Scattered over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace plans, international summits, secret negotiations, United Nations resolutions, and state-building programs, most of them designed to partition this long-contested territory into two independent states, Israel and Palestine. By the accounts of many diplomats, journalists, and historians, these efforts at peacemaking were repeatedly thwarted by the use of violence, which destroyed the trust necessary for the two sides to reconcile.
The Only Language They Understand presents a different view of the conflict. The title comes from an old saying I’ve heard often in my years here, first in Gaza, where I spent an initial six weeks in an airy apartment overlooking the harbor in 2010, and then in Jerusalem, where I’ve lived with my family outside the Old City walls since 2011. Whether uttered by a Hamas leader sitting amid the rubble of his Gaza home destroyed by an Israeli F-16 or spoken by a West Bank yeshiva student mourning the loss of neighbors stabbed to death by Palestinian assailants, the phrase means one thing: talk is pointless, because the enemy will be persuaded only by force.
When I started writing this book, a number of Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, friends, and interview subjects asked me what I would call it. After I told them, the reaction was almost always the same: laughter and appreciation—from people in both camps and across the political spectrum, including, to my surprise, one veteran Israeli negotiator who yelled out “kol hakavod!” (well done!) in the lobby of the King David Hotel—and then a pause, followed by a question, somewhat hesitantly posed. “But is it about our side, too?”
Indeed it applies to Israelis and Palestinians alike. I argue that it is force—including but not limited to violence—that has impelled each side to make its largest concessions, from Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution to Israeli territorial withdrawals. This simple fact has been neglected by the world powers, which have expended countless resources on self-defeating initiatives meant to diminish friction between the parties. By urging calm and restraint, quashing any hint of Palestinian confrontation, promising an imminent negotiated solution, facilitating security cooperation, developing the institutions of a still-unborn Palestinian state, and providing bounteous economic and military assistance, the United States and Europe have entrenched the conflict by lessening the incentives to end it.
The history of these doomed efforts plainly shows that compromise on each side has been driven less by the promise of peace than the aversion of pain. But the pain has not been limited to bloodshed. Economic sanctions, boycotts, threats, unarmed protests, and other forms of confrontation have been just as important in bringing about ideological concessions and territorial withdrawals. “Force” in this broader sense has, sadly, proved the only language “they” understand.
What remains to be seen is how much more of it Israelis and Palestinians will have to endure before bringing their conflict to an end.