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How might the world be different if the PLO had followed Gandhi?

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Abstract edit

This article evaluates how the world might be different if the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, had sought a redress of grievances through nonviolence rather than violence. This analysis rests on a summary of research comparing the relative effectiveness of violence and nonviolence and the role of the media in conflict. It concludes with four suggestions for ending the cycle of violence and building a better future for all: (1) Demand equal protection of the laws. (2) Limit "state secrets privilege" to make it harder for governments to deny equal protection and lie about it with impunity. (3) Support training in nonviolence for all. (4) Citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits to make it harder for major media to encourage their audiences to support counterproductive actions.

Introduction edit

How might the world be different if the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, had been committed to nonviolence, following Gandhi, King, and Badshah Khan rather than George Washington and Fidel Castro?

Nothing can be said about this for certain, except that the world would be different. However, careful study of history suggests that the world would most likely be better for virtually all Jews and Palestinians.[1]

This should NOT be construed as a criticism of Yassir Arafat nor of anyone who supported the PLO nor any other organization that has adopted violent tactics such as Hamas since 2023-10-07: They were following the example of George Washington. How could they go wrong?

Our answer to this apparent contradiction, discussed briefly below, is that few of the violent revolutions since 1776 have had the success attributed to the American Revolution, because the subsequent success of the US was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the violence of the American Revolution. The traditional narrative of the American Revolution has been written to please people who control most of the money for the media -- to the detriment of everyone else. Over 50 percent of adult white males could vote before the revolution, and the violence of the revolution did not change that, as discussed below.

Similarly, the nonviolence of the First Intifada led to the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. That led to the Oslo Accords and the current State of Palestine. We claim that if the Palestinians had maintained nonviolent discipline, the two-state solution promised at Oslo would likely have worked to benefit all.

Few supporters of Israel have any substantive understanding of the extent of the mistreatment of Palestinians by the Israeli military and settlers. The nonviolence of the First Intifada convinced enough Israeli voters that they could live in peace with Palestinians that Yitzhak Rabin won an election in 1992 to become Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. Most nonviolent campaigns have produced similar results, as discussed below.

Tragically, subsequent violence by both sides has created obstacles to honest consideration by each of how their opposition perceives them. Palestinians during the First Intifada and since have seen throwing rocks as relatively nonviolent. That is clearly not how most supporters of Israel have perceived that. In 2022 the Israeli ambassador to United Nations Gilad Erdan complained that the world has been silent in the face of Palestinian “terror attacks with rocks” against Israelis, as he held up a rock the size of a brick. He noted that a rock like that could kill someone in a car speeding along a highway.[2]

This suggests that the nonviolence of the First Intifada, discussed below, might have been more effective if Palestinians had not thrown rocks: The shift in Israeli public opinion that got Yitzhak Rabin elected as Prime Minister would likely have been greater, and the international pressure on Israel would also likely have been greater.

A vigorous commitment to nonviolence has worked in the past, even within the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. It seems to offer the only realistic prospect for breaking the cycle of violence and building a better future for both Palestinians and Jews.

Research comparing violence and nonviolence edit

Twenty-first century research can help us estimate the probability distribution of alternative outcomes in violent and nonviolent conflict. Most relevant in this regard is the inventory of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century compiled by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011). They identified over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns, each of which attracted over 1,000 people at some point. 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns were successful while only 25 percent of the violent revolutions were.

 
Figure 1. Democratization 1 year after (vertical scale) vs. 1 year before (horizontal scale) the end of twentieth century revolutions

Probably more important than the official success rate is the impact on democracy: Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) found that on average, nonviolent campaigns improved the level of democracy, while violent revolutions had no statistically significant impact on democracy. This was true whether the campaigns won or lost. The gains for democracy tended to be greater among the nonviolent campaigns that won than among those that lost. However, even the nonviolent campaigns that lost on average pushed their governments to be more democratic, to share power more broadly; see Figure 1.

Similarly, Chenoweth and Schock (2015) noted that the presence of a "radical flank", contemporary violence pursuing similar aims, tended to reduce the probability of success. See also Chenoweth (2016).

The nonviolence of the First Intifada edit

The NAVCO 1.1 dataset[3] compiled by Chenoweth and Stephan includes five campaigns in Palestine or involving Palestinians:

  1. "Palestinian Arab Revolt" in Palestine against "Pro-Jewish British policies" 1936-1939 coded as violent with limited success but with no change in Polity IV scores.
  2. "Jewish resistance" in "Palestinian Territories" against "British occupation" 1945-1948 coded as a violent success with no change in Polity IV scores.[4] Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, p. 304) reported that only "three successful violent insurgencies were succeeded by democratic regimes: the National Liberation Army’s 1948 victory in Costa Rica, the Jewish resistance in British-occupied Palestine, and the 1971 Bengali self-determination campaign against Pakistan. However, these instances represent only three cases out of fifty-five successful insurgencies in the twentieth century. They are as rare as authoritarian regimes that succeed victorious nonviolent campaigns. This variation points to a potentially fruitful avenue of future research", such as experiments suggested below in the section on, "Implications for the future".
  3. "Palestinian activists" in Jordan violently contesting "Jordanian rule" in 1970 coded as a failure with a modest decline from (-9) to (-10) in Polity IV scores, shifting Jordan to the most authoritarian point on the Polity IV scale.[5]
  4. The [First] Intifada in Palestine against "Israeli occupation" 1987-1990, coded as a partial success from nonviolence but with no change in Polity IV scores.[6]
  5. The longer violent "Palestinian Liberation" campaign (1973- ) against "Israeli occupation" beginning in 1973 and still ongoing in 2006, coded as a failure with no change in Polity IV scores.
The nonviolence of the First Intifada did more to move Israeli public opinion to believe that they could live in peace and harmony with Palestinians than anything else Palestinians have done since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, at least according to the literature that we've found credible.

When the First Intifada began, Yitzhak Rabin was Israel's Minister of Defense. He could see that the nonviolence could not be suppressed with massive counter violence for two reasons:

  1. Excessive violence against nonviolent demonstrators generated bad press that was actually moving Israeli[7] and international opinion.[8]
  2. Rabin knew that he could not count on soldiers to follow orders if they perceived their orders as out of proportion to the provocations.[9]

Early in the Intifada, he had told his soldiers to shoot to wound, in the legs and feet. As the nonviolence and negative press continued, he issued clubs and ordered soldiers to beat people, breaking bones.[10] Before the Intifada, Rabin had not wanted to talk with Palestinians, saying, "There was no point", because they always had to check with King Hussein of Jordan or President Mubarak of Egypt or President Assad of Syria.[11] That changed with the Intifada, because the Palestinians "proved that for the first time in their history, they had decided to take charge of their fate."[12]

When the nonviolence continued, Rabin ran for Prime Minister on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. He became Prime Minister in 1992 and was reportedly pleased when his staff told him he would not have to negotiate with leaders of the nonviolence.[13] Israeli leaders were desperate. They sent in agents provocateurs, who were exposed and neutralized until Israel expelled 481 leaders of the nonviolence and arrested between 57,000 and 120,000 others. Finally Israel got the violence they needed to justify overwhelming counter violence. That Palestinian violence also brought the ultra-Zionist right wing parties back to power in Israel.[14]

Violence and nonviolence in the American Revolution edit

The "Age of Revolution" (1765-1849, including the French Revolution and the Latin American revolutions of the nineteenth century), plus the Russian,[15] Chinese,[16] and Cuban revolutions, as well as the violent post-World War II anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia[17] all, from at least some perspectives, replaced one brutal repressive system with another. Many, perhaps all, have supporters who claim that common folk benefitted from that violence. For example, Napoleon introduced the Napoleonic Code, which has had a major influence on the civil code in many countries around the world, including the US state of Louisiana and most of Latin America and Eurasia.[18] However, claims that any of this violence made substantive advances for freedom and democracy, liberty and justice are at best controversial.

The standard narrative of the American Revolution seems to suggest that the American Revolution was different from all those other attempts to emulate it: The US, according to this narrative, got freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all from the violence of the American Revolution.

The reality is more nuanced: The US got independence from Great Britain. However, claims that the US got more than that from the violence are controversial and largely contradicted by the available evidence. Gaughan (2022) notes that at the time of the Revolution, Great Britain was a constitutional monarchy, which was extremely unusual during a global era of autocracy. "In the British Isles, only 15 to 20 percent of English men could vote. In contrast, ... [t]he rate of enfranchisement varied from colony to colony. ... [A]s many as 80 percent of men could vote in some colonies but only 50 to 60 percent in other colonies. ... During the Revolutionary era, most states expanded suffrage to at least some degree." This occurred via nonviolent democratic deliberation as the existing legislatures of the 13 rebelling colonies either wrote state constitutions or revised their colonial charters to delete reference to Great Britain. The research of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) suggests that the advances for democracy would likely have been greater if the rebellious colonists had refused to use violence. After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Parliament ended local self government in Massachusetts. Then crowds of worried farmers largely prevented judges and others appointed the King from doing anything unless they promised to ignore the recent acts of Parliament and abide by the colonial charter, under which those judges and other officials were answerable to the locals, not to London.[19] If that kind of nonviolent response had been the dominant feature of the American Revolution instead of violence, the experience of Gandhi, King, Badshah Khan, and others described by Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), Chenoweth and Schock (2015), and Chenoweth (2016) suggests that the impact of the American Revolution on world history would likely have been greater.[20]

Other research on nonviolence edit

Previous nonviolent campaigns have often succeeded by inventing new methods of protest as needs and opportunities were identifed. After an approach obtains some level of success, people with power often develop countermeasures that reduce the effectiveness of a known technique going forward.

Gene Sharp documented 198 nonviolent tactics.[21] Nonviolence International maintains a growing database expanding Sharp's list of 198. By 2021, Nonviolence International had documented 148 more.[22]

Role of the media in war edit

It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth.[23] We suggest, however, that

Truth typically dies long before anyone is killed in armed conflict.

In most and perhaps virtually all conflicts, each party seems to believe that their actions are justified by atrocities committed by their designated enemies.

Collateral damage that "they" commit proves to us that "they" are subhuman or at best criminally misled and must be resisted by any means necessary. Meanwhile, collateral damage that we commit is unfortunate but necessary -- from our perspective.

However, to supporters of our opposition, the collateral damage that we have committed proves to them that we are subhuman or at best criminally misled and must be resisted by any means necessary. This asymmetry of perceptions is amplified by the media each party consumes: Every media organization sells changes in audience behaviors to the people who give them money. A media organization with no audience has nothing to sell. If they have an audience but displease their funders, they may not continue to have the money needed to produce the content required to retain an audience.[24]

Media organizations everywhere mislead their audiences. They can do this easily, because everyone prefers information and sources consistent with preconceptions, a phenomenon called "confirmation bias." Media organizations everywhere exploit confirmation bias to please those who control most of the money for the media.[25] Wolfsfeld et al. (2002) noted that, "The news media remain important agents for demonizing enemies and transforming political and military leaders into heroes. ... News is fundamentally ethnocentric, especially news about enemies ... because they threaten us." And violence attracts more attention than nonviolence. "Battles are considered newsworthy, but ideas for preventing battles are not." Also, peace negotiations are usually conducted in extreme secrecy, because excessive publicity of negotiating positions could reduce the chances of success. Once an agreement is reached, the negotiators representing different parties to the conflict must then sell the agreement to their supporters. Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein collaborated in supporting each other in selling the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty to their respective peoples.

A review of relevant literature identified multiple drivers of increases in political polarization in recent decades:[26]

  • Increased concentration of ownership of the media, exemplified by the creation of Israel Hayom by Sheldon Adelson in Israel and its impact on Israeli politics (discussed below),[27] as well as Bolloré in France,[28] Murdoch in Australia, the UK and the US,[29] and Sinclair in the US.[30] Increased concentration of ownership of the media in apparently free societies make them look more like the unfree press in authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, where journalists are more often incarcerated and killed.[31]
  • The abolition of the Fairness doctrine by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987 and the subsequent adaptation of the major media in the US to the belief systems of their increasingly distinct audiences. (Segmentation, a standard business practice, produces political polarization threatening democracy when applied to media markets, especially when control is too concentrated.)
  • The rise of the "click economy", with Internet companies, especially social media like Facebook, making money from clicks, with algorithms that exploit confirmation bias in ways that increase political polarization, herding people into echo chambers in which people become increasingly convinced of the rectitude of their own positions and unknowingly increasingly ignorant of and insensitive -- and too often hostile -- to the constructed realties of people with whom they disagree.[32]
  • The decline in the quantity and diversity of local news, including the growth of news deserts and ghost newspapers.[33] The decline in trusted local source(s) makes it easier for people to be misled by increasingly homogenized and biased corporate media and click bait,[34] even threatening the national security of the US and its allies according to retired Lt. General McMaster,[35] former President Trump's second National Security Advisor.[36][37]

The abolition of the US Fairness Doctrine clearly had no legal implications outside the US. However, Grossman et al. (2022) documented an apparently similar "sea change in the right’s dominance of national politics" in Israel that primarily benefited Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party following the 2007 launch of Israel Hayom by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. It was distributed for free, reportedly to skirt Israel's campaign finance laws. "[I]t soon became the most widely read newspaper nationally", which Grossman et al. attribute to this newspaper. Their "findings highlight the immense impact the ultrarich can exert in shaping politics through media ownership."[38] This shift was described by US Senator Bernie Sanders, himself Jewish, saying, "the Israel of today is not the Israel of … 20 to 30 years ago ... . It is a right-wing country, increasingly becoming a religious fundamentalist country where you have some of these guys in office believe that God told them they have a right to control the entire area."[39] Sander's comment is supported by Adelson's support for the claim that, "the Palestinians are an invented people out to destroy Israel",[40] a claim similar to the Zionist trope that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land".[41]

Israel Hayom is often called "Bibiton", which is a portmanteau of "Bibi", a nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu, and "iton", the Hebrew word for newspaper. Adelson was accused[42] but not charged in the on-going corruption trial against Netanyahu[43] and died before he was scheduled to testify in that trial.[44]

A 2022 survey in Israel found that Israel Hayom had the largest weekday readership exposure of any newspapers in Israel at 31%. The second and third most popular newspapers were Yedioth Ahronoth with 23.9% and Haaretz with 4.7% readership exposure.[45] Yedioth Ahronoth tends to support former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni, who has been a leading Israeli politician advocating restraining expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and negotiating with Palestinians; anything like this has been vigorously opposed by the editorial policies of Israel Hayom. However, her support for Palestinians had limits, as indicated by a warrant for her arrest that was reportedly issued by a British court under universal jurisdiction, following an application by lawyers acting for Palestinian victims of the 2008-2009 Gaza war[46] for her role in that operation as Israeli Foreign Minister. (The warrant was reportedly dropped with apologies from British political leaders after her visit to the UK was canceled.)[47]

Political polarization doubtless exists between and within different groups supporting Palestinians and Israel driven by differences in the media they consume. Those differences in perception help perpetuate the conflict to the detriment of all.

Implications for the future edit

What might be done to break the cycle of violence that has plagued Palestine and Israel since the 1917 Balfour declaration?

Several ideas come to mind:

Equal protection of the laws edit

Can enough Palestinians publicly and effectively renounce violence that it actually moves Israeli and international public opinion enough to force Israel to provide something like equal protection of the laws? Israel was moved in that direction by the nonviolence of the First Intifada. It could happen again.

It would be great if Palestinians and / or Israelis and their supporters took the lead, but others do not have to wait for that.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has introduced several motions in the US House of Representatives to try to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar for having said, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Greene claimed that phrase was a Hamas slogan and "calls for genocide of all Jews."[48] This has created problems for several Jewish members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who oppose Omar's use of that phrase but support her against censure on free speech grounds.[49] If Omar and others could ask instead for "equal protect of the laws", it would be harder for people (like Greene) to oppose and easier for Jews and others to support.[50]

Less well known is the portion of the 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party that, "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."[51] Whether or not Ilhan Omar was intending to call for genocide of Jews, the current Israeli government, whose Prime Minister leads Likud, has been accused of actual genocide in a complaint to the International Court of Justice.[52] Those accusations are consistent with the comment by billionaire Sheldon Adelson that, the "Palestinians are an invented people out to destroy Israel."[53] The alleged denials of equal protection of the laws to Palestinians might be attributed in part to the editorial policies of the leading newspaper in Israel, Israel Hayom, funded by Adelson and delivered for free to anyone who wants it.

Perhaps it's better to avoid phrases like that entirely and instead demand something like "equal protection of the laws." That principle was promised by the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1868 and is still far from being implemented.[54]

Let's broaden this question: What percent of the enemies of any country are primarily a result of routine denial of equal protection of the laws by people with power? The documentation summarized here suggests that the Palestinian violence since the Oslo Accords has largely been due to mistreatment, extended incarcerations without charges or trial, destruction of property, taking property at gun point, and even murder by Israeli security forces and settlers, unreported or underreported in the major media consumed by supporters of Israel, as noted by Ofer Cassif, a Jewish member of the Knesset. He said that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu released Yahya Sinwar, the violent leader of Hamas, in a prisoner exchange in 2011, and did not release Marwan Barghouti, who has been called a Palestinian Mandela. Evidently, nonviolence is a much bigger threat than violence to the 1977 Likud promise, "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."[55] Similarly, there is substantial documentation of routine denial of equal protection of foreigners by the US[56] and France,[57] to name only two countries for which substantial documentation is available. For example, the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001 were major crimes but not acts of war by a major power capable of seriously threatening the United States. How might history since 2001 have been different if the US had treated the September 11 attacks as law enforcement issues and not an excuse to go to war?

There is substantial documentation suggesting that the government of Afghanistan would likely have complied with a standard extradition request. In 1998, June or July, the government of Afghanistan had agreed to extradite bin Laden to Saudi Arabia to stand trial for treason. If that extradition commitment had actually been carried out, bin Laden would have almost certainly been convicted and executed in typical Saudi justice.

However, the transfer was set for September, because the Afghans needed time to separate bin Laden from his armed entourage. Then on August 7, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, and muslim clerics all over the world condemned those attacks as unjustified violence, reflecting ill on Islam. For 13 days.

Then the US bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Muslim public opinion turned 180 degrees, as many concluded that bin Laden was correct: The US is an evil empire. The extradition was cancelled: Evidently, Afghan officials decided that if the US was not going to respect international law, maybe the world needs bin Laden. That thought was not restricted to Afghanistan. Donations to bin Laden increased substantially after the US retaliation for the embassy bombings. Employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US began to support bin Laden's preparations for what became the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001.

Afghan policy reportedly flipped again after the bombing of the USS Cole, 2000-10-12: Afghan officials agreed to inform the Clinton administration of bin Laden's whereabouts, so he could be killed by a US air strike.

However, that plan was late in the Clinton administration. Implementation was passed to the incoming George W. Bush administration, which failed to act on this agreement before September 11, 2001, almost a year after the attack on the Cole. Afghan officials seemed puzzled by the delay, reportedly offering in jest to provide fuel for the US aircraft to be used to kill bin Laden.

In sum, before September 11, 2001, US government officials knew that the Afghan government had offered to help identify the whereabouts of bin Laden so he could be killed. They also knew that the government of Saudi Arabia had been involved in the preparations for the September 11 attacks. It was clear that the attacks were organized by a non-governmental entity that was not capable of threatening the internal security of the US. But rather than invading Saudi Arabia, and rather than providing Afghanistan with evidence of bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks, Bush administration officials manipulated the international media to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Senator Bob Graham later said that during the hearings organized by the US House and Senate Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI went "beyond just covering up ... into ... aggressive deception."[58] And then-President George W. Bush successfully convinced the committee to redact the results of that investigation from their December 2002 report. Those redactions became known as "The 28 pages". They were declassified over 13 years later by then-President Obama. During those 13 years, the US and allies were stampeded into invading Iraq by claims in news reports produced by reporters and editors, who should have known at the time were questionable and likely fraudulent.[59]

What changes in the US political economy might reduce the ability of any administration to stampede the public, and the US Congress in particular, into supporting similar military actions without first exhausting non-military options?

The US Congress could, for example, allow anyone anywhere to file suit in any US federal court for violations of equal protection by the US or Israel anyplace on earth.

Limit state secrets privilege edit

Equal protection of the laws cannot be guaranteed without limiting the ability of governments to deny equal protection in secret. In the US, this would require modifying the law governing "state secrets privilege".

Under past and current US secrecy practices, US government officials have provoked foreign entities to do things that were then denounced as unprovoked to justify counterproductive uses of military force. Current US government secrecy practices encourage such dangerous behaviors, according to documentation in Connelly (2023).[60] The US responses to the 1998 embassy bombings and the September 11 attacks are examples, as discussed above. The 1997 report of the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy reached conclusions similar to those of Connelly. Lying to Congress may officially be illegal, but exposing such lies has been punished severely while people who deceived Congress were rewarded, as documented with the revelations of Edward Snowden. Worse, Richard Barlow's career was reportedly destroyed merely for telling his managers they should not lie to Congress. He did not expose officially classified government secrets, as had whistleblowers like Snowden: He came to public attention after filing suit for wrongful termination.

Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking a document that showed that during a five-month operation in Afghanistan, "nearly 90% of the people killed during one five-month period ... were not the intended targets." Rep. Ilhan Omar asked President Biden to pardon Hale, because none of the documents released actually threatened US national security but instead "shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows."[61] Similar things can be said about Daniel Ellsberg, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, Sibel Edmonds, Jeffrey Sterling, and Thomas Drake. The attempted prosecution of Julian Assange is similar but different, because Assange was never a US government employee and was rarely if ever in the US.[62]

The need for that much secrecy is further challenged by the research by Tetlock and Gardner (2015), who reported that their "superforecasting" teams "performed about 30 percent better than the average for intelligence community analysts who could read intercepts and other secret data" in forecasting problems assigned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[63] If important intelligence questions can be answered without government secrecy, that reinforces the conclusions of Connelly (2023) and others, that

  • excessive government secrecy threatens more than advances US national security.[64]

We need government secrecy for some things, e.g., design and production technologies for sophisticated weapon systems and military plans for future operations. However, as the Moynihan Commission and Connelly reported, that's a tiny fraction of the information currently held as government secrets. Both claimed that the US would be safer and more prosperous if it limited government secrets to the things where government secrecy is really important.

How can we do this?

We suggest here that the US should authorize any federal judge to subpoena federal government documents that are classified as government secrets and declassify any, subject to appellate review, if the judge concludes that the public interest would be better served by declassification than by continued secrecy. The judge could issue a ruling with a rationale that would remain classified for a certain number of years. The ruling could go for or against the government. In a case like Ellsberg's, the judge could dismiss a criminal case with prejudice, which would preclude the government from filing charges again in front of a different judge. The judge could also award attorneys fees and damages.

Support training in nonviolence edit

As noted above, the nonviolence of the First Intifada led to the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. This, in turn, led to the Oslo Accords and the current State of Palestine. As the time since the Hamas attacks on Israel of 2023-10-07 has increased, more people in Israel,[65] the US and internationally have become increasingly concerned that the ferocity of Israeli attacks on Gaza (and the West Bank) seems far beyond the national security needs of Israel and out of proportion to the provocation.[66] Similarly, people are concerned that Israeli military attacks in Lebanon[67] and Syria[68] threaten unnecessary expansion of the war.[69] A new nonviolent movement led by Palestinians could strengthen people in Israel and elsewhere who are opposed to the current war.

Palestinians and others could ask the US and Israel to support training in nonviolent civil disobedience for anyone interested, including designated "terrorists". A demand like this should be difficult for people to oppose and could make it easier for people in many places to effectively work towards equal protection of the laws and other things.

However, it is currently a criminal violation of the USA Patriot Act to provide such training to anyone designated as a "terrorist" by the US State Department, per the Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010). That law should be changed to support rather than criminalize such training.

How might the world be different if the US had vigorously supported rather than criminalized training Hamas and other designated "terrorists" in nonviolence? In particular, what are the chances that the Hamas-led attack on Israel of 2023-10-07 would have happened if Palestinians could have seen progress in response to nonviolent protests against many of the outrages documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and others? Currently few supporters of Israel seem to have any substantive awareness of the many outrages against Palestinians committed by people they support, because the media they find credible rarely if ever provides a balanced account of such outrages. If the US government had more openly supported such training, nonviolent protests facilitated by that training would likely have gotten better coverage in Israeli and international news. That in turn would likely have made it harder for the Israeli government to continue depriving Palestinians of equal protection of the laws so egregiously.

Citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits edit

The Wikiversity article on "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government" suggests randomized controlled trials to evaluate the long-term impact of citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits distributed via local elections, as recommended by McChesney and Nichols (2021, 2022). They suggest distributing 0.15% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to local news non-profits via local elections with a limit on the maximum that any one local news organization could receive. Evidence summarized in that Wikiversity article suggests that the increases in political polarization in many countries in recent years may be due in part to a loss of local news, as advertising money has increasingly shifted to Internet companies that hire few if any journalists.

To apply this to Israel and Palestine, we first note that their nominal GDPs in 2021 were $482 and $18 billion US$, respectively, totaling $500 billion.[70] 0.15% of that is $750 million. That may sound like a lot of money, but it's only 3.2% of the 2022 military budget of Israel of $23.4 billion.[71] It's also roughly three times what Israel was spending each day in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war,[72], 21% of the $3.6 billion that the US gave Israel in 2021, and 3% of the $26 billion that the US reportedly authorized for Israel 2024-04-24.[73]

If media subsidies like these make a substantive contribution to reducing the political polarization that has driven this conflict for more than a century, it should help build broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term for Israelis and Palestinians. If that happens, it would likely be the best investment in national security that Israel has made at least since 1948. This conjecture rests on the claims made above about news deserts, the "click economy", and Israel Hayom. If this works as predicted, it would also provide a shining example of new social technology that could help diffuse many other seemingly intractable conflicts around the globe.

Conclusions edit

We are not advocating an answer but a methodology that leading organizations have used successfully to build effective marketing campaigns worth billions of dollars: (i) Start by enunciating an objective like building broadly shared peace and prosperity while ending a cycle of violence. (ii) Brainstorm alternative approaches. (iii) Evaluate and refine them in focus groups. (iv) Test market the ones that seem most promising, and (v) go with what seems to work, (vi) while continuing to monitor results and adjusting accordingly.

You, dear reader, may have other ideas that might be more effective than any of the things discussed herein to break the cycle of violence and build broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term.

Bibliography edit

Notes edit

  1. ↑ This might be regarded as ' counterfactual history", which, especially in analyses like the present, invites people to consider the implications of alternative approaches to problems in light of research on human behavior and political economy.
  2. ↑ Erdan's complaint was reported seriously by Lazeroff (2022) in the Jerusalem Post, but was ridiculed by Willliams (2022) in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs. Pressman (2017) said that throwing rocks should be considered "unarmed violence".
  3. ↑ Chenoweth (2019a).
  4. ↑ There are minor differences between how this is coded in NAVCO 1.1 and the description found in Wikipedia on 2024-03-31. For example, the section on "Beginning of Zionist insurgency" in the Wikipedia article on "Mandatory Palestine" mentions the assassination of "Lord Moyne in Cairo" 1944-11-06, while Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) coded this campaign as starting in 1945, not 1944. This discrepancy might be explained, as Chenoweth and Stephan only included cases where they "were certain that more than 1,000 people were actively participating in the struggle, based on various reports." Chenoweth and Stephan may not have been able to document "more than 1,000 people" in that struggle prior to 1945. See also Chenoweth (2019b).
  5. ↑ This doubtless refers to "Black September", which Wikipedia reports as having run from 1970-09-06 to 1971-07-23, while NAVCO 1.1 codes both the beginning and end as 1970. This difference seems negligible for present purposes.
  6. ↑ The end date for the "Intifada" in NAVCO 1.1 is different from the description in Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), whose chapter 5 is titled, "The First Palestinian Intifada, 1987-1992". The end date in the corresponding Wikipedia article was 1993-09-13 (when checked 2024-03-31), different from both the end dates in NAVCO 1.1 and Chenoweth and Stephan. However, it seems that these differences can be safely ignored for present purposes. The coding of this campaign as "nonviolent" and a "partial success" is consistent with its contributions to the Oslo Accords and its subsequent failure to achieve the two-state solution promised by Oslo. The appearance of Palestinian violence late in that campaign is consistent with the discussion of the impact of a "radical flank" by Chenoweth and Schock (2015) and Chenoweth (2016).
  7. ↑ Peri (2012) described how Israeli public opinion towards Palestinians softened as Palestinian terrorist attacks receded into history and hardened in response to violence targeting Jews. On p. 23, he said, “In the 1990s -- during the peace process, which made it appear that the era of warfare was at an end and that Israel was becoming a postwar society -- the professional autonomy of the media grew, and journalists adopted a more critical stance. However, the failure of the peace talks in the summer of 2000 and the outbreak of the second Intifada with its suicide attacks aimed at the heart of the civilian population led to a serious retreat ... . State agencies and the public even more so again exerted pressure for media reorientation, demanding that the media restrain its criticism and circle the wagons."
  8. ↑ King (2007).
  9. ↑ Peri (1993) reported that, "The Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories that began in December 1987 poses challenges of an unprecedented nature and difficulty for Israeli society. One of those challenges comes in the form of a conscientious objection to perform military service. ... At the same time, however, some one hundred officers and noncommissioned soldiers have been tried and jailed for refusing to perform military service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In addition to them, several thousands are in a gray area of refusal. These latter are not put on trial, and therefore no report about them goes to the higher military authorities or the public." Similarly, Peri (1996, p. 355) said that as the Intifada continued, Rabin "had begun, in conversations with those close to him, to speak of a dimension that he would not dare to expand on publicly: that the war against the Intifada was damaging the [w:Israeli Defense Forces|IDF]'s fighting spirit, hurting army morale, and undermining the status of the status of the IDF as a people's army." Also, the Wikipedia article on "Refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces" lists several organizations that have appeared consisting of Israelis who are refusing to serve in occupied territories, e.g., in Lebanon in the late 1970s and in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1980s and 1990s.
  10. ↑ Munayyer (2011).
  11. ↑ Peri (1996, p. 353).
  12. ↑ Peri (1996, p. 356).
  13. ↑ Shlaim (2014, p. 533): "Rabin’s conversion to the idea of a deal with the PLO was clinched by four evaluations ... .First ... a settlement with Syria was attainable but only at the cost of complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Second ... the local Palestinian leadership had finally been neutralized. Third ... Arafat’s dire situation, and possible imminent collapse, made him the most convenient interlocutor ... . Fourth ... the impressive progress achieved through the Oslo channel. Other reports that reached Rabin during this period pointed to an alarming growth in the popular following of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the occupied territories [which] stressed to him the urgency of finding a political solution". See also King (2007, ch. 12).
  14. ↑ Mary Elizabeth King (2007, 2009) and Wikipedia, First Intifada, accessed 2023-03-35.
  15. ↑ There were actually two Russian Revolutions in 1917, the "February" and "October" Revolutions. The first was mostly nonviolent, resulting from massive popular displeasure with the management of the Russian political economy by the Tsar during World War I. The second was a violent reactions of the failures of the government that replace the Tsar, leading to the Russian Civil War. This sequence of events is crudely comparable to the First Intifada, in that the potential success of each was cut short by violence, with tragic consequences. We argue that a better popular understanding of nonviolence would likely have produced better results for both with much less loss of life.
  16. ↑ The Wikipedia article on "Chinese Revolution" lists several revolutions, all violent, none enhancing democracy. The longest and most consequential was the Chinese Communist Revolution (1927-1949). That's the one that would come first to many people's minds. However, it was not the only one.
  17. ↑ See the section on "After 1945" in the Wikipedia article on "Decolonization", accessed 2024-03-25.
  18. ↑ Wikipedia, "List of national legal systems, accessed 2024-04-01.
  19. ↑ Raphael (2002).
  20. ↑ See also The Great American Paradox and Graves (2005).
  21. ↑ Sharp (1973).
  22. ↑ Beer (2021, p. 7; 15/116 in pdf).
  23. ↑ Knightly (2004) attributes this to US Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917. However, the consensus in multiple articles in Wikiquote seems to attribute it to Philip Snowden in his introduction to Morel (1916, p. vii).
  24. ↑ Wikiversity, "Confirmation bias and conflict" and "How can we know?", accessed 2024.03.26.
  25. ↑ Wikiversity, "Confirmation bias and conflict".
  26. ↑ For more on this see Wikiversity, "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government", accessed 2024-04-01.
  27. ↑ Grossman et al. (2022).
  28. ↑ Cagé (2022).
  29. ↑ Murdoch's business focus is exemplified in the settlement Fox accepted in Dominion v. Fox: Fox admitted that they had initially reported honestly that Biden had won the 2020 US Presidential elections. However, after finding that they were losing audience to election deniers, they switched to reporting false claims about Dominion. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million, provided they did not have to apologize for having lied to their audience. If lying about the 2020 election increased their audience and revenue by 6% in 2021, they made money, even after paying $787.5 million to Dominion. Fraud can be good business. Media executives could be fired if they lose money trying to protect democracy.
  30. ↑ Ellison (2024), Kaviani et al. (2022), Miho (2020). This trend has been extended historically to include exclusive access offered by Western Union, founded in 1851, to the Associated Press (AP) as long as AP reporters did not criticize major corporations and monopolies and the contribution of those biases to the rise of the Robber barons in the US in the late nineteenth century, according to McChesney (2004, pp. 35-36): "[E]conomic historians regard the growth of Western Union as a major factor in the dominance of big business in American life. ... Western Union used its monopoly power to collaborate in the development of the Associated Press [AP, founded 1846], a monopoly news service run in cooperative fashion with the largest newspaper publishers. ... With exclusive access to the wires -- Western Union refused to let potential competitors use its wires -- AP became the only wire news service in the nation. ... Needless to say, [AP] invariably presented a voice that took the side of business interests."
  31. ↑ On 2018-10-02 Saudi government agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post, because they did not like his reporting. Similarly, Khouri (2024) reported that, "For the past six months, Israel has put a lot of effort into covering up its genocidal crimes in Gaza. One of the most brutal ways it does this is by routinely threatening, targeting and assassinating Palestinian journalists. The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported that at least 90 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7 alongside two Israelis and three Lebanese. This is the highest death toll of journalists in any modern conflict that CPJ has monitored."
  32. ↑ Carter (2021) and Wikiversity, "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government", accessed 2024-04-01.
  33. ↑ Abernathy (2020).
  34. ↑ Darr et al. (2018, 2021), Zuboff (2018), Frenkel and Kang (2021), Vaidhyanathan (2018).
  35. ↑ McMaster (2020).
  36. ↑ For a discussion of changes like these in Germany, see Floßer (2024). He discussed the Alternative for Germany (Alternatif für Deutschland, AfD), a right-wing populist, political party in Germany, that insists that Germany should not feel shame or guilt from what it did when Hitler was their leader. Floßer said the AfD generally got more votes in places with no local newspaper.
  37. ↑ For more on the decline of local news, its impact, and what to do about it, see the section on The current legal environment for Internet and other media companies amplifies political polarization and conflict in the Wikiversity article on International Conflict Observatory.
  38. ↑ See also Lalwani (2022). Similar concerns about the impact on French politics of the media empire of billionaire Vincent Bollaré are expressed in Cagé (2022).
  39. ↑ Hawkinson (2024).
  40. ↑ Stoil (2014).
  41. ↑ The extent to which this phrase helped drive the Zionist movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is controversial. See the Wikipedia article on "a land without a people for a people without a land", accessed 2024-04-03.
  42. ↑ Fulbright and Surkes (2017).
  43. ↑ Wikipedia, "Trial of Benjamin Netanyahu". Netanyahu and his supporters have been working to undermine the judiciary to protect themselves from the issues raised in this trial, as documented in the Wikipedia article on "2023 Israeli judicial reform", accessed 2024-03-27. However, the issues raised in this legal battle are not as obviously related to questions of the role of the media in conflict, the topic of the present discussion.
  44. ↑ Alterman (2021).
  45. ↑ Readership figures are from a Hebrew-language document cited in the Wikipedia article on "Newspapers in Israel", accessed 2024-04-03.
  46. ↑ Also called "Operation Cast Lead".
  47. ↑ Black and Cobain (2009).
  48. ↑ Bahney (2023).
  49. ↑ Grayer (2024).
  50. ↑ For more background on the use and interpretation of that and similar phrases by different groups, see the Wikipedia article on "From the river to the sea", accessed 2024-04-09.
  51. ↑ Likud Party (1977).
  52. ↑ South Africa v. Israel (2023).
  53. ↑ Stoil (2014). Evidence from many sources suggests that the vast majority of Palestinians are not out to destroy Israel. Past Palestinian violence can be plausibly attributed to mistreatment they have experienced, unreported or underreported in the media consumed by most supporters of Israel.
  54. ↑ The phrase "equal protection of the laws" are the last 5 words of Section 1 of that amendment. That amendment has reportedly been the most frequently litigated part of the Constitution, and Section 1 has reportedly been the most frequently litigated part of the amendment. Just such a case active as this is being written in Johnson v. Parson (2024).
  55. ↑ Cassif et al. (2024).
  56. ↑ The 1998 United States embassy bombings "are widely believed to have been revenge for U.S. involvement in the extradition and alleged torture of four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) who had been arrested in Albania in the two months prior to the attacks for a series of murders in Egypt", according to the Wikipedia article on those bombings, accessed 2024-04-22. If that's accurate, then the embassy bombings and the subsequent September 11 attacks might not have occurred without US complicity in torture. And the September 11 attacks might not have occurred if the US had treated the embassy bombings as law enforcement issues. Beyond that, there is substantial documentation of US interference in foreign countries, e.g., overthrowing democratically elected governments to favor US international business interests. See, e.g., the Wikipedia article on Foreign interventions by the United States and references cited therein.
  57. ↑ See, e.g., the Wikipedia articles on Françafrique and François-Xavier Verschave (accessed 2024-04-22), whose books titled "Françafrique (1999) and Noir silence (2020) have become standard works for anyone interested in the Rwandan genocide specifically, and generally the dissimulated policies followed by the French Republic in former colonies."
  58. ↑ Hulse (2015).
  59. ↑ Similar media policies have driven other wars. These excesses were particularly egregious during and after World War I, as documented by Hochschild (2022). The Espionage Act of 1917 gave the Postmaster General the authority to declare as "unmailable" any publication that he decided did not adequately support the war effort. This effectively terminated many publications, because there was no other way to distribute publications nationally at that time (p. 61). The lack of broad discourse in the media amplified war hysteria, under which many people were persecuted, beaten, robbed, incarcerated, and even killed with impunity for peaceably assembling and petitioning for better wages and working conditions, or even for just speaking German. That continued after the war to help major capitalists suppress labor organizers.
  60. ↑ See also the summary in Connelly, Samuelson, and Graves (2023).
  61. ↑ Johnson (2021).
  62. ↑ See also Graves (2014, 2021).
  63. ↑ Tetlock and Gardner (2015, p. 95).
  64. ↑ Connelly (2023); see also the summary in Connelly, Samuelson and Graves (2023).
  65. ↑ Wilkinson and Yam (2024).
  66. ↑ Mackenzie and Al-Mughrabi (2024).
  67. ↑ The Wikipedia article on 2024 in Lebanon listed 8 attacks by Israel that killed at least 15 people in the first three months of 2024, when checked 2024-04-02.
  68. ↑ Israel conducted lethal air strikes against alleged Iranian targets in Syria -- Aleppo March 29 and Damascus April 1, per Reuters (2024) and Bowen (2024); see also 2024 Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, accessed 2024-04-03.
  69. ↑ Peri (2020) claimed that Netanyahu's government had shifted more to the right in recent years, increasing the gap between military and political leaders. It could be helpful to have an update on how this split has impacted the current Israel-Hamas war and vice versa.
  70. ↑ UN (2023).
  71. ↑ SIPRI (2024).
  72. ↑ Masters and Merrow (2024).
  73. ↑ Madhani and Kim (2024).
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