Pipes, an American foreign policy expert specializing in the Middle East, was in town as the guest of Hillel Vancouver for the student group's annual gala Sunday night at the Delta Airport Hotel in Richmond. Prior to that engagement, he spoke to a packed theatre at the university as about two dozen protestors chanted outside.

Recalling the famous handshake on the White House lawn between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, overseen by U.S. president Bill Clinton, Pipes recast that moment of global optimism as the tragic beginning of a massive deterioration in relations between the two peoples.
"This event inspired great optimism," said Pipes. "Only a small band of skeptics thought it might turn out otherwise.... The reality of these accords is that they took a bad situation and made it much, much worse."

In the last decade, Israel has suffered the worst terrorism it has ever experienced and life for the average Palestinian has deteriorated beyond previous lows.

"Everyone agrees that things got worse," said Pipes. "They don't agree on why it got worse."

The finger-pointing, prevalent in the Middle East, is just as evident in Canada, as representatives of Jews for a Just Peace and the Palestine Solidarity Group shouted slogans outside the meeting, putting all the blame on Israel. Most protestors chose not to attend the meeting, however, permitting a civil, non-confrontational 90-minute discussion.

Pipes' presence brought out extra security precautions by the university, which successfully avoided the bitter and sometimes violent confrontations experienced on other North American campuses over the Middle East issue. Pipes has become a lightning rod of sorts for Israel's critics, who accuse his campus-watch.org Web site of threatening academic freedom. He is a regular columnist in the Jerusalem Post, among other publications, and is the director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank based in Philadelphia.

While chanting dissidents disagree, Pipes lays the blame for the decade of declining hopes on a what he sees as a single unacknowledged fact: that even if Arab leaders, including Arafat, are prepared to acknowledge and coexist with Israel, the mass of Arab citizens are not.

"The Israeli position in Oslo negotiations was to assume that the Palestinians had accepted the permanent existence of a Jewish state," Pipes said. "The reason [peace] did not happen is it was a wrong premise. Palestinians did not accept Israel's existence."

Despite Arafat's official statements, incitement against Israel's very presence continued unabated, according to Pipes, in vitriolic school textbooks that deny any validity to the "Zionist enemy," in official Palestinian Authority-controlled media, in religious sermons, in posters that appear everywhere in Palestinian communities, and even in crossword puzzles (Q: "A city in Palestine" A: "Haifa"). The glorification of suicide bombers, whose funerals, according to Pipes, bear more resemblance to wedding celebrations, is another of the most obvious and disturbing examples of non-acceptance of Israel.

Even if Arafat was sincere about seeking peace, Pipes said, the animosity was too deeply entrenched to change without massive efforts from the top. Instead, public opinion moved the other direction, Pipes suggested.

Through Israel's history of defensive wars, Palestinians and other Arabs had come to realize that Israel was a formidable foe who would not, in the short term at least, be beaten militarily. Coexistence seemed like the only option for the Palestinians, according to Pipes.

That all changed, Pipes posited, when Israel made an offer of effectively everything the Palestinians had demanded. Coupled with Israel's abrupt departure from military positions in Lebanon, the Palestinian "street" viewed these developments as a signal of Israel's weakness.

"The Israelis made concession after concession," Pipes said. Instead of leading to feelings of fraternity, he explained, the concessions were perceived as first blood.

"Instead of negotiating something with the Israelis," Pipes said, summarizing what he called a prevalent attitude among average Palestinians, "[maybe] they could beat the Israelis."

Despite series of agreements between Israel and, variously, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, no fundamental shift in public opinion at the street level ever took place, said Pipes.

"A state-to-state agreement [with Arab leaders] isn't worth a whole lot more than the paper it's printed on," said Pipes. "The mistake was to focus on the leaders and not look at the larger population."

In a question period following his presentation, Pipes was asked how Israel and its allies could affect public opinion at the street level in the Arab world, when free expression is limited. The answer, Pipes said, is not in talking but in the daily experience of Palestinian life. Over the past decade, life has deteriorated for Palestinians and the imminence of a Palestinian state has faded.

"The Palestinians were given carrot after carrot after carrot," said Pipes. "It didn't work. All it did was give them a sense that violence against Israel is the way to go."

The situation is unlikely to change, he said, until Palestinian public opinion concludes that their personal situation will not improve until violence ceases.

In a rare note of optimism, however, Pipes suggested that convincing the entire Arab world of Israel's legitimacy is probably not necessary. It would be counterintuitive for Moroccans or Egyptians to keep dreaming of a Jew-free Middle East, he argued, when the Palestinians have given up on the idea.

Nevertheless, the potential exists for a far worse cataclysmic conclusion to this protracted struggle, he warned. The two sides are fundamentally incompatible, in the sense that Israel seeks to exist in the Middle East and the general Arab view is that Israel should not exist. The only solution will come from one side giving up its ideal. That could come from Israelis acknowledging that the Zionist experiment has failed – that the goal of ingathering to a place of peace will never be reached – or it could come from an act by a state like Iran eliminating Israel (along with whoever else gets in the way) through nuclear war. On the other hand, coexistence could come through the Arab abandonment of its fundamental ideal of Israel's illegitimacy.

Pipes called the recent Geneva Accord, created by self-appointed Israelis and Palestinians, "Oslo rewarmed" and insisted there should be no negotiation until the conflict ends.

"This is a war that's now taking place," he said, adding that nations do not conduct armistice talks while fighting continues. "We shouldn't talk about final status issues." He claimed to have not even reviewed the contents of the Geneva Accord, and dismissed the contents of other agreements since Oslo.

After years of United Nations resolutions against Israel, Pipes argued it's time for the United States to pull out of the international body, which he argued was "irredeemable" and should be replaced by an organization of democratic states.

Though Pipes' advance billing, thanks to his critics, suggested a horned fanatic, the academic's low-key, quiet presentation helped keep the atmosphere sedate. Geoffrey Druker, city director for State of Israel Bonds, was the moderator for the lunch-hour event. He credits a strong turnout by members of the Jewish community for preventing any demonstration against Pipes within the theatre itself, noting that any disruptive audience members would easily have been drowned out by an audience that was clearly and overwhelmingly Zionist.

Another issue preventing strong reaction from the floor, Druker suggested, was the depth and breadth of Pipes' historical knowledge.

"Intellectually, I think he was quite intimidating to argue with," said Druker.

Only two questioners challenged Pipes' suppositions. The first, a young man, asserted that anyone with the faintest knowledge of Middle East history would know Pipes' conclusions are unfounded. Amid laughter from the audience, Pipes noted the statement was typical of his critics, who use invective but no substance to deflate his arguments. Later, a young woman noted that Pipes described how Israel could win the conflict, but she asked how Israel could win the hearts of the Palestinians, the United Nations and the world.

"I applaud your sentiments," Pipes told her. "But this is war." First, Israel must achieve survival, he said, then it can worry about winning hearts.