Israel and Palestine: The Dialectic of Death
Arsonist Rewarded with Gift of House He Set on Fire
In January, 2001, Israel and the Palestinian Authority met in Taba, Egypt, to hammer out a final agreement to end the century-long conflict between Jews and Arabs. At the close of the conference, they issued a joint statement declaring “that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and … remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections.”
The next month, Likud Party candidate Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel.
Sharon’s election effectively ended negotiation over a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Those negotiations had been held by prime minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party. Sharon was best known for leading Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. An Israeli government inquiry held him “indirectly responsible” for massacres by Israel’s Lebanese allies at Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila.
If talks were so close to yielding a peace treaty, why did Labor lose the election to Likud?
The negotiations came against a backdrop of increasing violence beginning in Fall 2000. Unlike the Intifada of the 1980s, when Palestinian attacks against the regime largely consisted of rioting and stone throwing, by November of 2000 Palestinians were shooting at Israelis. In October a bloodthirsty mob had stabbed two Israeli soldiers to death in Ramallah, home base for the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian violence had escalated after Israeli police had shot dozens of Palestinians to death. The police were shooting protesters, rioters, and rock-throwers in disturbances that had started in Jerusalem, where the Islamic holy site, the Haram al-Sharif, stood on the Jewish holy site, the Temple Mount. Muslims worshipped in the al Aqsa Mosque on top, and Jews worshipped at the Western Wall below. The disturbance started when Palestinians threw stones at Jewish worshippers below.
Why were Palestinians attacking? Because an Israeli politician had visited the Haram/Temple Mount to assert Israeli sovereignty over the site. This fed into Palestinian fears that Israel would upset the previous status of the site and more broadly that Israelis did not intend to allow a Palestinian state to form.
And who was the Israeli politician who started this escalator of violence? Ariel Sharon.
Stumbling Towards Peace
By the early 1990s, things were looking bleak for the PLO. They had been kicked out of both Jordan and Lebanon. Israel’s main backer, the United States, had just crushed PLO ally Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The United States’ main rival, the Soviet Union, had dissolved. Decades of war had brought only defeat upon defeat for the Palestinians, so the leadership decided to salvage what they could and agree to a two-state solution.
The idea of the two-state solution went back ot the original UN partition plan, and had broad international support. The PLO came around to the position that they would accept a reduced state of Palestine on the territories conquered by Israel in 1967. This became the basis of the Olso Accords (so-named because early secret meetings were held in Oslo, Norway). The PLO recognized the state of Israel, and Israel made an implicit commitment to allow a Palestinian state. In the meantime, Israel agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority (PA) to run parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
I suspect that for most Israelis, the idea of a two-state solution was a great victory. It meant that the Jewish homeland of Israel could, for the first time, exist in peace with its neighbors. However, Israelis also feared that, after they “traded land for peace,” Palestinians would renounce the peace and launch attacks from Palestine against an Israel that was made more vulnerable by its territorial losses.
For most Palestinians, the Oslo agreement was an admission of defeat. They still believed that Israel was a usurper that had kicked them out of their own country, but a small state was better than no state. They also feared that the self-government clauses of the agreement would not lead to an independent Palestinian government, but to colonial regional authority over small enclaves within the West Bank which would be subordinate to Israeli decisions about much of the territory.
For an extremist faction of Palestinians, a small state was worse than no state. In their view, it was better to keep fighting in the hope that eventually they would be strong enough to destroy Israel, rather than to be satisfied with a small fraction of Palestine. Leading this faction was the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, which greeted negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians with a series of bombing campaigns against Israeli civilians.
For an extremist faction of Israelis, compromise was also unacceptable because of the security fears mentioned above but also because the West Bank contained the heartland of the original Jewish kingdoms described in the Bible. As far as the Jewish religious right was concerned, God had promised that territory to the Jews.
With ambivalence on both sides, forging a final agreement between the two peoples was never going to be easy. They disagreed on the border, with Palestine demanding all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 (with small adjustments) and Israel wanting to retain parts of the occupied territory, including some large Jewish settlements and the Old City of Jerusalem. They disagreed on the amount of autonomy that Palestine would have. They disagreed on whether descendents of refugees from the 1948 war would be allowed to return to their original homes inside of the state of Israel.
Did the Israeli Government Prefer Hamas?
The violence continued to escalate after Sharon’s election. Over 2001-2005, Palestinian suicide bombers launched dozens of attacks, killing hundreds of Israelis, mostly civilians doing ordinary things like riding the bus or shopping at the market. During that time, Israel killed a few thousand Palestinians, including militants launching attacks against Israel, civilians throwing rocks at Israeli police, and some innocent bystanders. Israel also created a series of walls and fences along (and beyond) the border with the West Bank, and a network of checkpoints which impede Palestinian travel within the West Bank.
Likud and other parties even further to the right have been opposed to a Palestinian state on anything more than a set of enclaves for Arab population centers. To that end they established new settlements and a set of roads with Palestinian access restricted. From 1993 to 2003, the population of Israelis in occupied territory started at 153k (153,000) Israelis in East Jerusalem and 112k in the rest of the West Bank, and grew to 179k and 224k. By 2023, there were as many as 500k, not including East Jerusalem.
Though the Jewish extremists and the Muslim extremists have incompatible views on the future of Israel/Palestine, they are often tactical allies.
As right-wing finance minister Bezalel Smotrich put it in 2015, “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it…” in contrast to the Palestinian Authority which was causing “great harm to Israel in international forums.”
Prime minister Netanyahu has been quoted as saying, in a 2019 Likud meeting, that (in the words of others), “those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
As far back as 2007, then-intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said (according to an internal US diplomatic cable publicized by Wikileaks), that “Israel would be ‘happy’ if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.” However, Yadlin’s comments came in the context of fighting Hamas, not choosing between Hamas and the PA.
The way Israel conducted the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza looked like it was designed to help Hamas. A few years earlier, its withdrawal from Lebanon was widely seen as boosting the reputation of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that was credited with pushing Israel out. There was widespread speculation that unilateral withdrawal from Gaza would boost Hamas in a similar way, thus strengthening anti-peace forces among the Palestinians. On the other hand, withdrawing from Gaza as part of a deal with the Palestinian Authority would enhance its reputation and enhance pro-peace forces. Israel chose the unilateral option, and has been in a state of war with Gaza ever since. Meanwhile, the withdrawal was followed by an upset victory for Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections the next year.
I don’t know which Israeli leaders Hamas leaders would rather face. The bombing campaign they instituted in the 1990s could be interpreted as a tactic to prevent the Oslo accords yielding a final peace treaty, though it is hard to say for sure because many of the bombings were a response to specific Israeli attacks. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Palestinians in Hebron triggered Hamas’ 1994 bombings and convinced them to target civilians for the first time, and the assassination of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash instigated another round of bombings in 1996.
Joe Biden has floated the theory that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 in order to sabotage peace talks with Saudi Arabia. There has been speculation that the Saudi deal could also reinvigorate peace talks with the Palestinians.
How the Dialectic Works
Think of the population as being composed of four groups with different goals:
- Israelis who want only total control over Israel/Palestine [absolutist Israelis].
- Palestinians who only want total control over Israel/Palestine [absolutist Palestinians].
- Israelis who would make a territorial compromise for peace [compromiser Israelis].
- Palestinians who would make a territorial compromise for peace [compromiser Palestinians].
Absolutists on both sides can hold peace negotiations hostage: all they have to do is launch an attack on the other side. Negotiations are sensitive to this tactic, because each attack brings a counter-attack, usually one that is worse.
This is the first half of what I call the Dialectic of Death.
It is possible for both sides in a conflict to step down from escalation. After the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, small attacks did not lead to large-scale war for many years. This is because neither side – Israel and Hezbollah – wanted a large-scale war, and the two militaries could maintain discipline to prevent unauthorized attacks. With Palestine, peace negotiations are largely through Fatah, but attacks come from Hamas, which Fatah does not control. Also, Fatah feels political pressure from Palestinians to not appear to be a colonial pawn of Israel. With Israel, the government has been mostly dominated for the last twenty years by Israeli parties that are opposed to a two-state solution, and when a pro-peace party is in power, they are in a similar predicament to Fatah, with political pressure to respond violently to attacks from Palestinians in order to show they can maintain Israeli “strength”.
Therefore, peace is unstable, because it is relatively easy for absolutists on either side to destabilize it.
Compromisers on both sides could stabilize the peace. They do this by condemning and isolating the absolutists on their side. Sometimes this has happened. Hamas stopped its bombing campaign in the 1990s in part because of threats of force from Fatah but partly because, at the time, the peace process was popular among Palestinians. After Labor Party lost elections in 1996, in part due to Hamas’ bombing campaign, they regained control in 1999 during a time of quiet when Israelis were perhaps more optimistic about the posssibility of peace.
However, there is a tendency which neutralizes this stabilization. If the absolutists on “my side” break the peace, stabilization occurs if I can punish them by voting them out of office, refuse to help them, or at least protest against them. However, if I decide that the destabilization is the other side’s fault no matter what chain of events actually caused it, then there is no pressure on the absolutists to curve their behavior. As the example of Ariel Sharon winning the 2001 election illustrates, the absolutists can actually benefit from destabilization because it tends to make even the compromisers support them.
Absolutists can use justified fears to bring compromisers to their side. After all, the attackers on the other side can kill you with a suicide bomber or an airstrike even if you vote for peace.
To me the most frustrating aspect of the Dialectic of Death is that it makes people who say they want peace side with the enemies of peace. At various times, majorities of Palestinians and Israelis said they supported a two-state solution, yet they support policies which promote conflict.
Suicide bombing attacks stoked Israeli fears of what Palestinians would do if given their freedom. Hamas and other groups launching the attacks were not fighting for a two state solution, they wanted a single Palestine with very few Jews. In 2003, Palestinian polls showed almost 60% support for “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel” even though over 70% “support reconciliation between the two peoples after reaching a peace agreement leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state recognized by Israel.” Palestinians apparently thought it made sense to get to a peace deal by supporting terrorism. It doesn’t.
[Poll was by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah, an organization that seemed to generally support the peace initiatives. I downloaded the information in 2003 thought that particular link no longer works.]
Israelis tend to view attacks on civilians inside Israel (as opposed to in West Bank settlements) as proof that Palestinians will try to kill them no matter what they do. Why trade land for peace if there won’t be peace?
Palestinians tend to view the growth of settlements as an existential threat. If the Israelis intend to allow a real Palestinian state, why are they building settlements, sometimes in the middle of the proposed state?
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of both Palestinians and Israelis won’t blame their own people for the conflict. Palestinians will complain bitterly of being locked into Gaza, as if that had nothing to do with Gaza’s Hamas leaders continuing to work towards Israel’s destruction. Israelis will complain bitterly of Palestinian attacks, ignoring the role of Israeli bombings, shootings, and settlement expansion in undercutting efforts by any Palestinians who want to compromise.
Their side only attacks. Our side only defends, even if we must do so by pre-emptively attacking.
The Counter-Argument
To me, the Dialectic of Death makes never-ending warfare a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I believe the compromisers should decide that their real enemies are the absolutists on both sides. But I recognize that, for compromisers, there is a powerful counterargument:
“Even if we try to compromise, the absolutists on the other side will kill us. Therefore peace is impossible, and we should just concentrate on protecting ourselves by killing the enemy.”
I have two answers to this. Both are predicated on the fact that no one really knows what results our actions will lead to. Israelis voted in the absolutists because they thought that that would give them security; instead, they got the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah. For Palestinians it is even more clear that they have allowed Hamas to veto Palestinian peace initiatives and keep them mired in occupation.
Big picture: if anything you do is risky, would you prefer to die trying to make peace with your neighbors, or because you killed their kids and the survivors are coming after you for revenge?
Tactics of defense: if attacking the other side has led to ever higher death counts for your side, is it possible that prioritizing de-escalation may actually get fewer of your people killed?
Good analysis. I would change absolutist to conservatives “high scoring on phenotypic conservative measures” and compromisers as liberals “low scoring on…”. Conservatives are seen from the data as: low openness to new ideas and experiences (one of the big 5 personality measures), low humility and curiosity (one of the Hexaco personality measures, we are just getting data on this), a hyperactive amygdala (can be seen in brain scans), high feelings of disgust and high purity standards (Moral Foundations value), high ingroup solidarity/loyalty and outgroup fear or even hatred (Moral Foundations value), high respect for authority (Moral Foundations value), high pugnaphilia (we are just getting data on this) and low concerns with justice and equity for the outgroup (Moral Foundations value). Atrocities such as Deir Yassin and October 7 are committed by conservative people according to the above criteria, and both the Hamas leadership as well as the Israeli Netanyahu coalition (each creating more conservatives in the other camp with their actions) are conservative according to the above criteria . Most of the jews who came to Palestine before 1948 were socialists who wanted to share land and resources with arabs, but also wanted a safe space for jews from pogroms, holocausts, and other persecutions (liberal according to above criteria).
The game theory suggests that neither a one-state nor a two-state solution would work or even be accepted by a significant majority. So given this, I propose 3 states, each getting land assigned by the UN (we need to remove the US and Russia veto powers…):
1. The first state is comprised of mostly liberal people, both Palestinians and jews, with a few moderately conservative people who are needed for defense (because one of the blind spot of liberals is that they think everyone is a good faith communicator/actor like them, and for some conservatives this is not true, they just want to win at whatever cost). The conservatives have to be integrated at appropriate levels of organization, whether they be villages, families, or municipalities so that they can get their ingroup needs met, yet be balanced and monitored by liberals. The liberals will also benefit from this conservative mixture, to have intact lower levels of organization (that have been outcompeted by either capitalism in most of the world, or socialism in scandinavian countries) to belong to and reduce the deleterious effects of pure individualism.
2. The second state is comprised of Palestinian conservatives.
3. The third state is comprised of Israeli conservatives.
The advantage of this proposal over either the 1 state or 2 state proposals is that it does not require the consent of the conservatives on either side, and as long as enough liberals are for it, it can actually happen, unlike the other two which are no-starters. As long as the liberals can move out freely (not a given on the Palestinian side, will need assistance from UN) to the new state, the conservatives can keep their lands and keep killing each other (It’s not pretty, but it’s better than killing the liberals too or turning them into conservatives). It also requires a buy-in from the UN and maybe the US to help defend the new state against the other two, since they might be unified in wanting to attack it, seeing it as a traitor state (but they might also be deterred, seeing it as having members of their ingroup).
Challenges I see (Barry, see if you can find others): 1. how to keep the liberal state safe (because of aforementioned liberal blind spot when dealing with conservatives who want to kill them): the other 2 states might ironically unite in wanting to exterminate the liberal state), 2. how to keep conservatism from growing within the liberal state (especially if it is attacked by other 2), and how to get the liberal Palestinians (I don’t know what percentage they comprise, was pretty high before October 7, your polling data is useful but old, now it will go down, maybe come up again) out of Hamas controlled territory into the new state.
The advantages over the liberals just going to other countries that can sponsor them is that they can be a symbol for the other two states of what is possible with a peace dividend.