Agreed, but also, there’s a nutcase in every crowd; in the population of an entire country, there will be enough lunatics and extremists to be able to cause a problem, regardless of the promise of financial rewards for being good. In fact there will be people who cause problems because of the promise of financial rewards for being good.
Ideally the threshold would be set such at what the general community could realistically prevent. Undoubtedly some Gazans who weren’t actually involved knew or suspected something bad was about to go down on October 7th. If their livelihoods all depended on telling the authorities, I think there’s a good chance at least one of them would have told the authorities. The same goes for settler violence.
If I was earning an extra thousand a month for as long as my neighbor doesn’t try to kill anyone, I’ll be strongly motivated to talk to him and (along with my other peaceful neighbors) strongly urge that he remain peaceful.
But it’s just an idea. I remain unconvinced that it’s completely out of the realm of some slight possibility of succeeding (once the war ends, of course), especially considering the very low risk and how nothing else has worked.
What you are describing is a police state where everyone is indoctrinated to spy on their neighbors and report any “antisocial” acts.
It would be about as effective as the Soviet Union or Communist China or North Korea at keeping the population in line.
I think the chances of this sort of scheme working decrease with the population size you are dealing with; maybe a group of 100 people would manage to stay well behaved for these sums of money; maybe it would work with a thousand, or ten thousand.
But millions of participants? Seems highly unlikely; there will be people for whom the promise of money in this way disgusts them and fuels hate; there will be people who value their principles more than the money, and their principles include acts of aggression; and there will probably be other reasons why people don’t comply.
I can see two problems:
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Once the payments have started, withholding them from the innocent majority if the small minority misbehaves smacks of collective punishment, which is inherently unjust.
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I think the people on both sides who’ve lost people in this conflict and who want revenge (or, as they see it, justice) would be offended at the notion of (again, as they see it) being paid off. They might well tell the US to keep their money. It might even exacerbate things, although that’s just supposition on my part.
The theory behind my proposal is one that, in my opinion, is one of the hard iron rules of human behavior – people respond to incentives. Behavior changes when there’s a real incentive for behavior to change, when we’re talking about groups of millions. I’m hypothesizing that, so far, there haven’t really been real-world, day-to-day, and person-by-person incentives for Israelis and Palestinians to take positive action to restrain the most violent and extreme among them. This proposal would change that, and put big financial incentives on an actual change in behavior. It doesn’t imagine or suppose that Hamas and other extremists would suddenly decide they’d rather trade their hatred away for a decent income; rather, it imagines that all the millions of regular people around Hamas and other extremists would, in fact, gladly trade away those other extremists’ hatred for their own financial well-being, and would find ways to make it happen. I don’t know what all those ways would be, but that’s kind of the beauty of it – with this kind of financial incentive, human beings historically have come up with all kinds of ways to do things differently.
All of this is, of course, purely hypothetical, and I could be wrong about everything. Thanks to everyone who’s chimed in.
People respond to incentives if they have direct control over attaining that incentive.
If you’re offered $100,000 to lose a certain amount of weight, become fluent in German, or complete a graduate degree, or sell a hundred cars before Christmas, you’ll be very motivated because those things are mostly within your control.
People are not motivated when the outcome is almost totally beyond their ability. You’ll be very fatalistic if you’re told that you get a $10,000 bonus if some countryman of yours (whom you’ve never met or talked to) decides not commit a murder this year. You couldn’t stop him even if you wanted to. It would be like if I offered you $10,000 if there are no tornadoes in Kansas this year.
Right – so we make it achievable. Not a single murder, but we all get thousands of dollars in a bonus if, say, the murder rate goes down by 10% (just as a wild example). Maybe we’d find ways to discourage murder, by just a little bit, since it would be worth so much money to all of us?
You make it sound like “they” are a self-policing population of people with ubiquitous motivations. Both of these peoples are made up of a large variety of opinions and viewpoints. It sounds the same as if Americans really wanted to prevent school shootings, we should incent them as a group to stop doing it, and punish them if they fail. “They” cannot control their population they way you are imagining, especially when the ones causing all the problems are the guys with the guns.
The only presumption I’m making about these groups is that most of the individuals within would rather have $1000 additional per month than would not. If that’s accurate, then it means there would be at least some additional non zero motivation for most to attain and keep peace, and perhaps that could lead to new ways that haven’t yet been achieved or even considered for reducing and preventing extremist violence.
A lot of ifs, but the beauty of the plan is we (meaning the rest of the world) don’t have to pay a cent until there’s an actual peace agreement (imagine that!) plus a solid year of peace. So failure would have no dollar cost.
But how does that work in practice?
Say you’re a peaceful Gazan and you want to be able to earn your $1,000/month. So you go up to your local Hamas leaders and say, “Hey, can we agree not to attack Israel this year - or, ever again? I want to collect my money.” You’d be lucky to leave with your limbs intact.
Or, similarly, if you go around telling your local AK-47-armed militants on the street not to attack Israel because “we need $$$$”…I can’t see how that would go over well. It would be like walking up to a local Mafia godfather and consigliere and asking them to refrain from crime.
A small scale example - let’s suppose I was a bored billionaire. Then suppose (after the war ends) I identify a Gazan village of 100 people, and a Jewish West Bank settlement of 100 people, and offer every single one of them ten thousand dollars if none of them commit any murders or assaults against the other group (i.e. their Jewish or Palestinian neighbors) for one year. Any chance of success? Any chance those two hundred people figure out a way to reduce the chances of extremist violence among them? I don’t know exactly what the methods would be, but isn’t there a chance a group of a hundred might self organize in a way to figure this out? I think the chance is more than minuscule that this small experiment might succeed.
…proposal for peace: the US stops funding the genocide in Gaza.
Proposal for peace: Israel complies with the International Court of Justice directives that “has stated that Israel must take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, and in full cooperation with the United Nations, “the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip.”
Proposal for peace: instead of giving every single Israeli and Palestinian $5000, invest that money in rebuilding the Gazan healthcare system that has been obliterated over the last six months. Because an extra $5000 a year isn’t going to help much when there aren’t any hospitals to even get basic care.
You can’t even start thinking about the “peace process” when hundreds of thousands of people on one side of that process will die in the next few months from famine. A process that treats both sides as “equals” when one side completely controls what goes into and comes out of the other, when one side restricts how much food goes in and out, controls the airspace, controls the borders.
This wouldn’t give anyone an incentive to make peace. The Palestinians wouldn’t “restrain Hamas.” Israel would not “restrain their settlers and other extremists.” It wouldn’t have any chance of success.
Do you know how hard it is for Palestinians to even access money now?
Somebody mentioned the other day that there were literally only a handful of ATM’s working in Gaza. There is no money, no jobs, no work, no houses, no shelter, no food. The doctors in Gaza are almost all working for free right now.
But both Israelis and Palestinians would get paid identical amounts. How does that make any sense, and how would that promote peace?
Are you imagining that everything goes back to normal?
What does the “end of the war” look like to you?
Because it looks like Palestinians either driven by Gaza, or kept in a large concentration camp in Rafah.
Are you imagining anything different?
I’ll take this as a “no, you don’t think my idea would work”, and I’ll ignore the rest of what appears to me to be an attempted hijack. Thank you for your input.
…it isn’t a hijack.
What do you think things will look like after the war is over?
Terrible, I’m sure. Hopefully, at some point in the future there will be some semblance of normalcy in which we might consider new ways to (maybe) achieve lasting peace.
…and in this terrible near-future you are imagining, do you think Israel will allow Gazans to have a $5000 cash payment considering they haven’t even been giving them the taxes they’ve collected on their behalf?
In case it wasn’t obvious, my hypothetical presumes the capacity to distribute money to all individual Gazans and Israelis (which I recognize does not come close to existing at present). I’m not interested in rehashing Israel vs Gaza here.
That presumes that everyone has the same incentives. It would be like offering a group of a large number of rabbits and a few coyotes an unlimited supply of lettuce and carrots if nobody eats each other. Sure, the rabbits will take the deal, but the coyotes naturally don’t have a taste for lettuce or carrots (at least not as much as they have a taste for rabbits), and the rabbits have no way of forcing the coyotes to comply with the terms of the offer.
Yes, I am presuming that most Gazans and most Israelis have a similar motivation when it comes to extra income.