The End of Exploiting Israel’s Humanity
Where exploitation and manipulation are all part Hamas’ plan, Israel acting irrationally in the very short term makes it highly rational in the long term.
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This is a guest essay by Daniel Clarke-Serret, author of “Exodus: The Quest for Freedom.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Let us conduct a thought experiment.
There is $10 are on the table, and you and your partner have to decide how to distribute it. You alone may give the offer. Your partner must then decide to accept or reject. Should they reject, both of you get nothing.
These being the parameters, what is the logical course of action for you to take?
Assuming that one may only offer a positive integer, the rational offer would be for you to tender $9 so that your partner would receive $1. That way you would maximize your personal profit while screwing your interlocutor. If they were to reject, they would get nothing and $1 is better than nothing. Unsatisfying as the inequality may be, a rational partner would have no choice but to surrender to your power.
But as we all know, people aren’t rational. Seeing the unfairness of such a skewed distribution, many would choose to reject purely out of spite. Better that we both get nothing than you profit from your extortion.
In the context of a pure game scenario, where the participants play but one time, the human penchant for revenge would cost you. You really would be a fool to reject the offer. But in the context of real life, where exploitation and manipulation are all part of the “fun,” acting irrationally in the very short term would be highly rational in the long term.
It’s what one might call rational irrationality. Being aware that the other party is easily exploitable, the party that makes the offer would likely repeat the trick over and over again. The nice guy rarely wins. It would be far better to continue rejecting until the offerer begins to treat you with equality and respect. In the long term, and extend it out to an entire community, a more equal distribution would breed trust, human capital and non-transactional, respectful relationships.
We begin with this preamble to greater understand the geopolitical context of the Middle East and the somewhat counter-intuitive responses of the various onlookers. On one hand we have liberal democratic Western countries, such as Ireland, which have gone out of their way to boycott Israel, even to the extent of self transforming the definition of genocide.
At the same time, as regards the Israeli actions in Gaza, there has been a wall of almost complete silence from Arab, Middle Eastern governments. There has been barely a whiff of condemnation from Morocco, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Egypt and Jordan have maintained diplomatic relations and even official enemies such as Saudi Arabia have kept their diplomatic cool. Most extraordinarily of all, the newly installed Syrian government has engaged in negotiations for entry into the Abraham Accords, even contemplating ceding much of its claim to the Golan Heights.
When the reader takes into account the nature of the Syria government, that it is currently run by a former ISIS terrorist committed to Islamist domination of the world, this seems nothing short of incredible. Granted it likely won’t lead anywhere, the fact that we are even talking about normalisation agreements is a matter requiring further analysis. In brief, what the heck is going on?!
As journalist Nachum Kaplan recently said, he can foresee the situation where Israel will be rejected by much of liberal Europe at the same time as being in a state of normalized “peace” with much of the authoritarian Middle East. He’s right. The question is why.
To understand, we must return to the famous $10 psychological experiment. In a land of stable law, such as that which pertains in a high-trust country where unfair contractual terms are struck out, none would offer a $9 to $1 monetary distribution. Whether in the criminal law or the civil law, citizens naturally act within legal and morally agreed norms.
By contrast, societies which can’t rely on the law to keep the peace are obliged to engage in brutal, inter-clan violence to maintain a modicum of order. Such was the case in the Scottish Highlands, the Wild West, amongst the Maasai, and in pre- and early-Islamic Arab Bedouin society, where bonds of extended kinship were engaged to keep the peace.
If Ahmed from Clan A had dared to kill Sayed from Clan B, Sayed’s Brothers, uncles, first cousins and second cousins would have engaged in an orgy of violence against Clan A, not principally out of revenge, but rather to prevent any such action ever happening again. In a society without a police force and where calling 911 isn’t an option, brutal violence is the only deterrence. Brutal violence now is the only rational way to avoid worse brutal violence in future. Rational irrationality in action.
Whilst it may be more rational, in a one-off exchange, to call for compensation (as would be the case under the legal provisions of the Talmud and the medieval French Burgundy Code), in a pre-legal system, such agreeable reasonableness would merely lead to predictable future violence. Better to be a bastard today and a neighbour tomorrow, than a nice guy today and live in a dystopia for eternity.
So don’t offer a Bedouin tribesman just $1. He will smash your face in and you won’t do it again.
It wasn’t just in Arabia where the rule of rational irrationality held sway. Take the Wild West. Despite its gunslinging reputation, 19th-century Arizona wasn’t significantly more violent than 19th-century New York. The difference was the nature of the violence. The West Wild was an Arabian-like domain of honour. In Old Arizona, where law struggled to keep control, the odd brutal gunfight was needed to send a message, namely that you don’t take advantage of me and my family.
The effect of this violence, however, wasn’t to provoke more violence, but to prevent it. If you knew that looking at someone the wrong way, calling someone names and dissing their wife could lead you to have a bullet in your brain, you did your utmost to be polite and keep the peace. Only when they were foolish enough to to dishonour you, did you have right (and need) to react — and aggressively so. Once all had learned their lesson, beautiful peace could reign again in the police-free West.
It is this birthright that explains the existence of Blue and Red states in modern America — and their attitudes. The difference isn’t principally the rate of crime or its violence, but how one seeks to mitigate it. Down in the Deep South and out in the New West, folks are far more likely to call for strong family values and severe criminal penalties (including, of course, the death penalty). It’s in their blood, for they’re descended from a (well functioning, but pre-legal) culture of extended family kinship and extreme violence to maintain order. Being a nice guy in the 19th century would have left their ancestors dead.
By the same token, it is said that those down South are more friendly than those in the North — and the reasoning is precisely the same. If you were unfriendly in Old Oklahoma, the outcome wouldn’t have been good, but up in the Northeast, where you could rely on the law to do your dirty work, unneighbourly inhospitality had no consequences. Thus friendliness paid far better in Alabama than Boston (unless you were Black).
As for the USA, so for the Bedouin Arabs, who are the backbone of Middle Eastern Islamic culture. The Bedouins have a well-deserved reputation for friendliness, hospitality, and honour-based violence. In that they hold a great deal in common with the Wild West and for exactly the same historic reasons. To be clear, this isn’t a negative judgment, neither for American Southerners nor the Bedouin Arabs. Both had very good reasons for developing as they did.
Put simply, they wanted to survive.
Now, let us put ourselves back in the position of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The history since 1948 has basically been as follows: The Israelis offer $4, the Arabs/Palestinians refuse. The Israelis offer $4.50, the Arabs/Palestinians refuse. The Israelis offer $4.75, the Arabs/Palestinians refuse.
Each and every time that the Israelis make an offer and are faced with rejection, the Palestinians respond by offering $1 and the Israelis accept. Specifically, the Palestinians engage in a violent conflict, take one or more hostages and offer to repatriate those hostages in return for the release of thousands of terrorists. Occasionally, as at Entebbe, the Israelis reply with a daring raid to release their captives without a transactional price. In doing so, they avoid the need to respond to the offer at all. They avoid “the game.”
Ordinarily though, where rescue proves impossible, the Israelis relent in order to save their hostages’ lives. Using their powers of reasonableness and rationality, egged on by the equally reasonable and rational Europeans, the Israelis reason that something is better than nothing. Better to save one hostage’s life and release thousands of Palestinian murderers from Israeli jails than to be left without any positive result.
If this were a one-off event, that would make sense. After all, whether Palestinian terrorists are released or not, there will be plenty of men of violence to replace them. Yet, as we have seen, being a “nice guy” just invites further exploitation down the line.
Yes, October 7th was fueled, in part, by a belief in Israel’s destruction (and a desire to stop normalisation with Saudi Arabia) — How else do you explain the sheer brutality of the attackers? — but, vis-a-vis the hostages, one cannot discount the psychological aspect. They reasoned: “Every time we kidnap one hostage, they release 1,000 of our fellow butchers. Every time we ask for $1, they accept (due to their own humanitarian considerations and/or American/European pressure). So, if we kidnap 200 hostages, they will empty their jails!”
Israel’s rationality was being used against her.
Much to Hamas’ chagrin, things haven’t worked out as well as planned. To be sure they wished to invite Israeli retaliation as a propaganda tool for their gullible Western audience, but I’m equally confident that they weren’t looking for the wholesale destruction of Gaza. They miscalculated and, given the previous Israeli responses, understandably so. They expected rational, reasonable “European” Israel. What they got was rationally irrational, “let’s go mental”, “Bedouin/Middle Eastern/Old West” Israel.
By “go mental,” I assuredly don’t mean “indiscriminate bombing” or disregard for human lives. As is now well-documented, a great percentage of Gaza’s mosques, schools, and homes were booby trapped, led to terrorist tunnels, contained arms caches, and so on. Civilians were warned to evacuate in good time and provided (by their enemy) with humanitarian aid. What’s more, humanitarian considerations have most certainly been taken into account.
Nonetheless, the entire territory has been reduced to rubble and, even in the face of immense international pressure, Israel will not relent. They will not stop until Hamas is utterly annihilated or at minimum, exiled with maximum humiliation. To put it in terms that any good Arab Bedouin would understand, the Palestinians killed Israel’s wife and Israel is using extreme violence in response; they will only stop when the other clan gets the message.
To emphasize, this isn’t a question of revenge. It’s a question of law enforcement in a lawless region. It’s keeping the peace in the Old West. Only by making it clear to the other tribe that violence will not go unpunished (yes, disproportionately) will something approximating peace be achieved. The “taking the other side as a mug” tactic of constantly offering $1 while simultaneously rejecting the other side’s offer of $4 has spectacularly backfired.
The Palestinians (not just Hamas, but the Palestinian polity as a whole) now understand that violence will beget extreme destruction in return. It would be illogical to continue. Sure, they will continue to hate Israel. Xenophobia is part of the tribal game in every place, every country, and every region — but for the first time in a hundred years, the Palestinians have been furnished a rational reason to sue for peace.
It only came because Israel was prepared to judicially use irrationality.
When I lay the psychological scenario above, I do so not as a utopian dream of peace, but rather as a historically understood reality.
Two examples for you, first from the dawn of Islam.
One of the Prophet Muhammad’s great achievements was to unite the tribes of Arabia. Fortunately for him, but unfortunately for the Arabs as a whole, the formerly warring factions were united only out of loyalty for the Prophet himself and not out of a shared “national” bond. Upon his death, it was time for the first conflict within Islam to arise. Would the nouveau tribal federation remain united under the leadership of Abu Bakr, the recently elected Caliph of the Umah, or would they return to their previous conflicting ways?
Old hatreds arose once more and some tribes were willing to part ways. It was at this point that Abu Bakr (whose rule was to last a mere two years) made a fateful decision: Use extreme violence to keep the tribes united (albeit simultaneously offering the carrot of plunder through raids), or let the legacy of Muhammad be lost forever. He chose rational irrationality over loving reasonableness and the successful results (from his perspective) can be seen to this day: Islam continues to survive long after the empires that birthed it ceased to be.
Had Abu Bakr been a good European, the Arabs of Arabia would likely still be fighting amongst themselves today — and under a forgotten form of polytheism. As it is, the offered carrot of bountiful raids married with the deterring stick of violence led to successful empire.
While raiding their Northern Levantine and Mesopotamian neighbours, they found that the Byzantine and Persian empires had been so crippled by previous conflict that they had withdrawn from the scene. In full view of abandoned villages and decaying military positions, Abu Bakr’s men decided to stay permanently. The serendipitous “conquest.”
Thus, Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general understand the power of extreme violence to bring peace. At least for a time, the Arab empire brought culture, learning, tolerance, relatively little religious extremism, and bountiful peace to the Middle East.
The second example is more close related to our time. It returns to my earlier question about Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria: Why so little push back to Israel’s post-October 7th actions? Why has Israel withdrawn an embassy from Dublin, but maintained it in Abu Dhabi?
Simple: It’s because in a tribal, honour-based context, Israel’s domination of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran have been duly noted. Israel’s Arab neighbors do not love the Jewish state — how can they if she’s not Muslim — but they respect it.
And, according to all psychological studies, respect leads to peace in lawless regions.
Ignore the Whingeing and prating of hypocritical politicians who have been living for years off the work which Israel does in securing The West. Millions have been murdered in the last forty years in The Middle East by Arabs and Islamists at War with each other, without even a murmur from these people. Where were the marches and protests about the Iran/ Iraq War, the murder of Kurds in Halabja and Eastern Turkey, or the millions murdered by Assad and Islamic State in Syria, or Daish in Sudan and East Africa and in Nigeria? Or Saudi Arabia in Yemen? Millions have died at the hands of Military Islam. Yes, it is not nice to be attacked by thus proven and barely disguised Antisemitism by some Western politicians. But Reality is about to come crashing home in their own countries, be assured.
This perceptive article demonstrates a deep understanding of both culture and game theory. In Arab societies, Jewish humanitarian actions have often been misinterpreted as signs of weakness rather than strength. While this interpretation may seem irrational, it reflects the influence of honour-based cultural systems (known as 'Sharaf' in Arabic).
It seems that Western antisemitism represents an attempt to transform Christianity's moral implosion into neo-pagan narrative and —essentially reforging their religious prejudice as political opposition.