The Wondering Mind

The speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu was eagerly awaited to see how Israel would respond to President Obama’s insistence that Israel actually live up to the repeated commitments it has made, in writing, to stop all settlement activity. A commitment which only Israel even pretends it has not flagrantly broken even before the ink on the commitments were dry.

Well, we got our answer today. Which is to say, Netanyahu, as expected, basically flipped off the rest of the world.

Aside from using the word “state” to describe the possible status of lands occupied by Palestinians, there is nothing new in what Netanyahu said. Frankly, it’s the same double-talk and hypocrisy. Some would call them lies.

If you read the BBC article and watch the clip of the speech, it’s breathtaking the extent of confabulation Netanyahu engages in. Or it would be if it was not standard operating procedure for Israelis.

He urges talks without preconditions. Well, except Israeli preconditions. They don’t count. And of course all sides should live up to existing commitments. Except any commitments Israel has made, and consistently ignored. That doesn’t count either.

And most importantly, Israel and Israelis want peace. Except what they want isn’t peace at all. What they want is victory. What they want is to win and to dictate terms to the Palestinians. So I suppose to the extent that Israel wants to dictate peace to the rest of the Middle East, they want peace.

To be fair, it is not clear that this is what the majority of Israelis want. There are many who believe that the majority wants actual peace as much as anyone. To the extent that they are unable to reign in the extremist fringes of their polity, they are held as much captive as the rest of us. Of course, to the extent that they allow the extremists to hold the reigns of power in Israelis politics, they are not really captives at all.

Which is true of American support of Israeli policies. During Bush’s presidency, there was blind support of anything Israel wanted to do, to the detriment of everyone’s interest in true peace. Now is the time when we will see if the Obama administration will allow Israel to hold their foreign policy hostage as well.

Another inmate at Guantanamo has apparently committed suicide.

It is way past time that the Obama administration shut this place down. Congress may be balking and the American public maybe hesitant. But they are wrong. The camp is a continuing source of shame to the U.S. and does not make the country safer one iota.

We can find any number of people in American prisons who are, and would be if released, more dangerous than some of the people being held in Guantanamo. The continuing existence of this camp sends nothing by negative messages about this country to the world, and to the terrorists who want to do it harm.

It says that America is so terrified of these few criminals that they can’t stand to have them on American soil, even in some of the most secure prisons on Earth. It says that the U.S. won’t try these people because Americans themselves believe that their justice system is so weak and ineffective that they cannot stand up to a motley crew of Third World thugs. It says that Americans believe that they are above the standards that they preach to the rest of the world to abide by. That they think they are somehow special and above everyone else.

If the debacle in Iraq, the current troubles in Afghanistan, and the continuing fight with terrorists has shown us one thing, it is that even the most powerful nation needs friends. Getting rid of Guantanamo won’t dissuade those inclined to believe the worst about America, but it wont’ hurt to make everyone else more sympathetic to the American cause.

This article in the NY Times seems to encapsulate all the reasons why the Israeli people are doing themselves no favours by having elected in the current coalition headed by extremists. It’s probably why president Obama will not make much progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in his first term (assuming he will have a second).

The article says that there are two reasons why the world view of the new Israeli administration will be a hard sell to the rest of the world.

First, even though the standard approaches have not yielded success, no alternative has emerged.

Second, the Obama administration has repeatedly backed the two-state solution, as have the Europeans. In other ways, too, this White House has seemed to be closer in outlook to Europe than the past administration was.

They omit the most obvious third reason why it would be a hard sell: The new Israeli story is completely self-serving of the new administration’s own extremist views and policies.

Unlike just about every other country, the new Israeli world view is that the real problem is that Arab countries don’t accept Israel, and as the growing power of Iran. Under this alternate reality vision of the issue, Iran is the real problem because they support Hamas and Hezbollah.

Even if you accept this view (I can’t bring myself to even call it an “analysis”), it is completely one-sided and self-serving. This view is really advocating the elimination of the single most active and powerful source of military, if not financial, source of support for Palestinian resistance of Israel. The Israelis policy in this case, as is apparent in all other cases, is not for peace but victory over the Palestinians, by eliminating any means of leverage the Palestinians might have over Israel.

You can see the flimsiness of the Israeli position. On the one hand, they would have you believe that the real problem is the Iranians because they are causing all the problems. All of them. But Israel will not work on trying to resolve the Palestinian issue to help with the Iranian issue because the two are not linked. So they are linked, but not linked?

According to the article, Israel would like to argue that this is all moot, because the Palestinians aren’t ready to govern themselves. From Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman,

But it is expected that he would say that such a state was far in the future because Palestinian institutions and economic development required a great deal of work — as well as investment from Arab states — and that Palestinian education and public discourse needed to be more oriented toward coexistence.

Putting aside the naked colonial language, which is frankly hard to swallow, it doesn’t take an astute observer to note that “Palestinian institutions and economic development required a great deal of work” mainly because Israel actively destroys all and any Palestinian progress on either front on a regular basis. Usually with the liberal use of tanks, missiles, guns, and assassins. Which is also why “Palestinian education and public discourse needed to be more oriented toward coexistence.”

Fact of the matter is that before there can be real peace, Palestinians will have to put a stop to violence against Israel. But if Israel is serious about wanting peace, as opposed to trying to dictate peace (which is, of course, not the same thing), then it has to make concessions and compromises too. And so far it hasn’t.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks Israel hasn’t been doing much in the way of compromising or contributing.

The American, European and Arab response is that for Iran to be checked, every nation needs to do its part, and Israel’s part is to work toward ending the occupation, stopping settlement construction and fostering the creation of a Palestinian state.

Israeli negotiating tactic is most reminiscent of North Korean dealings with the rest of the world. They act out like a spoiled child. Then they eventually come whining to negotiations and sign a deal. The rest of the world starts to deliver, but North Korea doesn’t, so the world demands the North do so. They scream and yell they have been insulted, tear up the deal publicly, and demand another deal while trying to keep the benefits they already received in bad faith.

Israel keeps promising they’ll give back other people’s land (the Golan Heights), but only if they get something too. (Kind of like a thief offering to return your car, but only if you pay for it.) They say they’ll stop expanding settlements, and don’t. They say they’ll slow the expansion from their current levels, while accelerating the rate of “current” expansions.

While the world may not like what Hamas and Hezbollah have to say, at least they deal in (relative) good faith.

One thing you learn to do when you learn economics is to think of a problem in terms of incentives. Not always easy, but I think I have a very clear and good example. The piracy problem off the coast of Somalia. This is something that has been in the news much this past week due to the U.S. crew on cargo ship which was attacked. Thankfully, all crews are now free and safe.

The piracy problem, however, is far from resolved and only seems to be getting worse by the day. And when one looks past a lot of rhetoric and bluster, it’s clear that no one has an answer to this problem.

On a BBC News web page soliciting public opinion, there appear to be broadly 3 types of actions being suggested. (I am not counting a lot of the political finger-pointing, which is not all that helpful.)

1. Punitive collective punishment, against all the pirates, the various villages they come from, or the whole damned country. A less violent (and legal) version of this is for forceful response to piracy.
2. Use of escort convoys. People make comparisons to WWII, but this is something that is actually being done now with some, if not all, shipments of food aid to Somalia.
3. Arming the merchant ships and sailors.

(There are also some other useful suggestions at the very end of the article here.)

What all these suggestions seem to have in common is that fact that they seem to have resulted from a complete lack of any thought on the incentives and disincentives at work on the various parties.

So let us look at each party one at a time and see what incentives and disincentives they have.

First, the pirates.  The incentives are obvious. According to one report on the BBC, one pirate claims to have netted $250,000 from just one incident. You don’t have to live in Somalia for that to be exceptional pay for a day’s work. The disincentives are that it is dangerous work. Just look at what happened to three of the pirates holding the U.S. captain hostage.

Unfortunately, this is not that much of a disincentive. Those cases where the pirates are captured, less actually come to harm, are rare. And for pirates who are captured, it is not at all clear what you can do with them. Somalia has no functioning government, less an effective judicial system. No country wants to start bringing Somalis to their own country to prosecute. Some have tried dumping them on Kenya, but no one actually knows how effective a deterrent that has been, or if the Kenyans are even equipped to prosecute pirates seized by other countries.

What we have just looked at are absolute incentives and disincentives. There are also comparative incentives and disincentives. How does piracy compare against alternatives for these people?

In terms of incentives, it compares very well, since there are very few, if any, alternative means of income for many of these people. If there are no alternatives, it doesn’t really matter what you think or feel about piracy.

The disincentives compare favourably also. Living in Somalia is hard and dangerous by any standards. The main difference between engaging in piracy and not seems to be that most people try to avoid the dangers of Somali life, whereas you are seeking a higher level of danger by pursuing piracy. Unfortunately, piracy has a huge potential payoff, the other option does not. And besides, there’s no getting away from the hardships of Somali life short of leaving the country.

When seen in this light, the suggestions for action don’t have much merit. Action against Somalia will not work, unless you are intent on wiping out the entire population (I think they call that genocide), or you want to occupy the country and rebuild it.

Convoys are hugely expensive and, for that reason, untenable.  The pirates can just wait it out, until the navies get sick of escorting convoys, and then start again.

Arming merchant ships is not very practical. The pirates can, and will, always out-gun any armed merchant vessel. The only certain result of such policy will be increased danger and fatality, mostly for the merchant crew. Remember, the pirates’ lives are already pretty miserable and dangerous; how much worse will armed merchant ships make things for them?

What everyone seems to be missing in all this is that they are intent on setting up punitive deterrents. Clearly that won’t work. If punishment as deterrent worked all the time, we wouldn’t have any crime. So how about taking away the incentives for the pirates?

One, admittedly very simplistic, suggestion would be to make it illegal (maybe even criminal) to pay ransoms. This would be somewhat different from the classic “kidnap for ransom” scenario in that the party capable of paying the ransom is disinterested. While a rich person might pay a ransom for a family member even if it was against the law, a business would not, at least not without risking going out of business.

Businesses would then be faced with a choice. They can risk piracy by taking the same routes, assuming that they can find people to crew the ships. If a ship is taken by a pirate, the company can either pay up and face being prosecuted out of business, or not pay and face ruin in the court of public opinion. Or, they can reroute their ships to stay clear of pirates.

As people have already observed, rerouting ships is costly. But so is paying ransoms, and the various navies who protect ships don’t come free.

Under such a scenario, the payoff from piracy may decrease sufficiently that there is no longer enough incentive to keep doing it. The problem is in the details of such a plan.

This will take collective action on the part of many governments to enact, and properly enforce, the anti-ransom laws. Piracy will not be discouraged as long as there are ships to loot from countries with no such policy. And enforcement will also be problematic. There will be those sympathetic to companies paying ransom to save lives (while conveniently forgetting that it was those companies who put those lives deliberately in harms way in the first place).

The point isn’t that I think I have some great solution. The point is that public debate doesn’t seem to be considering all the incentives at work in shaping our current situation.

Israel finally has an actual government, only 2 months after the elections. Unfortunately, it’s full of nut-jobs (the right-wingers) and losers (the Labour Party).

And it would just be unfortunately, if they didn’t give one of the most important cabinet posts to one of the most racist hate-mongers in the Israelis parliament. Which is saying a lot when the government led by “moderates” was the one which authorised the brutal attack on the Gaza Strip last year. (Yes, they were responding to rocket attacks, and justifiably so. But no one sane outside of Israel actually thinks what the Israelis did was necessary to achieve that, or that it did not make things worse in the long term.)

It’s no wonder then that much of the Muslim world sees nothing but brazen hypocrisy and double standards from the West when it comes to dealings with the Palestinians and Israel.

When the Palestinians had what many considered to a relatively free and fair election (especially by the standards of the Middle East, including staunch allies of the West such as Egypt), and chose Hamas, they were vilified for choosing terrorists. The West aided and abetted Israel in enforcing a blockade on the Palestinian territories, something which continues to this day in the Gaza Strip.

This is the usual Israeli practice of collective punishment of the general populace. Even if you buy the argument about stopping arms trafficking, I have yet to hear of someone using rice and grain as deadly weapons.

When, however, you have the Israelis electing a bunch of racists whose platform clearly advocates not peace but victory and neo-colonialism over the Palestinians, then you just get some muttering from the West. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this will not help bring peace between the Israelis and the rest of the Middle East.

In fairness, the Palestinians are not helping their cause one bit. Hamas’ insistence on belligerence toward Israel hardly endears it to anyone, except the local populace and hard-liners. Of course, that is precisely why they do need to keep with the bellicose rhetoric, to shore up their base. But they need to find a way around it. While the Israelis could help, we can all see they won’t, so if the Palestinians are serious about peace, they have to figure that out themselves.

Fatah allowed Hamas to get to where they are by being horribly incompetent and corrupt. Two qualities which, apparently, have not improved much. Until and unless they rectify this, they won’t, and can’t, win sufficient legitimacy among the majority of the Palestinians, and on this, they have no one to blame but themselves.

To be even more fair, Israel has not, and will not, make any of the necessary Palestinian reforms easier. And they have done much to brutalise the Palestinian society and culture. Which is why they must share blame in the internecine conflict which grip the two territories. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this does not help Israel’s long-term cause. It may confer short-term tactical benefits, but that’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.

And for the Palestinians, they have to stop this kind of violence. Aside from barbarity and criminality of such acts, they don’t help the Palestinian cause one bit. (Stating the blindingly obvious here.) It’s practically criminal in and of itself that when their people need them the most, these people are expending their energies and talent on victimising other Palestinians.

While Israel may be a not-so-innocent instigator, this is, and has been, a common tactic; divide and conquer. Many, many oppressors have tried this tactic on those they oppress. If the Palestinians do not have, and cannot find, the strength and unity to overcome such challenges on their own, they will not be strong enough to stand on their own even if they gain their freedom from Israel.

I’ve long been a critic of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians, and of America’s slavish support of those policies. I think they regularly violate international law and are a source (although far from being the only source) of violence and instability in the Middle East. I also believe that the conflict with the Palestinians has had, and continues to have, a corrosive effect on the Israeli society and its institutions such as its armed forces. None of these things are good for the U.S.

So it was disappointing, but perhaps wholly predictable, when a nominee for a top intelligence post in the Obama administration was essentially ousted from the nomination by the “pro-Israeli” lobby. Their opposition seems to be based on the fact that the nominee does not have a history of rubber-stamping whatever Israel does, no matter how outrageous or ill-advised its actions. This resulted in a concerted effort to cripple the nomination, resulting in the nominee’s withdrawal.

Having said all this, the BBC had a more nuanced analysis, which seems to suggest that the candidate may have been undone not only by the opposition of the Israel lobby, but also by other qualities which proved controversial.

Since I am not already versed in the minutia of the history of this man, it would take me hours and hours to sift through records to figure out whose story is the more accurate portrayal. It’s time I don’t really have. So it’s hard for me to say if the man really did say things which put him in a poor light, or whether his opponents have misrepresented his record for their own purposes.

One thing does seem clear, however. While I don’t know that I necessarily agree with the concluding analysis of the BBC piece about the Arab-Israeli issue being a zero-sum game, it does make a very good point about diplomacy and analysis.

Even if this candidate is accurate in his portrayal of his past statements, it seems clear that he had been, and continues to be, somewhat tone-deaf politically. As an adviser, his jobs have been, and would have been in intelligence, one that is not only objective, but also political. He should have been mindful of the profile of his audience and couched his analyses accordingly.

More broadly, people should be mindful of the greater goals of what they are doing. People sometime lose sight of what their goal should be, instead focusing on making a point or about “being right”. In this case, the person’s job wasn’t to be right (well, actually it was, but that wasn’t the point of his jobs); it was to convey the correct analysis and to get his point across to his audience.

A while ago, I had an experience where a co-worker got into an argument with our boss. He was trying to get our boss to do something which we all knew he did not want to do. The co-worker finally said something which, while he had a point, caused the boss to yell at him. As I said, the co-worker had a valid point, but he was missing the bigger picture. The point wasn’t to be in the right, the point was to get our boss to do this thing, and at that he failed. So really, he got yelled at for no gain or good reason on his part.

A lot of the time, that old cliche that, “you should work smarter, not harder,” is a load of condescending bollocks. You would be working “smarter” if you knew how! Most of the time, you have no choice but to work harder. But sometimes, you really can, and should, work smarter.

Yesterday, it was bombing two separate UN schools. Now, we hear that Israel is targeting the Red Cross as well. And I mean target. As I write this, I have heard a John Gain, Director of Operations for the UN in Gaza, on radio state categorically that all UN and Red Cross targets hit by Israel were all identified to and cleared by Israel for safety.

The Red Cross, which is ordinarily diplomatic to a fault in such matters, has practically accused the Israelis of deliberately causing humanitarian tragedies.

In a rare and sharply critical statement, it said it believed that “the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”

It’s not hard to understand the Red Cross’ logic when you consider that Israel claims to have killed about 130 Hamas fighters. The last independent tally I saw claimed at least 400 plus fatalities among the Palestinians. That’s a ratio of about one Hamas fighter for every 3 civilians killed. Either the IDF just doesn’t care about civilian casualties, or they are bizarrely incompetent. I say bizarre, because with that kind of incompetence, you would expect the IDF to have killed hundreds of Israelis by mistake too. Strange how the mistakes almost always seems to kill just the Palestinians…

To be fair, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel. While I don’t buy the Israeli line that Hamas is deliberately targeting civilians, that’s only because I don’t believe their rockets have that kind of accuracy. Of course, firing rockets indiscriminately is no better than deliberately targeting civilians.

Unfortunately, I can understand Hamas’ reasons for their rockets.

…claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight.

The quote from an op-ed by President Carter is not hard to understand. I don’t think it justifies terrorist acts, but I am not sure that I wouldn’t support it if I was a Palestinian. I’m pretty damned sure that under the same treatment that Israel would do much worse. I’ve just seen Israel kill over 400 people for a few terrorists firing rockets.

What are the circumstances?  Well, a Vatican Cardinal recently had this to say.

The worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza led Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice, to comment in an online interview published Wednesday, “Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp.”

The cardinal defended his comments on Thursday in the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica, and said the situation in Gaza was “horrific” and “against human dignity.”

The Israelis are running a concentration camp. And if Israel find the term emotional and offensive; good. They should. The horrific tragedy the European Jews suffered in WWII does not give the state of Israel a free pass in how it acts towards other people.

More to the point, acting this way is not helping anyone, least of all the Israelis. And America is not helping Israel any by enabling such counterproductive behaviour.

Oh, and if you believe that Israel cares about the civilian casualties or about the humanitarian efforts to help Palestinians, other than on the PR front, they apparently have a bridge they want to sell you. Just ignore the reports that it’s in Gaza and they just bombed it.

The title is a quote most often attributed to Albert Einstein. (It should be noted, though, that I was not able to find the exact text or speech to which it could be attributed, so it may be one of those urban myths.)

It probably describes a lot of things that we do in our lives, both individually and as a society. I know I could probably do a lot better if I kept this quote in mind more often. It also aptly describes many of the worst policies most countries have.

Take Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. This past weekend, they started bombing the Gaza Strip and have killed close to 300 people so far, with over 400 estimated non-fatal casualties. They seem prepared to initiate a land-based incursion into the territory any day.

The only effect acts like this have on the Palestinians, as countless similar past incursions and attacks have demonstrated, is that it will kill and injure hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinians, and cause general misery and suffering for the general population. It has not thus far blunted acts of violence from Palestinian groups, and no one, not even the Israelis, I suspect, expects that to change this time around either.

The only thing this will achieve is for the Israeli political leadership to be seen to be doing something, even if it is something everybody expects to be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

This isn’t the first time that the Israeli army has been exposed engaging in disreputable acts. (And we’re not even counting its tactics and policies, which have been condemned by many as being outright illegal.) I still remember video footage from years ago of members of the Golani brigade beating up and assaulting a bound prisoner with fist, kicking, and rocks.

So it doesn’t exactly come as a shock that others from that same brigade may have engaged in what seems like a repeat offence. The Israeli army’s response? A predictable denial.

The Israeli army insists though that behaviour of this type goes against the force’s “core values and high standards”.

The Israeli army is an occupying force, that keeps a population of millions in subjugation by the force of the gun in defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions. If you don’t think much of U.N. resolutions, I remind you that defiance of U.N. resolutions was the legal justification for America invading another sovereign nation: Iraq. Whatever you may think of the justification for this occupation, whether you agree with the Israeli state that this is necessary for their own security, even survival, this occupation is a fact.

If history has shown one thing, it is that an occupying army will always suffer a gradual erosion in discipline, standards, and its moral fibre. You’ve seen it in many aspects of the British empire, in the Roman and Greek empires, and in many American conflicts abroad. There is no reason to believe that the Israeli army is somehow immune to this.

Silvio Berlusconi is many things, including a very successful businessman. While some of his wealth may be attributable to policies clearly aimed at personal enrichment while in office running the Italian government, he was already a rich man before that.

So he’s talented in business. And he has political skills, persuading the Italian public to vote him into office twice now, I believe. (One might argue, observing the chaos and corruption in Italian politics, that having the Italian public vote for you is hardly a ringing endorsement of anything, but we can argue that another time.)

What Mr. Berlusconi is not is an intelligent or sophisticated man. I forget the exact details of his personal history, but he is not where he is today due to a towering intellect. And like another politician famous for his lack of intellect, he apparently holds intellect and those who possess this quality in contempt. That and a used-car salesman’s opportunism is the only explanation I can have for his support of the Italian government’s policy of crippling scientific research in Italian universities.

The renowned science journal Nature rightly points out that this is short-sighted at best, and is likely only to damage Italy’s long-term industrial competitiveness. You don’t need to be rocket scientist to appreciate this. So such a self-destructive policy speaks volumes of the profound ignorance of the people pushing this policy.

Perhaps more worryingly, it is a symptom of the selfish short-sighted greed running the world today. The political calculation, I am sure, is that;

1. The consequences of the policies will only take effect when the current politicians are long out of office. It will be someone else’s problem, so who cares? It’ll be too late to hold them responsible.
2. The electorate will not only be powerless to do anything about it later, but it is assumed that they are just too stupid to ever make the connection when things begin to fall apart.

Sadly, both points are largely true today. Why else would the Italian people vote back into office a man who got their country involved in a war which was highly unpopular at home and otherwise achieved nothing except to attract notoriety and disgrace not only to his office, but to his country in general?

You don’t need to look only in Italy to find such cynical greed. It’s pretty much how business executives rob the companies they run and enrich themselves. It’s how we got into the current financial crisis. It’s pretty much how we get into every financial crisis. It’s also why we elect idiots, who promise to spend more and cut taxes; no one stops to ask how that is possible and who will pay for the extra expenses. Everyone just wants to party, but no one wants pay the bill or stay to help clean up.

So if the current financial crisis is the party ending a little earlier than expected, that may not be altogether a bad thing. But only if we all learn the right lessons.