Realistic solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Eight years ago I suggested a more creative solution to the Israeli-Palestitian problem. Sadly, my advice was not followed.

The most likely scenario is that the conflict will just keep on going indefinitely. The world is full of such frozen conflicts, with more getting generated - like the recent Crimea occupation. Very rarely they get successfully resolved by either force (like Sri Lanka) or negotiations (like Northern Ireland).

It seems very unlikely that either side will be able to solve this issue by force. Israel could try expelling some number of Palestinians, but they'd just move to refugee camps elsewhere. Arab armies didn't win any major war in about a thousand years (even their Medieval caliphate was mostly ran by Turks, Circassians, and other non-Arabs), and even if they suddenly became competent, they won't be able to do much against explicit US guarantees for Israel.

So let's consider for a moment a range of negotiated solutions which could possibly work, from easiest to hardest.

"Palestinians" living in Arab states

A huge obstacle to solving the problem is the official policy of Arab states, which all agreed to not grant citizenship or any other regular legal status to people born in them who are descendants of "Palestinians". This sometimes includes people with mixed "Palestinian" and non-Palestinian Arab ancestry.

Calling these people "Palestinians" is just a political ploy. They've never seen "Palestine", and back when their ancestors lived there there was no "Palestinian" national identity - it was only in the 1970s that Pan-Arabism faded away enough for any "Palestinian" nationality to start developing.

The policy of using millions of people this way, keeping them in a legal limbo to put pressure on Israel, is definitely nasty, but even worse - so far it did absolutely nothing to achieve its goals.

So as a necessary step all "Palestinians" who were born in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria (there's an awkward civil war here, but it will likely be over long before anything moves on Palestinian issue), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and various Arab minor states need to be granted full citizenship or equivalent, as soon as possible.

There's no possible solution without most Arab states cooperating on this. If some of them don't, the rest pretty much need to accept large number of the "Palestinians" in. Non-Arab countries could accept some number of them (like Chile and US did), but these people already share culture, language, and (generally) religion of their country of birth. It's ridiculous to make them move to another continent because of petty politics.

This can only be done unilaterally by each Arab country, so if you want to pressure someone to do something useful to get this problem towards a solution, that's the most obvious place to start.

Gaza Strip

This is really simple. Nobody has any issues with borders or population living there. There used to be some tiny Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, but they're all gone since 2005.

So in the end, some Arab entity will end up running Gaza. Israel and Egypt don't really care about the details, as long as security is maintained. Unfortunately so far it's not, and not only Gaza exports rockets to Israel, it also exports Jihadists to Egypt.

Apparently such terrorism is approved by 80% of the locals. As a result of this, Gaza ended up blockaded from both Israeli and Egyptian side. It's even worse, as Gaza under Hamas is in conflict with West Bank under Palestinian Authority, so even Palestinian Authority joined the blockade. Attempts to break it failed quite miserably, and probably won't be repeated.

This foolishness could easily end if attacks stopped, which would likely result in economic blockade getting gradually lifted, and everybody moving on with their lives.

Israel can't do much about it, other than building an even bigger wall, and occasionally dropping some bombs, possibly even on someone related to the attacks.

One plausible solution would be for a third party like Egypt or Arab League or the UN to take control over security in Gaza for some time, sort of like happened in Bosnia.

Israel definitely doesn't want the job, and so far nobody else volunteered. This is something Palestinians living in Gaza could in principle fix unilaterally, but in practice it's difficult as even a fairly small group of assholes could still export rockets and Jihadists even if they didn't have majority support.

As a minimum if Gazans antagonized only one of their neighbours, not both, perhaps the blockade could be loosen up a bit.

Jerusalem

It's going to remain the capital of Israel. Short of a total military defeat, there's no way in hell Israel will abandon it into some kind of international status, or just give away to the Arabs the part which happened to be on Jordanian side of 1949 armistice line.

There's some margin for negotiations of exact borders of Jerusalem, status of Palestinians living there, arrangement for the holy sites, and so on, but it's going to remain Israeli.

Trump's unilateral recognition of reality was a small step in right direction. Other countries should do the same, so we can all move on.

Money

Whichever entity ends up running Palestine will need a lot of funding, and the US, Europe, rich Arab states, and many other foreign sources will need to provide a huge deal of it to make it economically viable.

Not every problem can be solved by throwing money at it, but it works reasonably well for rebuilding economies after destructive conflicts.

As long as conflict is ongoing, Palestinian economy can't rebuild, so foreign money spent will achieve little more than temporary humanitarian relief.

One nice thing Palestinians could do to convince foreigners to be more generous would be ending payments to terrorists and their families.

There's also issue of enormous levels of corruption, but let's focus on the easier problem for now.

West Bank

There's some disagreement, but it's actually surprisingly small.

Palestinians would like to follow something like 1949 armistice lines, with as many of the Jewish settlement being dismantled as possible. Israel would like its border to follow something like the barrier wall, including most of the major settlements, annexing about 9% of territory beyond armistice lines.

Both sides are open to some degree of land swaps, and once allegedly the negotiations even reached the point where border differences were down to 3% vs 6% of the West Bank.

Security arrangements

Israel would also like some kind of strong security guarantees, which would invariably restrict Palestinian sovereignty, at least for some time. Palestinians are understandably not terribly happy about that.

Depending on how it's all designed, such arrangements could even be in Palestinian interest. The absolutely worst outcome for the Palestinians would be getting their own state, getting overran in a civil war by some local Islamists, who start exporting terrorists and rockets in every direction, and getting occupied again. Which isn't exactly unlikely.

It's hard to talk about details, as this part has the widest range of possible outcomes.

Most of these would be temporary, and once long term peace and security is achieved, such restrictions can go away. That can still take very long time, like with Bosnia.

It's possible that both sides would be happy to involve third parties in these arrangements, but third parties are not terribly happy to volunteer.

Oh wait, that was exactly the offer

What I described above was pretty much the Israeli offer in 2000 Camp David Summit. 100% of the Gaza Strip, 92% of the West Bank, $30bln resettlement fund, and some rather awkward security arrangement, many but not all temporary.

There were still significant differences on Jerusalem's holy sites, security arrangements and other such issues, but these are really tiny relative to the whole issue.

There's space for some minor tweaks around the margins, like a bit more generous land swaps, making security arrangements temporary, and throwing more money at rebuilding Palestinian economy, but any possible negotiated solution will look roughly like this, and everyone knows it.

So how is this not solved yet?

There's just no desire for serious peace negotiations on the Arab side. Arab dictators of nearby countries don't care about Palestinians, and find it more convenient to just keep the conflict frozen.

Palestinian Authority doesn't want peace, as any kind of peace would immediately halve number of "Palestinians", with the rest getting naturalized into countries of their birth. They'd rather have fake authority over all the "refugees" than a real country.

Recent American attempts at solving the problem rightly focused on ignoring Palestinian Authority completely, and getting direct agreement between Arab countries and Israel, which then PA without any foreign support will be forced to accept.

This doesn't seem terribly likely to succeed, especially with both Trump and Netanyahu so politically weak, but it's probably the best approach.

Perhaps president Winfrey will try again, and it will look almost exactly like Bill Clinton's Camp David plan from 2000, except Palestinians will be forced to take it seriously by lack of Arab backing.

Palestinian problem fixed

This solution is really really simple, has plenty of precedent in history, and yet I haven't heard it proposed seriously by anyone before. So here is goes:

Palestinians should convert to Judaism

According to Israeli laws, anybody who converts to Judaism can trivially get Isreali citizenship. Once sufficient number of Palestinians gets citizenship, not only will they no longer be persecuted as much (Israeli Arabs are still treated as second class citizen, but level of discrimination is much much less) - together with existing non-hawkish Israeli citizens they will constitute majority of voters who will ensure that Israel will become a country that's much more peaceful and friendly toward its neighbours. As a bonus on top of that such mass conversion would immensely piss off radicals on both sides.

Now you will very likely complain about freedom of religion and such stuff. But why are these people Muslim in the first place? Because their ancestors converted to religion of previous conquerors of these lands - some were forced to, others out of opportunism, perhaps some even out of genuine conviction - it doesn't matter. Is following religious choices of ancestors really worth all the death and suffering that exists in Palestine right now? I say no. Especially since the most painful part of such conversion - genital mutilation - they all underwent already.


This wouldn't be without precedent - not only religions like Islam and Christianity, but also languages like Latin, English, and Spanish, national identities, and cultures have all spread largely by members of the losing group adapting habits of members of the winning group. In fact it would be a lot more difficult to point to any major religion or nationality which didn't spread in such a way.


It's a topic for whole another post, but ignoring this is the primary reason why I hate most analysis of humans in terms of evolutionary biology so much - variance of human behaviour is almost entirely culture-driven, not gene-driven like they all pretend, and culture doesn't only spread from parents to children.

Anyway, it wouldn't be necessary for everyone to convert - as long as the portion of Palestinians who do is high enough - let's say half - it would completely alter current conflict dynamics enough to solve it. The die-hard few who care too much about Islam can then safety practice their faith in the emerging unified single state (with a huge Jewish majority, even if a lot of that would be rather unenthusiastic converts). As the law doesn't forbid it - children of Palestinian converts could choose whichever religion they wanted - Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Baha'i, Spaghetti-Monsterism, or whatever. In practice vast majority would simply follow religion of their parents.

Alternatives

Everything else having been tried and having failed already - there is really only one alternative to such mass conversion - waiting a few decades for both Israel and Palestine (and if possible all other countries of the region) to undergo demographic transition from short lives and big families to long lives and small families. Countries after demographic transition are a lot less belligerent.

This is very much happening - but very slowly. According to CIA World Factbook total fertility (number of children per women) between 1990 and 2010 fell from 7.0 to 4.9 for Gaza Strip (still ridiculously high), from 5.0 to 3.12 for West Bank, and from 2.9 to 2.72 for Israel - moving them away from values typical for the worlds' war zones like Afghanistan's 5.50 and Democratic Republic of Congo's 6.11 and more like civilized world's 2.1 and less.

One day it will very likely happen - all will undergo demographic transition, and while they might still hate each other as much as they do now - they will express it like Japanese and Koreans - by flaming each other on the Internet - not in the good old way of bombs and bullets.

This will of course take many decades. My solution solves the whole problem overnight. Any takers?

Boobquake experiment is bad science

In spite of my best attempts I couldn't find any relevant cats, so as a next best thing I included some catgirls possibly participating in the Boobquake experiment

I'm as appalled by low standards of modern science as cleris Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi is about skimpy female outfits. And yesterday, we both had a chance to be outraged at the same thing - boobquake experiment makes travesty of science!

Background

The conflict comes from a long accepted paradigm of natural disasters, which explained them as God's punishment for human sins. Research supporting this theory goes as far back as the famous Lot's experiment [Gen 19], and countless other papers of similar antiquity. It has been very widely believed until even as recently as mid-18th century, when it was the most commonly believed explanation for the 1755 Lisbon earthquake - according to sources of the time supposedly due to slutiness of Portuguese women, and other human sins.

This paradigm has been largely replaced by current naturalistic paradigm which claims such events are mostly "random" and have no particular reason - replacement motivated more by wish to remove God from the picture than by any hard scientific data, and by crude analogy with cases like creationism vs evolution in which similar removal of God was actually supported by large volume of evidence.

So it should be no surprise that if even a well researched case of evolution still has many doubters, it should be even more true for less researched case of causes of earthquakes and other natural disasters, where the main argument is compatibility with Western secularism.

Given all this, we should be grateful that someone finally tried running an experiment to check the sin theory of natural disasters. Unfortunately the experiment was so far from standards of good science as to render it totally unconvincing.

What went wrong with Boobquake experiment

The boobquake experiment was an attempt to test the sin theory of natural disasters by having a large number of women wear sluttier outfits than usual, make God angry, and cause increased number of earthquakes.

Before even looking at its scientific value we should notice that such experiment grossly violates modern ethical standards by risking lives of countless people who didn't volunteer for it. In the future it would be prudent to at least limit such experiments to a singre geographic location, where all sinners would group before commencing the sinning - and which non-sinners would be able to evacuate in advance.

Now, for the experiment. No attempt was made to establish baseline sin level, or even baseline outfit skimpiness level - and unfortunately we have no way of knowing how large was the change due to boobquake relative to the daily fluctuation of sin. Even the most basic estimates suggest the effect to be minor - supposedly about 200,000 women tried to wear sluttier than normally on that day - such number is far below changes in a single country known for sinning like Sweden due to daily weather variations. Experiment also takes place in the aftermath of Eyjafjallajökull eruption (believed by some to be caused by the deadly sin of greed of Icelanders) - which caused major disruption of tourism, and it is universally accepted that people sin a lot more during holidays.


Moreover, this sample was not random. Experiment participants have been self-selected, and we have reasons to believe that people particularly unconcerned with God's wrath, and therefore with higher than baseline sinfulness level - probably constituted vast majority.

While data on most participant is missing, comparison between be the supposedly "most scandalous" outfit of the main researcher she wore during the experiment with her profile photo causes serious doubts, as they're about equally revealing.

In addition to lack of statistical soundness, and sample randomness, no attempt was made to blind the experiment. This difficulty is inherent, as God's omniscience makes proper double-blinding impossible, but participants knew well in advance that they're assigned to treatment group, so they may have consciously or subconsciously reduced their other kinds of sinning, a blatant violation of basic rules of scientific testing that would pass no peer review. What's worse, no attempt was even made to establish a control group!

Now it could be argued that blinding participants would be difficult - or that sinning requires conscious action, so both treatment and control groups would be equally in state of sin by even risking wearing revealing clothing - but this difficulty is present in many experiments, and at least serious attempt should be made to reduce placebo effect when it cannot be fully eliminated. Numerous examples of women wearing clothing far more revealing that they thought easily found on the Web suggest this kind of blinding is not fully impossible.

Not only experiment was of dubious quality, the hypothesis tested is far from the standard theory of sin causing natural disasters. Now the theory has many variations but even the basic Sodom and Gommorah version clearly disagrees with research assumptions:

• Assumption was made of no delay between sin and punishment, while the theory says punishment only comes after sinning.
• Assumption was made of near-linearity between sin and punishment, while the theory says God was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if even as few as ten righteous people were found.

Given all these problems, the Boobquake experiment brings essentially no new knowledge to the discipline of causes of natural disasters, and we can only hope that future experiments are better planned, with better design, better experimental controls, and detailed publicly available photographic documentation of sinning.

With baseline like this, it is dubious Boobquake really changes average sinning level much

Related research

While Boobquake is clearly bad science, a much more relevant research was done by IPCC reports, which claim that we can expect high correlation between global warming and extreme weather effects.

This strongly confirms sin theory of natural disasters, as warmer weather causes many women to wear more revealing outfits, the results being among others "increased droughts, tropical cyclone activity, and tsunamis" (but curiously no mention of earthquakes).


Now correlation doesn't equal causation, and IPCC research doesn't directly test the sin theory, but it arguably provides stronger evidence than Boobquake experiment.

In the future, one would hope solid systematic research is done on variations of female outfit skimpiness - an area that has long been ignored by mainstream science.