A Poker Players' Solution To The Middle East Conflict ?

[Cyrus]

THE ENDEAVOR

Advantage poker players are usually persons who are able to analyze coolly and deeply a situation that involves confrontation, unclear intentions and incomplete information. If not at the time of battle, they should be able, in the aftermath, to be able to chart a range of optimal plays.

So the question is, What is the play here?

I suggest that this politics forum undertakes a “Poker Players’ Solution To The Middle East Conflict” based on hard facts, somber and objective analysis of possibilities and a the profit motive. The profit here shall be peace in the region. (For this endeavor it cannot be accepted that the objectives of one or the other side can be the objective. Let’s leave this for their respective “planners”; they seem to be making a bloody enough mess of it all, as it it.)

THE BACKGROUND

This is a conflict about the same piece of land. All of that land. A decision by a third, arbitrating party split that land in two, some 60 years ago. Neither side was satisfied because, as already said, both wanted all of it. However, one side, the Israelis, accepted the split; the other, the Arabs, did not.

Wars ensued. The continuous, extreme and often murderous tension between Israel and its neighbors came to a head in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1996.

<u>The Arabs lost all of those confrontations.</u> An armed struggle of sorts was begun by the Palestinians, ranging from acts of bona fide terrorism of the most vicious sort to popular, rather disorganized uprisings.

Although of obviously great historical value and quite instructive in terms of ideologies, t does not matter, at this point, and certainly not in this endeavor, who started the wars. What matters is the Here &amp; Now, because this endeavor is about What Next.


THE SITUATION

I will start the ball rolling by trying to identify the components of the situation. I suggest that this is an obviously necessary first step, on which a consensus needs to be built. Characterizations of persons’ and sides’ characters are acceptable when outlined in the context of objectifying things.

Example: Does it help when I posit that “negotiations with the Hamas leadership cannot be in the cards, because they’re all a crazy sob’s” ?? It does and it doesn’t. It helps because it’s quite legitimate to enquire about the ultimate rationality of the players. Such an enquiry, for our purpose, should be construed in a manner that cannot be labeled (by the moderate mods here..) as simply political invective. On the other hand, it doesn’t help because, as written, it’s a statement that is much too sweeping and without justification. We need a modicum of justification (eg “they are crazy” based on such-and-such historical record – or a medical record…). And we need some specificity, i.e. if the leader of Hamas is crazy, well what about his second-in-command, is he a loonie too? Are most of them loonies? And so on.

THE TOOLS

Less game theory and more negotiation theory. Less Chom sky and more Sun Tzu. Less Petrocelli and more Machiavelli.


THE TWO SIDES

Israel

1. Is a democracy. (Many people would present objections and qualifiers to that statement on the basis of the status of Palestinians in the Israeli democracy but, for our purposes, we can at the very minimum agree that Israel is a democracy no less, at the basic level, than the Athenian democracy WAS with its helots. Which, in turn, should not be taken to mean that the Palestinians are literally slaves.)
2. Its steadfast objective is a land that is both secure and with a Jewish majority.
3. The objective above over-rides peace and co-existence. Israel needs to be safe and whole first and peaceful second.
4. Is the strongest party by far in the equation (misnomer intended), in terms of military strength and support by the current and supreme world power, the United States. (The reasons for the support are unimportant. We can safely assume that the support is here to stay.) Collateral: Israel, at least for the foreseeable future, cannot accept parting with its military and political superiority.
5. Cannot accept parting with certain parts of the land it currently occupies, either for reasons of security, eg Golan, or ideology, eg East Jerusalem.
6. Cannot accept alongside its future borders the creation of an independent Palestine that would be in any way a threat to its security.
7. The alternative to an independent Palestine, as above, cannot be the so-called One-State Solution because it would be against the objective described in nr 1 above to allow the Palestinians’ faster rate of population growth to eventually overcome to Jewish population. (Note that economic prosperity has been known to generally slow down population growth considerably, while the situation and especially the aftermath of bloodshed work in the opposite direction.)

Palestinians

1. Their leadership is currently the most radical and militant. Observation: History shows that hard-liners are often the right ones for a compromise. E.g. Having established his credentials as an anti-communist crusader, Richard Nixon could take a trip to Red China without much risk of getting red-baited about it. Maybe this observation helps in hard-line cases such as Ariel Sharon or Hamas, maybe not. Remains to be seen.
2. Want to live their lives in peace but are also engaged to their nationalist aspirations. (Note that it is unimportant whether such aspirations are historically well-founded or not. We can safely assume that they are there, on account of the Palestinian election results which for decades bring to the top the “national liberation” parties. We implicitly accept that those elections are representative of what the Palestinians want.)
3. Want an independent state that is contiguous and includes East Jerusalem as its capital, with its own armed forces and government. (Not the only Palestinian position that's 180 degrees opposite to where Israel stands!)

Arabs (Same side as the Palestinians; don’t laugh.)

1. Dreams of “pan-Arabic” union are pretty much dead. But the sense of Arabic brotherhood is strong, if only among the peoples.
2. They are generally interested in having finally peace in their region for economic and political reasons.
3. They accept that they cannot defeat Israel in a military confrontation.
4. They cannot appear to be losing too much face in the eyes of the Arab populace, in terms of “abandoning the Palestinians”, etc. (This seems not to jive with the many massacres committed by Arabs against Palestinians, but it does.)
5. They are, currently, running mostly dictatorial regimes, so they can get away with “compromises” relatively easier than a democracy.
6. They have no longer some serious “ideological” quarrel with the United States aside from the Palestinian issue and the issue of democracy in their countries. The U.S. is basically for capitalism and everybody these days is trying to be as good a capitalist as possible! (To take this one step further, if the Palestinian issue is resolved, those countries no longer have any excuse for maintaining an anachronistic authoritarian regime as “state of emergency”. Getting those countries to open up politically can be claimed to be in the interest of the United States – and Israel.) Observation: The country with the biggest “ideological” antipathy towards the U.S. (Iran) is neither front-line, nor Arabic.
7. Are all ruled by authoritarian or clannish regimes.


Can we roll this ball at all ?