Israeli politicians and military brass have begun sounding the alarm about the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, where electricity is available for four to eight hours a day and where municipal services are being cut in half. While the military threat form Gaza appears containable, it is less clear that Israel can contain the ramifications of a total humanitarian collapse in Gaza. How can and should Israel act to forestall or prevent the humanitarian crisis that is about to swallow Gaza whole?
This is a segment from The “Judaism: The Theme Park” Edition.
Support the show on Patreon
Looking for extra segments, in-depth prep material, and other patron-only perks? Support the show on Patreon and gain access to these and more.
Evolutionary spite consists in acting so to harm yourself while harming opponents even more, thereby leaving you relatively better off than before the act when outcomes are relativized across participants. Zero sum games are particularly vulnerable to successful spite, since only relative standing defines winner take all. In diverse positive sum environments, spite does poorly: the world is too large to harm at once, leaving some able to increase their standing through absolute gains (in food, money, other resources), cooperating beyond the spiteful act. Spite works when there are highly central actors able to affect about everyone (think of dictators), or the resource environment is capped or shrinking. Stalin’s purging of generals prior to WW II was spiteful: he eliminated expertise but consolidated, as he continually did, his hold on arbitrary removal; when the Nazis invaded, his spiteful action cost the country dearly. Spite is curtailed when there is reasonable fear that outside resources will arrive. The Nazis were such for Stalin, decreasing his relative war standing at the onset.
Gaza is prime material for evolutionary spite. The siege has reduced resource availability for over a decade; businesses, such as they are, are precarious and under quasi-Mafioso control via Hamas. Hamas only needs to stay on top of the shrinking hill; no one can import resources to vie against it. This Israel and Egypt have created; but without the Israeli “just above starvation” policy Egypt would not, I think, have acted alone to cut supplies.
Violence is inherently spiteful. Wars are spite writ large. It is not surprising, then, that Gaza spasms periodically into violence against Israel; these spasms are meant as much to control at home as hurt Israel which, realistically, they don’t hurt much. Resource contention within Gaza will have its military contenders, in direct zero sum competition with whatever social welfare forces exist in the strip. Social welfare as outcome is dampened when all you are doing is slowing down decline; the military wing does better than it otherwise would because welfare is another form of ultimate disaster. What we call “rational” strategies are derived from a presumption of resource growth–so, businesses make more resource by their very existence. Our rationality fails in closed shrinking environments like Gaza, leaving the outside world shocked and dumbfounded.
Without doubt Israel helped create this evolutionary world. But blame changes nothing. I think the greatest mistake, and I will call it a moral mistake, Israel has made is quite of late: the decision to honor the PAs demand to cut power to Gaza, thereby drastically reducing effective resource availability, as so much of our resource production requires electricity. Turn off power and resources shrink, some permanently lost. Israel should have refused the request saying, simply, there are some things we will not do to an essentially captive, helpless population–captive of Israel or Hamas doesn’t matter, still captive. Instead, Israel indulges a greater spiteful game between Hamas and the PA, leading to internal violence.
The first step to change Gaze is to lift the power siege requested by the PA, not because one favors Hamas over the PA, but because only by finding ways out of this shrinking resource world can things ever change. Such change, if it can come, will have violence: some do quite well under resource decline, fearing new actors emerging when growth is possible. And these individuals and their networks exist precisely because resources have been in decline–they have been nurtured by scarcity. Just as in an overall Israel peace agreement, disruptive violence must be expected, for there too many see their positions better under the old status quo.
Enlightened self interest, such as realizing sewage approaches Israeli beaches, can help by placing a direct cost of the power siege onto Israel, but that outcome is merely a measure of how the failure to understand how evolutionary spite under resource decline changes people. This latter is what you need to focus upon. And to do that you are going to have to jettison the use of evil as explanatory tool. For, once evil is defined, only eradication remains. How much collateral damage do you want in Gaza? Can you afford to declare evil? If not, then what do you do? Try to reduce the conditions for successful spite.