The very interesting Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has a good analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a clever suggestion for moving forward:
“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build
mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any
reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace
is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment
problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future,
after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly
to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made
a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you
were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this,
it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land–you disarm, put
down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then
give you the land–the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow
through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with
the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader
Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to
cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate
will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what
their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of
money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a
starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would
suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based
on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent
Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to
each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the
tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on
either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides
agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely
self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement
by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue
over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international
agency, and that’s that.”
The article cited has a lot more on Bueno de Mesquita and the remarkable series of accurate predictions that he has made using rational choice modeling. See also this piece from Science News, The Mathematical Fortune Teller.
Shimon Peres pitched the “New Middle East” as a market incentive for peace in the 1990s. He envisioned a Middle East made wealthy by free trade and cooperation. Most Arabs considered this concept an insidious Zionist conspiracy. (Those last three words are not meant ironically; the Arabs really thought that way.)
Anyone have any recommendations for books on modeling and game theory?
The notion of tourism revenue is incidental to this plan. More generally it is paying the Palestinians to be friendly to Israel (with tourism serving as one measure of such niceness). This has worked well with Egypt, but it has yet to work with the Palestinians. The income effect may lead to more terrorism and also create some of the classic problems with foreign aid or for that matter resource-rich seats of governance. The Israeli public may want to stop sending money if splinter groups (or were they the mainstream?) start a terrorist attack. It is a bad precedent to pay off a group not to attack, or there may be a threat of an attack to induce a preemptive payment. More specifically, the entire proposal seems quite “pre-Wall” to me. The notion that suicide bombers are scaring off tourists to Israel just doesn’t seem that true today.
I think this remains an interesting idea, but it is less new than it sounds and I think of it as already having failed. The U.S. already has gladly signaled it would invest money if it could get a stable Palestinian authority in return.
Israel’s reaction to the violence since 2000 has almost destroyed the economy in the West Bank. There GDP per capita has fallen by half since 2000. This shows that economic loss is not an effective way to control the violent groups. Also as long as Israel has this power, a solution based an improvement in the economy will still require trust by the Palestinians.
Bruce wrote:
“You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever.”
The U.N. ? Whatever.
Hamas’ opposition to a CASINO is not proof that Hamas would oppose ANY initiative..
I mean that’s a CASINO. There are plenty of places where casinos/gambling are illegal and if i’m not mistaken, Israel itself is one of them.
The fact that Hamas opposed it is not proof that it opposes tourism. at all.
If I understand the proposal correctly, private entrepreneurs in Israel (or perhaps just the Israeli government) should apportion tourism revenues to Palestinians 60:40.
But what of the ‘revenues’ earned by Palestinians from other countries for inciting violence? It is very likely Palestinians would forego some portion of this new 40% revenue stream to continue maximizing ‘terrorism’ funds, now with the added incentive of minimizing Israeli’s 60% portion of tourism funds.
Like some others, I’m perplexed by how this 60/40 ratio could be maintained and distributed. Maybe there is an obvious solution I’m missing.
The best that I can come up with is a sort of tourist debit card, where of every Israeli new Sheqel deposited .60 could only be spent on Israeli businesses and .40 on Palestinian business.
This seems an ungainly solution and would have huge associated costs.
It is my belief that the Israrli-Palestinian conflict will never really be solved until one group eliminates the other. I think the whole thing has gone too far to be peaceably worked out. However this de Mesquita guy has an excellent suggestion that has almost made me revise my opinion. If it were not for religious fanaticism on both of the sides then I think that this would be the way to solve the friction in the Middle East. But religion is the greatest polarizer and I think that it will prevent any of the problems either side has from being solved. But this idea is the most original one I have ever heard and it certainly has a good chance. The U.N. should get on that.
John Scott,
You’re certainly right that religious fanticism has a huge part to play in the propagation of this conflict, and you pessimissm about a potential solution is certainly not completely unfounded. However, I still maintain hope that there will be a solution, and am certain it could work.
The route to this solution is hardly controversial, but it is the ONLY method that has not been tried. It simply centers on the crazy idea that all humans are humans, and are equal, and deserve equal rights. Following from this, it makes the assumption that once you stop oppressing people, conflict will eventually subside. Sure, there will always be some crazies who are willing to kill for pure hatred, but once there is no fundamental injustice to fight for, those people become as isolated as the V-Tech killer; hardly likely to cause a descent into anarchy, war or violence.
Let’s for a second start thinking of Palestinians and Israelis as equal humans, and start working towards a solution that gives them both equal rights, and doesn’t allow either of them to suppress the other. That’s how a solution was reached in South Africa, the American south, and countless other places.
As long as all of our “creative” solutions, from Shimon Peres to Bueno de Mesquita continue to assume that a solution can be reached while settlements, the occupation, and Israeli domination and control of Palestinian lives are not addressed, we’ll never reach a solution.
Slavery went on for hundreds of years, and was one of the most repressive and hateful things humanity has ever done; and yet blacks and whites live together in one society here peacefully, and a black man may well be elected president next year. Israelis and Palestinians can hardly have done to each other more than whites have done to blacks. A proper solution will solve all of this.
In the words of Golda Meir, “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel. Until then, there will be no peace.”
Most Arabs
You asked them all? Or you just know how “that kind thinks?”
Bueno de Mesquita’s is an interesting and elegant solution, unfortunately it is also a solution to a non-existent problem. The Palestineans do not merely want more money, or more peace; they want the Israelis to get off their land. Which is a perfectly reasonable desire.
Or to put it into economic terms; what does 40% of all revenue mean if you are not allowed to control your own property?
Anything that purports to be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and does not address water is probably useless.
“We find more than once condemnation and denunciation to the resistance operations and bombings [suicide attacks], carried out by Hamas and the Palestinian resistance branches. There is no other choice but to use restraint regarding the condemnation, the attaching of the label of terror [to "resistance"], and the assembling of conferences [for] condemnation [of the attacks]. [This] so that everyone will know, that we did this only because our lord commanded so, “I did it not of my own accord† [*] and so that people will know that the extermination of Jews is good for the inhabitants of the worlds on a land, to which Allah gave his blessing for the sake of the inhabitants of the worlds.†
[Al-Risalah, April 23, 2007]
Al Risalah is the HAMAS paper.
Or, we could try HAMAS tv:
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1579.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1561.htm
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1587.htm
Go to
http://pmw.org.il/
and search for HAMAS mickey mouse
Let’s move on to Iran:
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1558.htm
Next, we’ll start looking at Al Aqsa TV.
Let us also not forget that any money given to the Palestinians will just be stolen by their leaders. Arafat stole billions in western aid and his people got none of it.
Interesting…but as well as wanting to know the failed predictions, I’d also like to know how many other people are in a similar prediction business. As with astrologers, there may be so many that one of them’s bound to be right 90 percent of the time. Now as to the Arab-Israeli confict, I prefer my own idea, which seems more versatile: Middle East Peace Bonds: http://socialgoals.com/mepeacebonds.html
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Tourism? Incentive?
From 1967, when Israel took administrative control of Gaza and the West Bank, until the time that Arafat launched the Intifada, Gaza and the West Bank were amongst the top 5 fastest growing economies in the world. Tourism was a part of this.
This economic and social flourishing stopped once the violence of the Intifadas started.
This shows that, whether the Intifada was the collective will of the Palestinian people or not, that the taken decision decided for violence despite the economic incentives.
The Palestinian position has long been that they will not tolerate the existence of the Israeli state – they have been at war with Israel more or less constantly since Israel’s re-establishment in 1948.
They’ve elected to government a group, Hamas, which is officially dedicated to the removal of all Jewish presence from Muslim lands (according to their charter).
The toxic propaganda against the Jews, and the ideology espoused and taught by Hamas is not far removed from the kind of output the Nazi’s were producing.
There’s a historical link to Nazi anti-semitism – the Palestinian leader al-Husseini in the 1930′s and 40′s was a devoted fan of Hitler – there’s documented evidence that he asked Hitler for permission to implement the Final Solution in Palestine. He’s broadcast on Nazi Berlin radio, exhorting Arabs to “kill the Jews wherever you may find them – this pleases God”. He was to have been prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials, but escaped.
Unlike Germany, the Palestinians leaders post-War never renounced and condemned their unhealthy Nazi ideas.
Do you think there might be a problem here, that Bueno de Mesquita is not addressing?
only ignorant people say ain’t.
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