Daniel Pipes, Peacemaker?
By Michael Scherer
May 26, 2003
Mother Jones

Like many other Middle East scholars, Daniel Pipes sees a way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But unlike most of his peers, Pipes sees no room for negotiation, no hope for compromise and no use for diplomacy. "What war had achieved for Israel," Pipes explained at a recent Zionist conference in Washington DC, "diplomacy has undone."

His solution is simple: The Israeli military must force what Pipes describes as a "change of heart" by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza -- a sapping of the Palestinian will to fight which can lead to a complete surrender. "How is a change of heart achieved? It is achieved by an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat," Pipes continued. "The Palestinians need to be defeated even more than Israel needs to defeat them."

Obviously, such extreme views put Pipes at odds with the stated policies of the Bush administration, and even Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has indicated he will accept the "road map" for peace. So it took many by surprise last month when President Bush nominated Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally sponsored think tank dedicated to "the peaceful resolution of international conflicts."

The nomination has angered American Muslim groups and liberal Jewish leaders, who see Pipes as a poor choice for a peace institute. "Daniel Pipes is not a peacemaker," says Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth and co-chair of the liberal Jewish group Tikkun. "It would be like appointing me to be the head of nuclear physics at Los Alamos."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which calls Pipes "the nation's leading Islamaphobe," is promising an all out campaign to defeat his nomination, and at least one prominent senator has already expressed reservations. Setting the stage for a possible showdown later this year, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, says he has "serious concerns" about Pipes, according to Jim Manley, Kennedy's spokesman at the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, which must approve the nomination. "It's just a question of whether the Republicans will want to engage in a public battle," Manley added.

Pipes supporters, who represent both the core of the Republican base and the core of the pro-Israel lobby, are itching for such a fight. He has been endorsed by groups such as the Christian Coalition, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Zionist Organization of America. "The kinds of issues that Daniel has been talking about are the kinds of issues we could stand a debate about in the public at large," says Frank J. Gaffney Jr., the president of the Center For Security Policy, a conservative think tank.

The issues Gaffney refers to extend far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A prolific author and columnist with a doctorate from Harvard, Pipes opines exhaustively on just about every aspect of terrorism and the Muslim world. Pipes is also a founder of Campus Watch, a website that compiles public files on college professors who are critical of Israel or certain aspects of American Foreign policy. Several weeks ago he penned a column arguing that the Bush administration should install a "democratically-minded Iraqi strongman" in Iraq. In another column, he asserted that the U.S. had no "moral obligation" to rebuild countries like Iraq and Afghanistan after an invasion.

Pipes, who declined a request to speak with Mother Jones, told the audience at the recent Zionist conference that he could not comment about his nomination. But he did have a word for his political foes, particularly the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "My nomination is merely a stepping stone in their assertion of power to achieve a militant Islamic state," Pipes said. "To put it more graphically: the substitution of the Constitution by the Koran."

Pipes frequently issues such warnings, declaring that militant American Muslims intend to mount a second American Revolution, and impose Islamic law. In this context, he has criticized Bush for suggesting in public that Islam is a peaceful religion. "All Muslims, unfortunately, are suspect," he wrote in a recent book, though he added that only "10 to 15 percent" of Muslims are militant. If Muslims have jobs in the military, law enforcement or diplomacy, Pipes states in another column, "they need to be watched for connections to terrorism." He also finds Muslim immigration problematic: "All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

"These are views that are not particularly mainstream or tolerant of the other," says Judith Kipper, a Middle East fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "A number of people have raised a question of having someone on the board with extreme views because democracy thrives in the center."

For nearly two decades, the Institute of Peace has found quiet success occupying that center, working with peace scholars, facilitating peacekeeping missions, and holding conferences on conflict resolution, all with a current federal budget of $16 million. Created in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the institute is intended to offer balance to the war colleges sponsored by the Department of Defense. It has awarded dozens of grants to fund research on peacefully ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, building a new Palestinian state and creating "inter-communal" understanding between Arabs and Israeli Jews.

Pipes' personal views on the conflict can be traced back to the early days of the struggle. In 1923, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an ideological father to the Israeli right wing, wrote that there would be no peace until the Arabs in Israel were psychologically crushed. "As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish that hope," he declared. More than a decade later, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, echoed those sentiments. "For only after total despair on the part of the Arabs, a despair that will come not only from the failure of the disturbances and the attempt at rebellion, but also as a consequence of our growth as a country, may the Arabs possibly acquiesce in a Jewish state of Israel," he wrote in 1936.

Today, such views are most strongly held in Israel by right-wing political parties, and in America by Jewish supporters of the Israeli settlement movement and evangelical Christians, who have found common cause with the hard-line aspects of the pro-Israel lobby. Those groups were well represented at the Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit, which began May 17 at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington D.C. Pipes was greeted there as a celebrity, receiving standing ovations before and after his speech.

Conservative icons Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes also addressed the conference, speaking about the conflict in religious terms. Bauer described Israel as God's biblical gift to the Jews, a religious edict that should not be abandoned. For Keyes, the fight against Palestinian terrorism was a Christian fight against evil. "Evil does not come from without," he thundered from the podium. "It comes from within." Other speakers, meanwhile, attacked the mainstream media for a rampant anti-Israel bias. The Bush administration's road map was derided as a "highway to appeasement," and the occupied territories were referred to as "disputed" or "administered" territories.

A group called Americans For A Safe Israel circulated its own "2 state solution" at the conference, calling for Palestinian refugees and the residents of territory occupied by Israel to be declared Jordanian citizens and relocated at international expense. If Palestinians refuse to resettle, the flier stated, they should be "declared citizens of Jordan with the appropriate legal steps taken so that they remain within Israel and loyal to Israel (sic) law."

In 1990, Pipes seemed to endorse a similar proposal, dismissing the underlying assumption of the road map and the failed Oslo peace process. He wrote that it was "either naïve or duplicitous" to think that two states could exist between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Now, according to his website, Pipes believes that a two-state solution could work, but only after a complete Palestinian surrender.

The Israeli people, however, appear to be rejecting Pipes' hard-line approach to ending the conflict. An April poll by Tel Aviv University found that 65 percent of Israelis support the road map, including 58 percent of Sharon's Likud Party voters. At the Zionist convention, Pipes suggested that Israelis would needed to be nudged towards his solution. "It is Israel's burden to be tough," Pipes said. "The Israelis must be encouraged to defeat the Palestinians."

The hundreds of Americans in attendance, pumped with religious fervor and more than 5,000 miles from the bloodshed, seemed ready to take up his call. . What do you think?

Michael Scherer is the Washington Editor of Mother Jones.