This is the moment for an Israeli victory

The U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace process began in December 1988, when Palestinian ‎Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat met American conditions and "accepted United Nations ‎Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel's right to exist and renounced terrorism" ‎‎(actually, given Arafat's heavily accented English, it sounded like he "renounced tourism").‎

That peace process screeched to an end in December 2016, when the U.N. Security Council ‎passed Resolution 2334. Khaled Abu Toameh, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Palestinian politics, ‎interprets the resolution as telling the Palestinians: "Forget about negotiating with Israel. Just pressure ‎the international community to force Israel to comply with the resolution and surrender up all that you ‎demand."‎

As 28 years of frustration and futility clang to a sullen close, the time is nigh to ask, what ‎comes next-‎

I propose an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. That is to say, Washington should encourage ‎Israelis to take steps that cause Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashaal, Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and the ‎rest of that crew to realize that the gig is up, that no matter how many U.N. resolutions are passed, their ‎foul dream of eliminating the Jewish state is defunct, that Israel is permanent, strong, and tough. After ‎the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually ‎other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict. Palestinians will gain by finally ‎being released from a cult of death to focus instead on building their own policy, society, economy, and ‎culture.‎

While the incoming Trump administration's Middle East policies remain obscure, President-elect Donald ‎Trump himself vociferously opposed Resolution 2334 and has signaled (for example, by his choice of ‎David M. Friedman as ambassador to Israel) that he is open to a dramatically new approach to the ‎conflict, one far more favorable to Israel than Barack Obama's. With his lifelong pursuit of winning ‎‎("We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning"), Trump would ‎probably be drawn to an approach that has our side win and the other side lose.‎

Victory also suits the current mood of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's not just ‎furious at being abandoned in the United Nations, he has an ambitious vision of Israel's global ‎importance. Further, his being photographed recently carrying a copy of historian John David Lewis' "‎Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History" ‎signals that he is explicitly thinking in terms of victory in war. Lewis, in his book, looks at six case studies, ‎concluding that in each of them "the tide of war turned when one side tasted defeat and its will to ‎continue, rather than stiffening, collapsed."‎

Finally, the moment is right in terms of the larger trends of regional politics. That the Obama ‎administration effectively became an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran scared Sunni Arab states, Saudi ‎Arabia at the fore, into being far more realistic than ever before; needing Israel for the first time, the ‎Palestine issue has lost some of its salience and Arab conceits about Israel as the archenemy have been ‎to some extent abandoned, creating an unprecedented potential flexibility.‎

For these four reasons -- Security Council Resolution 2334, Trump, Netanyahu, and Iran -- the ‎moment is right to meet the new year and the new administration with a revamped Middle East policy that aims for the Palestinians to taste defeat.‎

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.

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