, any more than every German was a Nazi. It does mean that political culture matters. Societies that celebrate violence, reward terrorism and teach successive generations that coexistence is treason cannot produce leaders capable of making peace.
History matters. There has never been a sovereign Palestinian Arab state. Between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan ruled the West Bank and Egypt ruled Gaza, no one demanded one. Fatah was founded in 1959, and the PLO in 1964—before a single Israeli settlement, before the occupation it claims to resist—and its violence was aimed at Jews, not at Amman or Cairo.
Here is the test. Would the United States allow ISIS to establish a caliphate next to an American city? Would it evacuate more than 100,000 U.S. citizens from the area and then allow ISIS fighters from abroad to relocate there? Yet the foreign-policy establishment and the Democratic Party demand that Israel accept Hamastan on its borders and call it a peace process.
Israel has proven that it can make peace with Muslim states: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan. What do they share? Opposition to Islamism. The holdouts, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, share a history of funding it.
The most damning evidence of Palestinian extremism comes from Arab governments themselves. Why haven’t any volunteered to accept Gazans? Does anyone remember the silence that accompanied Kuwait’s expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians after they cheered Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the country? Why did Egypt fight to keep Gazans from crossing into Sinai, when doing so could have averted the humanitarian catastrophe and saved thousands of lives? Because Cairo, having spent decades suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood, understood exactly which ideology it would be importing.
Jordan occupies most of historic Palestine and already has a Palestinian majority. It is their natural home; nevertheless, the king opposes the immigration of additional Palestinians for fear they might repeat the 1970 effort to overthrow the regime.
That concern leads me to reject the idea that Jordan should become the Palestinian state. A Hamas-controlled Jordan—with a much larger territory and a well-equipped military—would pose a far greater threat to Israel than a small Palestinian entity situated between two neighbors, which have an interest in preventing it from becoming a threat.
So, what is the answer? Not a caliphate on Israel’s border, which is what the two-state chorus is proposing.
Ideally, a man would emerge—only men hold power in Palestinian politics, a detail that pro-Palestinian progressives ignore—who can persuade Israelis that he has chosen statehood over jihad. Much of the world, Israel included, naively believed that Yasser Arafat had done this when he recognized Israel in 1993. It was, however, the first phase of a strategy to destroy Israel in stages, as the terror that followed made plain, and as Arafat himself confirmed when he called for a jihad to liberate Jerusalem. Israel nonetheless proposed establishing a state in nearly all the West Bank and all of Gaza. A Palestinian state beside the Jewish state was incompatible with his goal of replacing Israel so he declined the offer.
Some of the same naifs—many from the U.S. State Department—have tried to sell Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier, as a peace partner. However, he rejected a similar deal for statehood and continued to promote terror.
Marwan Barghouti is often promoted as a man of peace, another Nelson Mandela. Unlike Mandela, however, Barghouti was convicted of murder and is serving five life terms in an Israeli jail for his role in three terror attacks that killed five Israelis.
As in Iran, regime change is required. The PLO is a relic and must be replaced. A genuine partner would have to surrender sacred cows—a capital in Jerusalem, the “right of return,” “pay-to-slay.” Like slain Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, however, he would risk assassination by the Islamists, which has always been a threat going back to the days of the Mandate when the Husseini clan led by the Islamist Mufti of Jerusalem silenced Arabs willing to coexist with Zionists.
Absent such a leader, Palestinian institutions require what Germany required—not denazification but de-Islamization. Schools, mosques and media must be purged of antisemitism and the routine glorification of murder.
Those who call themselves pro-Palestinian do Palestinians no favors by defending their current corrupt rulers, pushing BDS and cheering killers. All of it guarantees the status quo. Real solidarity would mean demanding reform of the Palestinian Authority, pressing for normalization with Israel and cultivating young leaders with the courage to break with the Islamists.
We did not agree to an ISIS caliphate in Raqqa. We should not underwrite one in the West Bank—or in Tehran.
