Hurting Stalemate in the Middle East: Opportunities for Conflict Resolution?

Many people, when they hear “Middle East conflict,” throw their hands up in despair, the implication being that there is absolutely nothing that can be done about that intractable, violent conflict. This is also the feeling of many people in the region and even some in the field of conflict resolution. Nevertheless, at least conceptually, the field of conflict resolution contains insights that could help in designing and implementing an effective intervention into that “mother” of all conflicts.

For example, there is a situation in game theory known as the “Prisoners’ Dilemma” (PD). According to one narrative in American popular culture, two men are picked up by the police in a small American town on the assumption that they have committed a horrible crime. They are taken to the local police station where they are separated and interrogated incommunicado. Each man is told that if he confesses, he will be set free, while his accomplice will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, likely convicted, and probably face the death penalty. If he does not confess, both he and his accomplice will be convicted on a lesser charge (e.g., manslaughter instead of homicide). No matter how each man reasons, he concludes that he would be better off by confessing, no matter what the other does.

Each then confesses, is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, convicted and faces the death penalty. What is the “dilemma” here? In answering this question, it is helpful to view the PD schematically, where each of two parties can either cooperate (C) or defect (D) from a cooperative strategy (see Rapoport, 1960, 1964).

In a Realpolitik-driven world, such as the one in which we are currently living, no matter how parties reason, they tend to aim for a zero-sum situation in which they can “win” at the expense of the “Other” (+10,-10/- 10,+10). As we have seen, however, when both parties in a PD situation attempt to achieve a zero-sum gain at the expense of each other, both lose (-5,-5). This is known as the security dilemma (see Herz, 1950). The paradox is further heightened by positive-sum, “win-win” options (+5,+5) that are present at the same time the parties continue to pursue the “win-lose” option.

Over time, as parties in a PD-structured situation conduct progressive “distributive bargaining” along the “win-lose” frontier and sink deeper into the “lose-lose” abyss (-5,-5), they experience increasing frustration and enhanced feelings of hostility toward the “Other” (see Dollard, et al., 1939). Under the circumstances, they risk shifting their game from the PD to the “Game of Chicken.” In contrast to the PD’s clash between Realpolitikdriven individual rationality (+10,- 10/-10,+10) and Idealpolitik-driven collective rationality (+5,+5), the “Game of Chicken” involves a catastrophic clash between prestige and survival (as has been implicit in the tense relations between nuclear powers India and Pakistan over Kashmir).

While the PD illustrates the “bite/counter-bite” nature of action-reaction escalation, it does not capture the structural and historical settings within which the moves and countermoves are being played out to the detriment of all.

For Israelis and Jews worldwide, these include the experience and historical memories of discrimination, pogroms, and, immediately prior to the founding of the Jewish state, the identity-shaping (and nearly destroying) Holocaust. For Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims worldwide, the Jewish state was created — and is still being established — at the expense of the indigenous population, resulting in their military occupation, oppression, marginalization, and criminalization.

Each Palestinian suicide bombing rekindles Jewish fears of extinction, while each Israeli military assault on an already occupied population with U.S.-supplied jet fighters and helicopter gunships furthers the sense of Palestinian emasculation, humiliation, frustration, and rage.

Case in point: the mutually suicidal Second Intifada, which began in late September 2000, with Ariel Sharon’s provocative walk along the Temple Mount with hundreds of armed body guards. More than three years into that round, in March 2004, the Israelis assassinated the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and subsequently killed his successor, Dr. Abdel Azziz Rantisi (formerly a pediatrician) (Bennet, 2004; Stephens, 2004). After a five month lull in terrorist attacks, in late August 2004, two Hamas operatives blew themselves up aboard two buses in Beersheba, killing 16 Israelis (Anderson and Moore, 2004). The very next day, 1 September 2004, “Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled into a Gaza refugee camp..., forcing hundreds of Palestinians out of their homes” (Washington Post, 2004a):

Witnesses said about 20 Israeli tanks and military vehicles rolled into the camp in what military sources said was an operation to target militants. Helicopters fired missiles into the camp, wounding six Palestinians, including gunmen (ibid).

Then on 27 September 2004 — the Israeli military began a major incursion into Gaza in an effort to curb Palestinians from firing Qassam rockets fashioned from sewer and construction pipes into Israel. The next day a Qassam landed in the town of Sderot, killing two children (Moore, 2004a).

By the end of the 17-day Israeli operation — “the largest operation in Ghaza in four years of fighting” (Washington Post, 2004b) — 114 Palestinians had been killed, including 29 children, “and many of the adults were civilians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry” (Moore, 2004a).

In addition —More details emerged from one of the most shocking incidents of the operation, involving the shooting of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl. Soldiers said their company commander [a captain] broke the rules of war by firing a magazine into the head and body of the girl, Iman al-Hams, to “verify the kill” after she approached an outpost near Rafah (Erlanger, 2004). Further — Israeli tanks and [U.S. Caterpillar D9] bulldozers flattened an estimated 95 houses, chewed up several miles of asphalt roads and agricultural tracks and destroyed more than 260 acres of olive and citrus groves and strawberry fields, according to a report compiled by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Moore, 2004a).

All this, in a 360 sq km area “which, at the best of times, is described by its 1.3 million inhabitants as the world’s largest prison” (Morris, 2004). In general, over the last four years, according to a 133-page report issued by Human Rights Watch — Israeli troops have destroyed hundreds of houses and left thousands of Palestinians homeless in the southern Gaza strip in operations that far exceeded military security requirements (Moore, 2004b).

So, with the next round of anticipated Palestinian suicide bombings and other reprisals probably being planned as of this writing, the bite-counterbite process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likely continue, with everyone worse off at the end of the day than they were before (-5,-5). “Fighting fire with fire” in the Middle East, therefore, seems only to make the fire worse. One way to undermine the “psychologic” of the Prisoners’ Dilemma is to deal effectively with the underlying, deep-rooted historical and structural factors that continue to drive both Palestinian and Israeli actions and reactions. But, with the exception of “unofficial” Israelis and Palestinians involved in, for example, the Geneva Accords (Americans for Peace Now, 2003), “official” Israelis and Palestinians have not been able to achieve this on their own. Hence, they desperately need help.

This is where the “Quartet” — the United States, Russian Federation, European Union, and United Nations- -can play a potentially effective role. More important, the “win-win” (+5,+5) rationality would demand that they should, if they really want to “win” against global terrorism, which is linked to the conflict in the Middle East, and prevent the PD from being transformed into the “Game of Chicken,” with disastrous consequences for all concerned. Indeed — Images of the [recent Israeli] attacks broadcast by Arab satellite networks, often in tandem with footage of the continuing violence in Iraq, further stoked anti-Israeli and anti-American passions in the region (Moore, 2004a).

For veteran Middle East watcher Thomas Friedman (2004b), this image juxtapositioning has led to “a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA — ‘Jews, Israel and America’ — all lumped together in a single threat” (also see Brzezinski, 2004).

Many years ago, the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif (1967) proposed the concept of superordinate goals as a powerful tool to deal with tense conflict situations. These are goals that no one person, group, organization, or state can achieve on its own, but only by working together with others. Such goals include dealing effectively with cross-border, trans-national issues such as global terrorism, environmental scarcity, ecological degradation, the AIDs pandemic, and the like.

The prospect of finally resolving the Middle East conflict to the satisfaction of all concerned in today's highly charged, civilizationally divided world, with weapons of mass destruction already possessed by Israel and easily available to others, is the superordinate goal par excellence! And yet, it has not appeared to be a high-priority goal for the U.S. government: the major driver of the “Quartet” and leading outsider involved in dealing with the Middle East conflict. As long as this remains the case, the PD-driven problem will continue to worsen, move further into the Game of Chicken dynamic, and continue to feed the ranks and fury of global terrorists who see the United States as evil incarnate, intent on the destruction of traditional religion and culture worldwide. Hence, nothing much seems to have changed with regard to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict since Samuel (“Sandy”) Berger, former President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, cautioned in The Washington Post two days before 11 September 2001: The deepening conflict in the Middle East is neither self-containing nor self-correcting. It threatens to radicalize the region, with far-reaching consequences for the United States. Eleven months of unremitting violence has created a breadth of bitterness among Israelis and Palestinians that cripples their ability to break this death grip themselves. Without any illusions about the difficulties of reversing this cycle, an intensified effort on the part of other nations, led by the United States, is needed. Nothing much has changed except that this situation, and its linkage to the global civilizational overlay and terrorism, has gotten worse. There is, however, one potential silver lining in all this: On the fourth anniversary of the onset of the Second Intifada (28 September 2004), Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei “urged both Palestinians and Israelis to reassess strategies they have adopted during the grinding conflict” (Myre, 2004.

Together with the subsequent death of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, plus pressure by British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the United States to become re-engaged in the region, this represents a window of opportunity and challenge for the field of conflict resolution: how to help turn around the potentially catastrophic Israeli- Palestinian conflict by encouraging the U.S. government to be a more effective intervener, with multiple incentives for both sides to at least pause, reflect, and rein in the cycle of violence that has set both of them into an ever deepening “death grip,” with profound implications for peace, security, and stability worldwide.

According to an editorial in The New York Times (NYT, 2004) shortly before the U.S. presidential election — The increasingly bloody stalemate between Israelis and Palestinians is certain to force itself onto the agenda of the next American president. That should be evident from the growing toll of innocent lives on both sides [-5,-5] and the anger and despair spreading across an already inflamed region [+10,- 10/-10,+10]. Yet with barely two weeks left in the campaign, President Bush and Senator John Kerry have all but ignored this important issue, with neither offering any serious proposals to break the deadlock.

Clearly, this situation cries out for change. And as additional motivation to help make that happen, Thomas Friedman (2004a) reminds us: This is a real crisis for all parties. And [a] crisis is a terrible thing to waste. According to Timothy Garton Ash (2004), one step toward resolving this crisis is: “Only if America and Europe [among others] work together can we unfold, for the rest of the world, the transforming power of liberty” [+5,+5] (emphasis added). Perhaps former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s trip to the region to facilitate efforts to arrange for an election to select Arafat’s successor was a step in that direction (see Wright and Moore, 2004).

Otherwise, the United States is likely, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski (2004), to face “a prolonged conflict with Islam,” which sounds very much like Samuel Huntington’s (1993, 1996) “clash of civilizations” and a further irresponsible descent into the mutually suicidal dynamic of the Game of Chicken.