Michael A. Calvo, The Middle East and World War III: Why No Peace? CreateSpace/Amazon, 2017, 541 pp.

Michael A. Calvo, doctor of law of international organizations and international economic relations, is a member of the Israeli Bar, an honorary member of the Paris Bar, and a former member of the ICC International Court of Arbitration. He is one of the coauthors of the criminal claim filed in Belgium and in France against PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and others. He has now extensively researched and written the first multimedia book to document and expose the terrorist and anti-Israeli Palestinian system and pattern of behavior. Calvo’s fundamental point is very simple and can be summed by asserting that the Arab and Muslim world will never accept Israel as an independent Jewish state. All efforts invested by foreign nations in the quest for peace stem from mere blindness and deliberate ignorance.

Calvo cannot be misconstrued: the notion of land for peace is neither viable nor accepted. It is, he maintains, only a step toward the annihilation of the state of Israel. Based on meticulous research backed by statistics, Calvo shows that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has produced more acts of terrorism than the era before its birth. For Calvo, the solution to the problem is simple: Israel should strive to establish its God-promised, single state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, assimilating the Arabs and other minorities within these borders while giving them equal rights as citizens. But since the Arabs may also want additional political rights, municipal autonomy, a mini-emirate status, or tribal status could be granted to the biblical cities of Betar, Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Tulkarem, and Jenin where they could exercise those rights.

What is Dr. Calvo’s “safe solution” as set forth in the last pages of his book?:

1. Making concessions to the chairman of the Palestinian Authority will not lead to a permanent peace or settlement of the conflict. It is a waste of time and effort, and it will lead to war.
2. It is time for the United States, the European Union, and all other European states to stop financing the Palestinian Authority, which has been a criminal entity since its birth, until its leaders “confront all those engaged in terror, dismantle the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure and capabilities, confiscate illegal weapons (and surrender them to Israel), combat corruption,” stop anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement, introduce a new curriculum for peace and tolerance, stop paying stipends to prisoners, and call for an end to BDS activity in the world. According to Calvo, to prove an interest in true peace and security, the Palestinian Authority should be required to declare Hamas, Fatah, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Tanzim, the PFLP, and so on as terrorist organizations and to take all measures to make Judea and Samaria free of them.
3. The U.S. administration and the European states should put an end to BDS and place the PLO, Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestinian Authority leaders and members on its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
4. Hamas and its terrorist stranglehold on the Gaza Strip should be confronted.
5. The Palestinian refugees should be put under the authority of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, just like other refugees, and the refugee status should not be extended from generation to generation as UNRWA now does. “There is no reason that Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and Judea and Samaria in 1967 should have more financial advantages and rights than other refugees in the world. This is a shame and an aberration.”

Dr. Calvo enumerates various policy measures with which one may agree or disagree according to one’s beliefs and ideology. One thing, however, is sure: this is one of the best-documented books relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict and will become a source of reference.

As for the views Calvo propounds in the book, one could at minimum characterize them as expressing an act of faith and a prophecy; as his last paragraph states:

Let us hope that Israel will continue to have strong leaders, that the world will have new strong leaders who will resolutely face all those who threaten peace, who will seek a real peace, one not based on compromises, weaknesses and setbacks, who will know how to put aside those who, in the name of peace, leave the battlefield and become unwitting accomplices of the enemy, who will act to save Justice and Law. All hesitation will lead to catastrophe. In a phrase, there is no substitute for victory. The tragic experience of World War II has shown the horrendous cost of a policy of peace at almost any price.