Here is my main criticism of the New York Times Magazine’s peace plan that it unfurled last Sunday on its cover, in which Bernard Avishai called for urgent negotiations to strike a deal. But if Tahrir Square teaches us anything, it’s that the Palestinians shouldn’t go into the boardroom now. It’s pretty simple game theory:
Let’s say that the youth movement that led the protest in Tahrir Square had agreed to the Mubarak regime’s demand for negotiation in late January, and had called off the protests, reasoning, hey they would have imprisoned us last week, now they want to talk to us, that’s progress. Well, obviously, the youth movement would have given up a lot of power, the power to shut down Egypt; and though with his eye on the prize of a return to normalcy, Mubarak would have made some real concessions to the youth movement, he would have come out of it still president. Let’s say for argument he had appointed young civil engineer Ahmed Maher vice president and Maher began the arduous process of instituting reforms under Mubarak. You might call that victory, but we all know that the movement ended up with a much better deal by staying in the streets.
Let me put this another way. Let’s say a federal judge rules that the NFL football players have to negotiate with the team owners, they can’t go on strike later this year. Well when they sit down to negotiate, the football players would obviously be getting a much lousier deal from the team owners than if they held on to their hammer, the right of work-stoppage– the threat of cancellation of several games, or the entire season.
The point is that the Powerful– Mubarak or the team owners with all their money– always want to maintain business as usual. And the Less Powerful try to level the playing field by disrupting business as usual, making enormous personal sacrifices and risking their lives/careers in order to put an entire business or society on hold. When they make this threat real and then go into negotiations, the deal is going to be much sweeter. Look at Egypt. Mubarak is gone and there’s going to be a new constitution that will grant a lot of freedoms.
Now let’s move the analogy to Israel/Palestine. Instead of the Egyptian protesters’ modest goal of Getting Rid of a Dictator of Thirty Years who has deprived you of all freedom, let’s say you’re a two-stater Palestinian whose modest goal is to get rid of the occupation, and wants Israel to return to the 1967 lines. Well, hell, if you sit down and negotiate, as Avishai recommends, you’re going to be sitting across from Mubarak and arguing about how much of the Ariel lands you get a piece of and how long the tunnel is that will be going under the desert so you can visit your grandmother in Gaza. You’ve lost before you began. Business as usual goes on, with minor adjustments.
But if you are a smart negotiator, you would stay in Tahrir Square, to use the analogy, and try to bring the powerful to his knees, begging for you to stop. You’d do this nonviolently, by every means you have at your disposal. Just like the people in Tahrir did. You’d use protests in the West Bank, you’d use the international boycott campaign, you’d get your friends in Argentina and Brazil to call for recognition of a Palestinian state, you’d push your new friends in Egypt to start talking about the hateful siege on Gaza, you’d ask your blogger friends in the United States to highlight Israel’s racist practice of throwing Palestinians out of their houses, doing your best to hurt Israel’s image, and sadly, some of you might even pile up a few rocks just in case they start shooting– which tragically they do.
I’m talking game theory. Any smart gamer/lawyer would pursue these strategies on the Palestinians’ behalf. And even a two-stater Palestinian would get a much better deal than the Times is proposing.
But the Times, serving as Israel’s lawyer (surprise!), doesn’t even mention these Palestinian efforts. It’s telling Palestinians, Go to the table now, and negotiate. And these negotiations are even worse than the negotiations Mubarak was proposing, inasmuch as Mubarak was willing to sit across the table from the Muslim Brotherhood, whereas the Times negotiations don’t even include Hamas, an important part of Palestinians’ political life.
Clearly some Palestinians want more than just the removal of the occupation. Maybe they think that 1/5th of the land of historical Palestine is a bad deal when they were offered 45 percent 60 years ago. Or maybe they want the right to return to lands their families were expelled from inside Israel in 1948, and they feel they have this right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or maybe they want a democracy in all of Israel and Palestine.
Well under the deal the New York Times is offering, all such ideas are off the table. Again, I ask, if you’re Palestinian and you want a good deal, why would you reenter negotiations when you could be in Tahrir Square– mounting international pressure, watching Obama and the Israel lobby slowly lose power to Europe where you have more friends, squeezing Israel through boycott etc.
The inevitable response to my game theory is, Do you really want to sustain the suffering in Israel/Palestine? No, no I don’t. And if Israel had been playing its cards right, it would have offered an equitable/viable two-state solution 10 years ago. But it didn’t. It was, and is, greedy for the West Bank. And the truth is that the deal the Times is offering is so unfair that no matter what leader signs it, people will have a deep sense of grievance, and that will only prolong the conflict…
