Daniel Pipes: The conflict with the Palestinians has changed the IDF into a police force with a defensive mentality viewing stability as a goal in itself.
Daniel Pipes: If the battle is heating up, the outcome is virtually fore-ordained: raison d'état eventually will propel Israeli governments to override local Jewish concerns and work with civilisationists while Europe's Jews will continue to emigrate, causing their voice to grow ever weaker.
Daniel Pipes: The idea of putting any area “under international control” curiously harks back to the 1947 U.N. partition plan’s ill-fated but enduring notion of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum. In other words, it is anachronistic.
Daniel Pipes: Struck by this grand vision of Poland’s destiny, and particularly interested in the near-total ban on Muslim migrants (Morawiecki again: “We will not accept migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in Poland”), I just spent a week in Warsaw to understand why that country differs so sharply from Western Europe and what this implies.
Daniel Pipes: There's also reason to see the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital not as an end in itself but as one act of a three-part drama that ends badly for the Jewish state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was photographed Dec. 21 carrying a copy of “Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History,” by John David Lewis (Princeton University Press, 2010). In that book, Lewis looks at six case studies and argues that in them all "the tide of war turned when one side tasted defeat and its will to continue, rather than stiffening, collapsed."
