Land for Peace? Game Theory and the Strategic Impediments to a Resolution in Israel-Palestine

ABSTRACT

Why have Israel and the Palestinians failed to implement a ‘land for peace’ solution, along the lines of the Oslo Accords? This paper studies the application of strategic behavior models, in the form of games, to this question. I show that existing models of the conflict largely rely on unrealistic assumptions about what the main actors are trying to achieve. Specifically, they assume that Israel is strategically interested in withdrawing from the occupied territories pending resolvable security concerns but that it is obstructed from doing so by violent Palestinians with other objectives. I use historical analysis along with bargaining theory to shed doubt on this assumption and to argue that the persistence of conflict has been aligned with, not contrary to, the interests of the militarily powerful party, Israel. The analysis helps explain, from a strategic behavior perspective, why resolutions like the Oslo Accords, which rely on the land for peace paradigm and on self-enforcement, have failed to create peace.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel-palestine
• international conflict
• land for peace
• strategic behavior
• game theory

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to James Heintz, Daniele Girardi, Roberto Veneziani, Peter Skott, Mariam Majd, Emily Wang, Sebastian Vollmer, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the participants of the Analytical Political Economy Workshop at UMass Amherst. All remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout the paper, ‘strategic’ interactions will refer to the situation where agents act based on an expectation of punishments and rewards, and taking into account how these are influenced not only by their own behavior but also their opponent’s options, calculations, and decisions. Though such strategic interactions can be analyzed in a number of ways, the focus in this paper will be on the use of games and game theory.

2. Schiff (2012) argues Rabin hoped that peace talks would lead to a breakthrough in the normalization of Israel’s relationship with the Arab bloc headed by Syria. For Arafat, the recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of Palestinian people and the creation of the Palestinian Authority gave the PLO both representation powers and funding; domestically, Arafat could present ‘some achievement that would be considered a breakthrough on the road to a Palestinian state’ (82).

3. ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’ are biblical terms for the West Bank meant to popularize the notion that they are inherently Jewish and part of the greater Land of Israel.

4. See, for example, the attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2009 and 2014.

5. The form for the probability function guarantees that $p\left(1/2\right)=1/2$, so that whomever has half the land has half the probability of winning. The parameter $\beta$ affects the slope around this midpoint, i.e. whether a small increase (decrease) raises (lowers) the probability of winning to a small or large extent.

6. This is the ‘salami tactics’ approach to expansion, originally discussed by Thomas Schelling in his book Arms and Influence (1966).

7. One can speculate here about the role of the international community (an issue also touched on in Appendix A). The parameter $c_2^{\mathrm{\prime }}>0$ may be understood to partly reflect the involvement of the international community in that if a game ending war does breakout, the party losing land faces very high costs of waging the war because it has become weaker alliance-wise over time. If this changes so that the international community aligns itself more strongly with the party losing land, the parameter $\varphi$ in Equation (2)(2) $x_t=\frac{\beta +\left(1-\delta \right)\varphi }{\delta \beta +\left(1-\delta \right)\left(1+\delta \varphi \right)}{x}_{t-1}+\frac{{\left(1-\delta \right)}^2{c}_2+0.5\left(1-\beta \right)\left(1-\delta \right)}{\delta \beta +\left(1-\delta \right)\left(1+\delta \varphi \right)}$(2) becomes negative, increasingly likelihood of a stable equilibrium; in effect, international states would then work as a balancing force.

8. Also, for this reason, a game in which there is a ‘moderate’ versus ‘annexationist’ faction within Israel would do more to obscure the degree of consensus around this key issue. It would obfuscate what are essentially differences over the desire for limited Palestinian autonomy, as differences over the desire for land-for-peace as the roadmap to two fully sovereign nations.

9. Another more technical limitation of the application of the model to Israel-Palestine is that continuous divisibility of the land is necessary to assume to generate similar results (Fearon 1997). Such continuous divisibility is not a perfect descriptor of the situation, especially in East Jerusalem. However, it is a good approximation of at least the situation in the West Bank, where Israel has gradually expanded without major barriers except in the (geographically small) Palestinian population centers.