The Economist is pressing for a two-state solution, arguing that the President should “strive to keep it alive.” I agreed; from a purely rational, detached perspective, the two-state solution is great. But I have been reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (I highly recommend it) and this jumped out at me:
An ingenious rerouting of the psychology of taboo in the service of peace has recently been explored by Scott Atran, working with the psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin and the political scientist Khalil Shikaki.
In theory, peace negotiations should take place within a framework of Market Pricing. A surplus is generated when adversaries lay down their arms—the so-called peace dividend—and the two sides get to yes by agreeing to divide it. Each side compromises on its maximalist demand in order to enjoy a portion of that surplus, which is greater than what they would end up with if they walked away from the table and had to pay the price of continuing conflict.
Unfortunately, the mindset of sacredness and taboo can confound the best laid plans of rational deal-makers. If a value is sacred in the minds of one of the antagonists, then it has infinite value, and may not be traded away for any other good, just as one may not sell one’s child for any other good. People inflamed by nationalist and religious fervor hold certain values sacred, such as sovereignty over hallowed ground or an acknowledgment of ancient atrocities. To compromise them for the sake of peace or prosperity is taboo. The very thought unmasks the thinker as a traitor, a quisling, a mercenary, a whore.
In a daring experiment, the researchers did not simply avail themselves of the usual convenience sample of a few dozen undergraduates who fill out uestionnaires for beer money. They surveyed real players in the Israel-Palestine dispute: more than six hundred Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than five hundred Palestinian refugees, and more than seven hundred Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The team had no trouble finding fanatics within each group who treated their demands as sacred values. Almost half the Israeli settlers indicated that it would never be permissible for the Jewish people to give up part of the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (which make up the West ank), no matter how great the benefit. Among the Palestinians, more than half the students indicated that it was impermissible to compromise on sovereignty over Jerusalem, no matter how great the benefit, and 80 percent of the refugees held that no compromise was possible on the “right of return” of Palestinians to Israel.
The researchers divided each group into thirds and presented them with a hypothetical peace deal that required all sides to compromise on a sacred value. The deal was a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees. Not surprisingly, the proposal did not go over well.
The absolutists on both sides reacted with anger and disgust and said that they would, if necessary, resort to violence to oppose the deal. With a third of the participants, the deals were sweetened with cash compensation from the United States and the European Union, such as a billion dollars a year for a hundred years, or a guarantee that the people would live in peace and prosperity. With these sweeteners on the table, the non absolutists, as expected, softened their opposition a bit. But the absolutists, forced to contemplate a taboo trade off, were even more disgusted, angry, and prepared to resort to violence. So much for the rational-actor conception of human behavior when it comes to politico-religious conflict.
All this would be pretty depressing were it not for Tetlock’s observation that many ostensibly sacred values are really pseudo-sacred and may be compromised if a taboo trade off is cleverly re-framed. In a third variation of the hypothetical peace deal, the two-state solution was augmented with a purely symbolic declaration by the enemy in which it compromised one of its sacred values. In the deal presented to the Israeli settlers, the Palestinians “would give up any claims to their right of return, which is sacred to them,” or “would be required to recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel.” In the deal presented to the Palestinians, Israel would “recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Palestinians to their own state and would apologize for all of the wrongs done to the Palestinian people,” or would “give up what they believe is their sacred right to the West Bank,” or would “symbolically recognize the historic legitimacy of the right of return” (while not actually granting it). The verbiage made a difference. Unlike the bribes of money or peace, the symbolic concession of a sacred value by the enemy, especially when it acknowledges a sacred value on one’s own side, reduced the absolutists’ anger, disgust, and willingness to endorse violence. The reductions did not shrink the absolutists’ numbers to a minority of their respective sides, but the proportions were large enough to have potentially reversed the outcomes of their recent national elections.
There are some important implications for the peace process. First, we need to stop treating this negotiation economically, like we are dealing with rational actors. When a conflict has gone on this long and when it’s motivated by religion there aren’t “rational actors,” so you can’t use self-interest to craft the best agreement. You can’t just say, “1967 boundaries” and expect both sides to scurry to end the conflict.
But there is also reason to despair. Look at the type of moral concessions each side would have to make, just to get a small plurality of the opposite side. Can you imagine Netanyahu admitting, “we recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Palestinians to their own state and would apologize for all of the wrongs done to the Palestinian people”? Can you imagine Mahmoud Abbas saying, “we give up the right to return and recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel”?
This is not to say a one-state solution is better – it’s horrifying. The first step – the U.S. stop unilaterally supporting Israel regardless of its actions – will never happen. But, there is one other hope: it’s possible that the younger Israelis and Palestinians will look at the situation with more detachment, rationally rather than morally. President Obama has seen this, and he has rallied for younger Israelis to lead the charge towards peace. Unless they re-frame the issue though, a solution is unlikely:
The human moral sense is not always an obstacle to peace, but it can be when the mindset of sacredness and taboo is allowed free rein. Only when that mindset is redeployed under the direction of rational goals will it yield an outcome that can truly be called moral.