Everyone Wants Peace on Their Terms

 

As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus

 

In “Does anyone really want a settlement in the Middle East?”, Daniel Hannan asks the question of what anyone has to gain from the current flare up of the conflict in Gaza:

What is Hamas trying to achieve by firing rockets into Israel? I’m not asking about its right to do so, or what the alternatives are, or the pros and cons of the whole 70-year-old dispute. I’m asking a narrower strategic question. What are the people who run Gaza trying to achieve by lobbing ordnance across the border?

…

The most rational explanation I can find for Hamas’s renewal of hostilities is that it’s trying to shore up its support in Gaza. The Syrian civil war and the Egyptian coup have deprived the paramilitaries of, respectively, their chief sponsor and their most immediate sympathiser. Isolated and bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of their 40,000 government employees, Hamas leaders seem to have decided to stake everything on a military campaign. Possibly, like Galtieri’s junta in 1982, they feel they have little to lose. At best, a new ceasefire might result in concessions, such as prisoner releases or – the big prize – a reopening of Gaza’s borders. At worst, the conflict should rally people to their regime.

 

Pareto efficiency is an important concept here. Less important as a positive standard for policy as much as a via negativa for eliminating policies we think shouldn’t work.

The world is Pareto-efficient when no one can be made better off except at the expense of somebody else. Or, as Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael D. Whinston express the idea in their text book Microeconomic Theory: “(A world) that is Pareto optimal uses society’s initial resources and technological possibilities efficiently in the sense that there is no alternative way to organize the production and distribution of goods that makes some consumer better off without making some consumer worse off” (Mas-Colell and Whinston 1995, 313). 

Pareto efficiency is a standard which conforms very much to how we would like politics done in a liberal democracy. After all, would not benevolent citizens choose to vote to avoid a world in which somebody can be better off without hurting anybody else? If Jim could be given a new home without hurting Jill or Bill, wouldn’t Jill or Bill let that happen? So clearly Pareto efficiency does conform to the ethos of a liberal democracy, and expresses the basic sentiment motivating liberal democracy (especially of the social democratic variety) that people can come together through the voting booths in order to solve their problems in an amicable fashion. Yet, though Pareto efficiency is interesting in speculations about policy, it absolutely fails in being a useful standard for guiding policy, and the reason for that is that Pareto efficiency is so weak a condition that pretty much every conceivable state of the world beyond economists’ models is already Pareto efficient. 

  

At this point, somebody who looks at the world from the point of view of economics alone can point out how much is being wasted over the struggle between the two nations and how much their citizens could gain by living in peace with each other. However, politics is about identify as much as about policy, and so for the political situation between Palestine and Israel to change, somebody’s identity has to lose, and so somebody has to be made worst off. Maybe not in profane terms (in fact, they might be made better off from the Max-U point of view), but certainly in the sacred terms of identity. 

Indeed, I can’t even find a neutral term to describe the region inhabited by the two nations without giving off signs of non-existent bias between either faction. If I call the region, Palestine, I imply that the Palestinians should win the conflict (whatever that means) and vice versa for calling the region Israel. Even importing the Latin word Judea or the Greek Παλαιστίνη doesn’t work. There’s just no way of talking about the situation without hurting somebody’s identity, which implies that the entire situation is some weird equilibrium, and kept there because changing it would require pain that no one wants to feel.  

 

We are all tethered by history in a world of utility maximizers, both in terms of the sacred and the profane, and that is felt no more strongly in Israel/Palestine/Judea/Παλαιστίνη/whatever-you-want-to-call-the-region. For there to be peace in the region, because of the initial endowment given to us by history, somebody will have to walk away from the negotiating table unhappy; yet, because we live in a world of utility maximizers, that won’t happen.