This all obviously couldn’t even start until the current war ends, but let’s assume (and hope) that it ends soon.
Let’s pay for peace. For a nice round number, let’s assume there are ten million Israelis and five million Palestinians. I propose that, in exchange for a peace agreement that successfully lasts for 1 year, every single Israeli and Palestinian be paid $5000. And subsequently, for every month that goes by peacefully, every single Israeli and Palestinian be paid $1000. These payments should continue, but very slowly decrease, for 20 years.
The cost would be an initial outlay of $75 billion after the first year of peace, and then $15 billion per month, gradually decreasing for twenty years. I think the rest of the world could afford this, and perhaps even it would even be cheaper than the costs of continued conflict.
But this is key - payments pause upon violence. They will resume when the violence ceases.
This gives every single Israeli and Palestinian a big, big incentive to make peace, and to end any violence that breaks out. Ideally, it would mean that Palestinians would restrain Hamas and other violent elements within them, and Israelis would restrain their settlers and other extremists.
Has anything like this ever been tried before in world history? Would it have a chance of success?
“Say, Bud, nice country you got here. You know that $1000 you receive every month. I’d hate to see you not get that should a bomb go off. For $100 from you, I could make sure it doesn’t. Tell all your friends, too.”
All it would do would increase the number of Hamas-like groups springing up around the world with new sectarian conflicts hoping to get a cut of the same kind of deal when they agree to stop. The hatred for Israel is also so deep rooted that I doubt money would help here even once.
It might not work, but the nice thing about the plan would be that it would be free until we have a peace agreement plus a full year of peace. So there wouldn’t be a huge risk in trying it out.
In the Andy Griffith episode Andy the Marriage Counselor Andy offered to give Opie and Billy a nickel each day that they got along, but they decided that they would “rather play good games for nothin’ than get a nickel for playin’ nice”.
It won’t work. It’s on par with the US deciding the way to solve the war in Vietnam would have been to offer the North $100,000 per person to stop trying to reunite the country by force; it’s ignoring the reason behind the violence and trying to solve the problem by throwing money at it, literally.
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment and assuming it would work though, $15 billion a month over 20 years comes out to $3.6 trillion. That’s a hell of a lot more than the current cost of the conflict to the rest of the world, which is close to nothing relative to that cost. Some very quick googling of “Palestine international support” gets this:
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians totaled over $40 billion between 1994 and 2020.
Playing devil’s advocate further, when the 20 years have run out and the $3.6 trillion distributed to Israel and Palestine, how do you imagine this wouldn’t result in both sides going back to violence, only armed with $3.6 trillion worth of new weapons?
Most of the costs of conflict are indirect – how much shipping is lost due to the conflict? How many markets could otherwise be exploited? How many laborers could add value to a company or project? Ongoing conflict is making so many economic opportunities impossible. I don’t know if it’s close to $3.6 trillion over 20 years, but it might be.
As to the last part of your post – I’m presuming and hoping that, after twenty years, people would start to value peace (and would have overcome the biggest obstacle – seeing it as possible at all), just like in Northern Ireland, and the extremists would have lost the vast majority of their support.
But I’m just throwing an idea out there. Cost is obviously a big obstacle, but I don’t think it’s necessarily insurmountable.
These two peoples hate each other, and no amount of hush money to keep them both calm will ever work. The infrastructure of Gaza is in ruins at this point, and giving cash to Palestinians to keep quiet is likely to toss gasoline in the fire (here’s some money for your troubles, now shuttup). Israelis wont trust anyone other than their well-armed IDF to keep them safe, and sending them cash to not defend themselves won’t work either.
I am afraid this is the most massive cluster-F of our lives and no one knows how to solve it, but ISTM paying two groups not to fight will only encourage more conflicts around the world from people wanting the same deal.
I recognize the challenge, but the downside you mention would only occur if the plan actually works, since no one gets paid until an agreement plus a year of peace, and then everyone’s livelihood depends on continuing peace.
Terrorists organizations don’t care about the welfare of the people they are claiming to represent. They only care about damage to the enemy. So what if violence cuts off payments to the people? The people are not funding them, outside interests are. The people will get their rewards when the hated enemy is dead.
It is not even close to the most massive clusterfuck of our lives. There is an ongoing civil war in Yemen which has had more than 375,000 casualties since 2014. A war between Ethiopia and Eritrea is estimated to have killed between 100,000 on the lowest end and 600,000 on the highest, in the space of two years (2020-2022.) These are only two examples that make both Israel and Ukraine pale in comparison.
Neither of your examples has lasted 50+ years and impacted the the geopolitical world as much as the Israeli Palestinian conflict, even with those impressive casualty counts.
My idea would be to evict both parties from the country and give the whole thing to Disney on a 100-year lease. Turn it into a biblical-themed amusement park. Both sides have access as tourists.
If this conflict could be solved with money then I think it would’ve been solved decades ago. I suspect the only thing offering them money for peace would do is offend people on both sides.
Who is the money to be paid to, and withdrawn from if violence occurs?
What would be the mechanism for attributing success or blame, unless it be collective reward or punishment of one or other entire community, regardless of what individuals within it have or haven’t done?
Or to put it another way, how do you isolate the violent extremists in such a way as to induce them to join in “normal” non-violent politics or reduce them to (near) irrelevance?
You’re assuming a form of rationalism that hasn’t exactly been evident in the region for a very long time.
It’s not about making extremists behave rationally – it’s about Israelis having huge financial incentives to make absolutely sure their own extremists don’t fuck it up for everyone, and Palestinians having huge financial incentives to make absolutely sure their own extremists don’t fuck it up for everyone. Right now lots of folks in the region (and especially many Palestinians) have nothing to lose, and maybe aren’t likely to report or crack down on the extremist next door who they know is planning something terrible. But what if they and all their neighbors suddenly have tons to lose – an entire middle class lifestyle, including paying for college for their kids? ISTM that that would make a difference. At least some of them would be much more likely to report their extremist neighbors activities to the authorities.
Maybe it’s impossible. But I still put forward that this idea has very low risk, since failure means no payment and no new cost (and just the status quo as usual).
I think most of the people living in the area are already incentivized not to attack one another by the fact they have homes and businesses established and are (or were) invested in keeping their communities safe and healthy. Once that safety and security is removed, they have no incentive for peace.
The main problem is not that civilians want to fight each other, it’s that extreme influences, some external to the region, WANT to keep the conflict going, and provide aid (arms) to assure anyone not wanting to go along with the program of revenge and violence and destabilization is bullied into compliance. Maybe pay-off Iran to cease supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups so they wither away would be a better use of the money.
If it only takes one act of violence to break the deal, then its going to get broken constantly, which is the same as the deal not existing, which means no incentive for anyone else to do anything different from normal.
There would be a threshold, so throwing a tomato doesn’t ruin it. Not sure what the threshold would be - maybe 2 or more deaths by sectarian violence, maybe more - but we could look at past history, like northern Ireland after the peace deal, to see what’s reasonably achievable.
The main problem I see is the immense resentment by the peaceful folks when the troublemakers cost them their money.
Imagine if, say, the government told every New Orleans resident, “For every year with <10 murders, every New Orleans resident receives $10,000!” What are the 99.99% of non-murderous New Orleaners supposed to do when the 0.001% keep committing murders anyway, and result in nobody else receiving the ten thousand dollars they wanted (and arguably deserved?)
You can’t reward or punish people for the behavior of others over whom they have no control. Finally, you can bet that in a place like Gaza, Hamas is simply going to confiscate such money from the local Gazan residents. Maybe not all of it, but Hamas would certainly see these incoming payments as a lucrative income stream to skim a big chunk off of annually. (“Everyone must give 30% of your payments to Hamas!”)