I wonder if anyone has a sufficiently good model of how societies work, to predict how would Palestinians (or Israelis) react to different things. I certainly don’t. But I believe it is necessary to perceive the situation game-theoretically not as a conflict of two players, but rather as millions of independent players on each side, suffering from lack of coordination, each side tormented by their own local incarnation of Moloch.
For example, no matter what we conclude that “Israel should do” or “Palestine should do”, in real life those decisions would need to be made by specific leaders, who have their own interests, not necessary well aligned with the interests of the side they formally represent, and above all, they probably want to avoid assassination or losing the next election. That may drastically limit the choices available to them.
On the bottom of the pyramid, the same applies to e.g. an average Palestinian. In their place, would you rather do something that risks strong retaliation from the side of Israel, and let’s say 5% chance of your family getting killed by IDF? Or make an opposite choice, and face a 90% chance of your family getting killed by Hamas for “treason”? To understand the motivation, we need to notice all the predictable consequences. Then, seemingly stupid behavior may start making sense in a very sad way.
*
Not sure if I can make an analogy with Europe, but I am thinking about the aftermath of WW2. The natural thing to do would be to punish the losing side in various creative ways (killing their high status people, looting and raping the average ones, burning their cities, taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines), and then mostly get bored and leave them alone.
But when you think about it, “taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines, and later leaving them alone” was the exactly the aftermath of WW1, and now in hindsight we see how that strongly contributed to WW2. One might conclude that pissing people off and then turning your back to them is actually not a smart strategy, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Seems like there are basically two ways to lasting peace: be nice to your neighbors (and hope that they understand and reciprocate), or crush them so completely that they will never pose a danger again (and hope than you did not underestimate their resilience). Or maybe, first crush the resistance and show them who is the boss… and only after they fully accept that they lost (but not sooner!), give them a second chance and perhaps a helping hand. (The important thing is to get the timing right; to make it perfectly clear that the second chance is mercy, not a combination of their successful resistance and your weakness.) This worked unbelievably well in both Germany and Japan.
(Note that Soviet Union chose the “loot and rape, take territory, and impose fines” option regardless. Today, Germany reciprocates by supplying weapons to Russia’s enemy. Probably not a coincidence.)
Note that I am not speculating on who “deserves” what. All justice in this world is at best a very crude approximation anyway. I think the lesson is to perceive the aftermath of a conflict not as an end of the old era (which would, for literary reasons, require a dramatic punishment), but rather as a beginning of the new one. The winner gets to choose what kind of neighbor will he have in future. He needs to choose wisely.
*
I don’t have a good model of how fragile civilization actually is; what kind of disasters we can overcome, and what kind leaves permanent damage. We had a pandemic recently, it changed our lives in many ways, and now it’s mostly over, and it seems like there will be few permanent consequences. (The companies are now trying to eliminate work from home, which suggests that even the positive consequences will disappear.) On the other hand, seemingly positive inventions like television or social networks can do irreparable damage to social fabric. (Deepfakes, surprisingly, did not. Yet. It seems like most people actually do not care about technical realism of evidence, only whether it supports their preexisting opinions or not. The ones you can convince by a deepfake, you could already convince by a blog post or a video game footage.)
Dictatorships seems quite resistant. Not the specific dictators, although some of them live quite long. But rather the fact that the person most likely to defeat a dictator is the future dictator. The system is more “antifragile” than the people who represent it. It is difficult to organize a democratic opposition in a dictatorship, and murdering the potential opposition leaders is easy. I don’t remember an example when a dictator was overthrown without foreign help; and all currently existing dictators are probably a proof that often even the foreign help is not enough.
Regardless how Hamas got to power, it is naive to expect that it will just go away peacefully. Not even if 90% of Palestinians started secretly hating it. (Secretly, because they do not want their entire families to get murdered.) If a few years later someone replaces Hamas, it will probably be another organization bloodthirsty enough to be a serious competitor.
(Analogically, once you elect Hitler, you cannot simply “unelect” him later. It does not work that way anymore. The rules have changed. SA can still be replaced by SS, but that is not really what you wanted.)
*
It seems to me that Israel has successfully defeated the native population of Palestine, but handled the aftermath poorly. I have no idea what their options were at the moment, and how much this choice was conscious. (Remember that “Israel” is not one player, but millions of individual players following their own goals. Perhaps most of them would prefer to live in peace, but those are not necessarily the ones who make the decisions. An occasional conflict is a pretext to expand the territory. I certainly cannot be the only person who has noticed that.) From the perspective of peaceful future, this was a bad outcome.
Individual Palestinians are probably stuck in their situation, and cannot solve it without outside intervention. No matter how big threat IDF may be, Hamas is clearly worse. (Also, it’s not like opposing Hamas individually would somehow make you or your family safer from IDF. The chance to become a collateral damage remains the same. Except now you also have a more urgent problem to worry about.)
The WW2-style solution for Israel would be to own the fact that they are already deciding the future of the region anyway, conquer the entire territory of Palestine (without annexing it), remove the current leaders and put them in prisons, establish a puppet government, keep a military presence there (to stop anyone from interfering with this process), and do a massive reeducation of the Palestinian population. Keep rewarding the people who do the right things, and punishing the people who do the wrong things. Build a new police force from local people, and train them so that one day they would be able to defeat former Hamas members if they try to get their power back. Very slowly teach local people self-government. Like, first let them peacefully choose their representatives on local levels, and only allow them to choose among the “safe” options (like: here is a budget for your village, how much would you like to spend on schools, how much on playgrounds?); if they act responsibly, expand their competence.
The question is whether Israel actually has enough military power to do this. In some sense, peace is more difficult than war, because in war you just need to eliminate a few enemy centers, but in peace you need to protect every village (otherwise your enemies can establish a base there). To be a good policeman is more difficult than to be a soldier.
(Notice how USA has a great army, but their police sucks. Also, how defeating Nazi Germany and Soviet Union turned out to be an easier task than defeating Taliban.)
An important part is not to do a half-assed job. Remember, if you leave too soon, all people who joined your side will be murdered the next day. So it might be better to do this all in a part of Palestine, rather than in the entire Palestine partially. (Choose a part that would be able to defend itself from the remaining part, if necessary.)
(Maybe the word I am looking for is “protectorate”? Not sure.)
This response is not unreasonable, but the description of “WW2-style solution” seems ignorant of the fact that Israel did occupy Gaza for decades, and had something very similar to a “puppet government” there, in the form of the Fatah party in control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, and Hamas violently took over in 2007.
The rest of it operates under the hypothesis that Hamas is opposed to the objective interests of the Palestinians of Gaza. This ends up being tautological if objective self-interest is defined as ‘not being killed during Israeli retaliation.’ But this is a very narrow definition. There is a common saying that ‘it is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.’ One need not drag in religious extremism or poor education as explanatory factors for an average Gazan viewing their own death under Israeli bombardment as an acceptable alternative to living with the indignity of the perpetual Israeli blockade of Gaza, to say nothing of the evisceration of dreams of Palestinian sovereignty.
Note that the preceding was not an endorsement of last week’s attack, I’m just calling out the weaknesses in the depiction of Gazans as nothing but uneducated bomb fodder to the Hamas regime.
Israel (...) had something very similar to a “puppet government” there, in the form of the Fatah party
I don’t know much about history of Israel, but Wikipedia says that Fatah fought against IDF, and was considered a terrorist organization by Israel. If that is true, it is not the kind of “puppet government” I suggested to install.
I wonder if anyone has a sufficiently good model of how societies work, to predict how would Palestinians (or Israelis) react to different things. I certainly don’t. But I believe it is necessary to perceive the situation game-theoretically not as a conflict of two players, but rather as millions of independent players on each side, suffering from lack of coordination, each side tormented by their own local incarnation of Moloch.
For example, no matter what we conclude that “Israel should do” or “Palestine should do”, in real life those decisions would need to be made by specific leaders, who have their own interests, not necessary well aligned with the interests of the side they formally represent, and above all, they probably want to avoid assassination or losing the next election. That may drastically limit the choices available to them.
On the bottom of the pyramid, the same applies to e.g. an average Palestinian. In their place, would you rather do something that risks strong retaliation from the side of Israel, and let’s say 5% chance of your family getting killed by IDF? Or make an opposite choice, and face a 90% chance of your family getting killed by Hamas for “treason”? To understand the motivation, we need to notice all the predictable consequences. Then, seemingly stupid behavior may start making sense in a very sad way.
*
Not sure if I can make an analogy with Europe, but I am thinking about the aftermath of WW2. The natural thing to do would be to punish the losing side in various creative ways (killing their high status people, looting and raping the average ones, burning their cities, taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines), and then mostly get bored and leave them alone.
But when you think about it, “taking parts of their territory, imposing heavy fines, and later leaving them alone” was the exactly the aftermath of WW1, and now in hindsight we see how that strongly contributed to WW2. One might conclude that pissing people off and then turning your back to them is actually not a smart strategy, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Seems like there are basically two ways to lasting peace: be nice to your neighbors (and hope that they understand and reciprocate), or crush them so completely that they will never pose a danger again (and hope than you did not underestimate their resilience). Or maybe, first crush the resistance and show them who is the boss… and only after they fully accept that they lost (but not sooner!), give them a second chance and perhaps a helping hand. (The important thing is to get the timing right; to make it perfectly clear that the second chance is mercy, not a combination of their successful resistance and your weakness.) This worked unbelievably well in both Germany and Japan.
(Note that Soviet Union chose the “loot and rape, take territory, and impose fines” option regardless. Today, Germany reciprocates by supplying weapons to Russia’s enemy. Probably not a coincidence.)
Note that I am not speculating on who “deserves” what. All justice in this world is at best a very crude approximation anyway. I think the lesson is to perceive the aftermath of a conflict not as an end of the old era (which would, for literary reasons, require a dramatic punishment), but rather as a beginning of the new one. The winner gets to choose what kind of neighbor will he have in future. He needs to choose wisely.
*
I don’t have a good model of how fragile civilization actually is; what kind of disasters we can overcome, and what kind leaves permanent damage. We had a pandemic recently, it changed our lives in many ways, and now it’s mostly over, and it seems like there will be few permanent consequences. (The companies are now trying to eliminate work from home, which suggests that even the positive consequences will disappear.) On the other hand, seemingly positive inventions like television or social networks can do irreparable damage to social fabric. (Deepfakes, surprisingly, did not. Yet. It seems like most people actually do not care about technical realism of evidence, only whether it supports their preexisting opinions or not. The ones you can convince by a deepfake, you could already convince by a blog post or a video game footage.)
Dictatorships seems quite resistant. Not the specific dictators, although some of them live quite long. But rather the fact that the person most likely to defeat a dictator is the future dictator. The system is more “antifragile” than the people who represent it. It is difficult to organize a democratic opposition in a dictatorship, and murdering the potential opposition leaders is easy. I don’t remember an example when a dictator was overthrown without foreign help; and all currently existing dictators are probably a proof that often even the foreign help is not enough.
Regardless how Hamas got to power, it is naive to expect that it will just go away peacefully. Not even if 90% of Palestinians started secretly hating it. (Secretly, because they do not want their entire families to get murdered.) If a few years later someone replaces Hamas, it will probably be another organization bloodthirsty enough to be a serious competitor.
(Analogically, once you elect Hitler, you cannot simply “unelect” him later. It does not work that way anymore. The rules have changed. SA can still be replaced by SS, but that is not really what you wanted.)
*
It seems to me that Israel has successfully defeated the native population of Palestine, but handled the aftermath poorly. I have no idea what their options were at the moment, and how much this choice was conscious. (Remember that “Israel” is not one player, but millions of individual players following their own goals. Perhaps most of them would prefer to live in peace, but those are not necessarily the ones who make the decisions. An occasional conflict is a pretext to expand the territory. I certainly cannot be the only person who has noticed that.) From the perspective of peaceful future, this was a bad outcome.
Individual Palestinians are probably stuck in their situation, and cannot solve it without outside intervention. No matter how big threat IDF may be, Hamas is clearly worse. (Also, it’s not like opposing Hamas individually would somehow make you or your family safer from IDF. The chance to become a collateral damage remains the same. Except now you also have a more urgent problem to worry about.)
The WW2-style solution for Israel would be to own the fact that they are already deciding the future of the region anyway, conquer the entire territory of Palestine (without annexing it), remove the current leaders and put them in prisons, establish a puppet government, keep a military presence there (to stop anyone from interfering with this process), and do a massive reeducation of the Palestinian population. Keep rewarding the people who do the right things, and punishing the people who do the wrong things. Build a new police force from local people, and train them so that one day they would be able to defeat former Hamas members if they try to get their power back. Very slowly teach local people self-government. Like, first let them peacefully choose their representatives on local levels, and only allow them to choose among the “safe” options (like: here is a budget for your village, how much would you like to spend on schools, how much on playgrounds?); if they act responsibly, expand their competence.
The question is whether Israel actually has enough military power to do this. In some sense, peace is more difficult than war, because in war you just need to eliminate a few enemy centers, but in peace you need to protect every village (otherwise your enemies can establish a base there). To be a good policeman is more difficult than to be a soldier.
(Notice how USA has a great army, but their police sucks. Also, how defeating Nazi Germany and Soviet Union turned out to be an easier task than defeating Taliban.)
An important part is not to do a half-assed job. Remember, if you leave too soon, all people who joined your side will be murdered the next day. So it might be better to do this all in a part of Palestine, rather than in the entire Palestine partially. (Choose a part that would be able to defend itself from the remaining part, if necessary.)
(Maybe the word I am looking for is “protectorate”? Not sure.)
This response is not unreasonable, but the description of “WW2-style solution” seems ignorant of the fact that Israel did occupy Gaza for decades, and had something very similar to a “puppet government” there, in the form of the Fatah party in control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, and Hamas violently took over in 2007.
The rest of it operates under the hypothesis that Hamas is opposed to the objective interests of the Palestinians of Gaza. This ends up being tautological if objective self-interest is defined as ‘not being killed during Israeli retaliation.’ But this is a very narrow definition. There is a common saying that ‘it is better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.’ One need not drag in religious extremism or poor education as explanatory factors for an average Gazan viewing their own death under Israeli bombardment as an acceptable alternative to living with the indignity of the perpetual Israeli blockade of Gaza, to say nothing of the evisceration of dreams of Palestinian sovereignty.
Note that the preceding was not an endorsement of last week’s attack, I’m just calling out the weaknesses in the depiction of Gazans as nothing but uneducated bomb fodder to the Hamas regime.
I don’t know much about history of Israel, but Wikipedia says that Fatah fought against IDF, and was considered a terrorist organization by Israel. If that is true, it is not the kind of “puppet government” I suggested to install.