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Tal Ben-Shahar is a Graduate Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics,
and the author of .
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By Tal Ben-Shahar
December 1, 2002
As soon as the Israeli Defense Force retreated from Hebron and Bethlehem as part of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the terrorists were able to regroup in these areas and launch two deadly attacks. In Hebron, terrorists ambushed Jews on their way to prayer and murdered twelve Israelis; in Jerusalem, eleven Israelis, among them children on their way to school, are dead after a suicide terrorist from Bethlehem blew himself up on a bus.
The immediate response from countries the world over was a strong condemnation of the terrorists, and a simultaneous call for the resumption of peace negotiations with the Palestinian representatives. What will it take for the world to recognize that the Palestinians do not want peaceful coexistence, but rather the destruction of Israel? What will it take for the world to realize that the only solution to the conflict is an all-out war against the infrastructure of terrorism, including its leaders?
Apparently, it is not enough that the PA has violated every agreement that it signed with Israel, that it murders Israelis, incites violence against Jews, provides a safe haven for other terrorist groups, and attempts to smuggle weapons into the territories. Neither is it sufficient that official Palestinian maps include the entire area of Israel, and that the Palestinian leaders and the majority of citizens talk of a state that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Will it take the actual destruction of Israel, the full realization of the threats the Arabs openly make in their native language, to convince the world of the Palestinians' intentions, just as it took the ruin of Czechoslovakia to convince the world of Hitler's intentions?
If no empirical facts, no hard evidence, can convince those who still call for peaceful negotiations that their prescriptions for ending the conflict are wrong, then what they are suggesting is nothing more than detached dogma, and thus has no place in serious political discourse.
The philosopher Karl Popper claims that a theory, to have value, must be falsifiable, that we must be able to subject it to empirical tests which will verify or negate it: "There will be well-testable theories, hardly testable theories, and non-testable theories. Those which are non-testable are of no interest to empirical scientists." We need to apply the same standards to ideas in the realm of politics as we do to ideas in the natural sciences. A politician who, in the face of any and all counter-evidence, refuses to admit having made a mistake, is a dogmatist; to be rational, a politician must be open to the possibility of being wrong, he must demonstrate a genuine willingness to subject his ideas to the test of reality.
If, back in 1993, the Israeli left and all those who supported the Oslo agreements were asked whether ongoing incitement against Jews by the PA, recurring suicide murders, and attacks against Israelis using the very weapons that Israel gave the PA to stop the violence would constitute a breach of the agreement serious enough to annul it, they would have undoubtedly said 'yes.' In fact, when the architects of the Oslo Accords, the likes of Israel's prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, and member of parliament Yossi Beilin, were criticized by the Israeli public for giving weapons to the Palestinians, they assured the public that if the Palestinians were to use their weapons against Israel, the Israeli Defense Force would re-capture the territories and confiscate the weapons. No one at the time, not even the most ardent supporters of Oslo, suggested that such action by the Israeli government would have been inappropriate.
And yet, today, instead of an annulment of the Oslo Accords and a declaration of war, we are hearing calls for more concessions by Israel and a return to the negotiating table, and no voice is louder than Beilin's. Had it been possible to go back in time to 1993 and describe the current situation to the Israelis, Americans, and Europeans who supported the Oslo Accords and to tell them that under these circumstances they would continue supporting negotiations with the Palestinians, they would have most likely dismissed the account as fantastic fiction.
What enabled this would-be fictional fantasy to become a tragic reality? There are two interrelated psychological processes that account for the current predicament: the 'sunk cost' phenomenon and desensitization. The 'sunk cost' phenomenon explains why people might continue to invest in a lost cause. We are reluctant to write off bad investments that we made, and are likely to continue investing in them even though it makes no sense for us to do so. We do not like to admit that we were wrong; we do not like to admit that our money or efforts were wasted.
Unwilling to admit that the years that had gone into putting together the Oslo Agreements were in vain, that they were wrong about the true intentions of the Palestinian leadership, proponents of Oslo continued to invest in the process despite an increase in violence and violations. To this day, they continue to urge the Israelis to give the Palestinian Authority a 'last chance' to prove that they really are peace partners. Over time, as more and more last chances were given to the terrorists, a second psychological process kicked in: desensitization.
If you put a frog in hot water, it will do everything that it can to jump out immediately. In contrast, if you put a frog in cool water and then gradually turn on the heat, the frog is more likely to remain inside beyond the point of no return. By the time the frog realizes that the water is uncomfortably hot, it is too weak to jump out. Not noticing the incremental change in temperature, the frog eventually dies. Similarly, in Israel and around the world, people have gradually become desensitized to violence.
If in 1993 the murder of one would have aroused emotions strong enough to warrant a reevaluation of the peace process, today the death of a dozen is just another statistic. In the past, a single attack by terrorists would have led to a harsh military response against the terrorist group and the government that sponsored the terrorist group. Today, the response when hundreds of Jewish lives are taken, is feeble at best, even against the actual terrorist organizations that sent the murderers. Jewish life, it seems, has been cheapened.
To counter the 'sunk cost' phenomenon and desensitization, the Israeli government and every other moral regime must adhere to a rational principle from the Jerusalem Talmud: "Whoever destroys a life, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world; and whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world." The Arab regimes care little for the lives of their people, mercilessly killing thousands at the slightest hint of dissent, and even less for the lives of others. The governments of the Jewish State and of other free countries are different in that for them human life is sacred, and it must remain so, not only in theory, but in practice.
Ilan Perlman, an eight-year-old boy who was murdered in the Jerusalem bus massacre, is a world unto himself; his grandmother, who died sitting next to him, is a world unto herself. Those who intentionally and systematically destroy worlds, the world of Ilan, of his grandmother, or the world of any other innocent person, are anything but worthy peace partners. They are murderers who must be brought to justice.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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