How might the world be different if the PLO had followed Gandhi?

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Abstract

This article evaluates how the world might be different if the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, had sought a redress of grievances through nonviolence rather than violence. This analysis rests on a summary of research comparing the relative effectiveness of violence and nonviolence and the role of the media in conflict. It concludes with four suggestions for ending the cycle of violence and building a better future for all: (1) Demand equal protection of the laws. (2) Limit "state secrets privilege" to make it harder for governments to deny equal protection and lie about it with impunity. (3) Support training in nonviolence for all. (4) Citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits to make it harder for major media to encourage their audiences to support counterproductive actions.

Introduction

How might the world be different if the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, had been committed to nonviolence, following Gandhi, King, and Badshah Khan rather than George Washington and Fidel Castro?

Nothing can be said about this for certain, except that the world would be different. However, careful study of history suggests that the world would most likely be better for virtually all Jews and Palestinians.

This should NOT be construed as a criticism of Yassir Arafat nor of anyone who supported the PLO nor any other organization that has adopted violent tactics such as Hamas since 2023-10-07: They were following the example of George Washington. How could they go wrong?

Our answer to this apparent contradiction, discussed briefly below, is that few of the violent revolutions since 1776 have had the success attributed to the American Revolution, because the subsequent success of the US was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the violence of the American Revolution. The traditional narrative of the American Revolution has been written to please people who control most of the money for the media -- to the detriment of everyone else. Over 50 percent of adult white males could vote before the revolution, and the violence of the revolution did not change that, as discussed below.

Similarly, the nonviolence of the First Intifada led to the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. That led to the Oslo Accords and the current State of Palestine. We claim that if the Palestinians had maintained nonviolent discipline, the two-state solution promised at Oslo would likely have worked to benefit all.

Few supporters of Israel have any substantive understanding of the extent of the mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli military and settlers, because the media they find credible rarely if ever provide balanced coverage of it.

However, the nonviolence of the First Intifada convinced enough Israeli voters that they could live in peace with Palestinians that Yitzhak Rabin won an election in 1992 to become Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. Most nonviolent campaigns have produced similar results, as discussed below.

Tragically, subsequent violence by both sides has created obstacles to honest consideration by each of how their opposition perceives them. Palestinians during the First Intifada and since have seen throwing rocks as relatively nonviolent. That is not how most supporters of Israel have perceived that. In 2022 the Israeli ambassador to United Nations Gilad Erdan complained that the world has been silent in the face of Palestinian “terror attacks with rocks” against Israelis, as he held up a rock the size of a brick. He noted that a rock like that could kill someone in a car speeding along a highway.

This suggests that the nonviolence of the First Intifada, discussed below, might have been more effective if Palestinians had not thrown rocks: The shift in Israeli public opinion that got Yitzhak Rabin elected as Prime Minister would likely have been greater, and the international pressure on Israel would also likely have been greater.

A vigorous commitment to nonviolence has worked in the past, even within the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. It seems to offer the only realistic prospect for breaking the cycle of violence and building a better future for both Palestinians and Jews.

“ Oh, would some Power the gift give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us

” — Robert Burns (1786), To a Louse

Experts

There is a substantial body of research dating back at least to the 1950s that most experts can be beaten by simple rules of thumb developed by intelligent lay people. Kahneman and Klein (2009) found that,

• Expert intuition is learned from frequent, rapid, high quality feedback.

Few professions have that. In combat, military leaders can develop expert intuition on how to deliver death and destruction to designated targets. Political leaders develop expert intuition on how to say things that please people who control most of the money for the media.

However,

• humanity needs broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term.

How can we obtain that when the processes by which political and military leaders are selected may be clandestinely hostile to that end?

For example, to what extent is the world better or worse off for the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003? What changes in the structure of the US and international political economy might produce better outcomes with crudely similar problems in the future?

This article focuses largely on the cycle of violence that has plagued Israel-Palestine since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. However the section on "Implications for the future" below suggests reforms that could have broader implications.

With members of the Knesset calling for using nuclear weapons in Gaza and concerns about the conflict between Israel and Iran spinning out of control, any reasonable expense for alternatives that might stabilize this conflict might be very wise investment, even with substantial uncertainties about the outcomes.

Research comparing violence and nonviolence

Twenty-first century research can help us estimate the probability distribution of alternative outcomes in violent and nonviolent conflict. Most relevant in this regard is the inventory of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century compiled by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011). They identified over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns, each of which attracted over 1,000 people at some point. 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns were successful while only 25 percent of the violent revolutions were.

Figure 1. Democratization 1 year after (vertical scale) vs. 1 year before (horizontal scale) the end of twentieth century revolutions

Probably more important than the official success rate is the impact on democracy: Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) found that on average, nonviolent campaigns improved the level of democracy, while violent revolutions had no statistically significant impact on democracy. This was true whether the campaigns won or lost. The gains for democracy tended to be greater among the nonviolent campaigns that won than among those that lost. However, even the nonviolent campaigns that lost on average pushed their governments to be more democratic, to share power more broadly; see Figure 1.

Similarly, Chenoweth and Schock (2015) noted that the presence of a "radical flank", contemporary violence pursuing similar aims, tended to reduce the probability of success. See also Chenoweth (2016).

The nonviolence of the First Intifada

The NAVCO 1.1 dataset compiled by Chenoweth and Stephan includes five campaigns in Palestine or involving Palestinians:

1. "Palestinian Arab Revolt" in Palestine against "Pro-Jewish British policies" 1936-1939 coded as violent with limited success but with no change in Polity IV scores.
2. "Jewish resistance" in "Palestinian Territories" against "British occupation" 1945-1948 coded as a violent success with no change in Polity IV scores. Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, p. 304) reported that only "three successful violent insurgencies were succeeded by democratic regimes: the National Liberation Army’s 1948 victory in Costa Rica, the Jewish resistance in British-occupied Palestine, and the 1971 Bengali self-determination campaign against Pakistan. However, these instances represent only three cases out of fifty-five successful insurgencies in the twentieth century. They are as rare as authoritarian regimes that succeed victorious nonviolent campaigns. This variation points to a potentially fruitful avenue of future research", such as experiments suggested below in the section on, "Implications for the future".
3. "Palestinian activists" in Jordan violently contesting "Jordanian rule" in 1970 coded as a failure with a modest decline from (-9) to (-10) in Polity IV scores, shifting Jordan to the most authoritarian point on the Polity IV scale.
4. The [First] Intifada in Palestine against "Israeli occupation" 1987-1990, coded as a partial success from nonviolence but with no change in Polity IV scores. The work of Chenoweth and Schock (2015) and Chenoweth (2016) suggests that the success might have been greater, if the violence ("radical flank") that appeared late in the campaign had not occurred.
5. The longer violent "Palestinian Liberation" campaign (1973- ) against "Israeli occupation" beginning in 1973 and still ongoing in 2006, coded as a failure with no change in Polity IV scores.

The nonviolence of the First Intifada did more to move Israeli public opinion to believe that they could live in peace and harmony with Palestinians than anything else Palestinians have done since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, at least according to the literature that we've found credible.

When the First Intifada began, Yitzhak Rabin was Israel's Minister of Defense. He could see that the nonviolence could not be suppressed with massive counter violence for two reasons:

1. Excessive violence against nonviolent demonstrators generated bad press that was actually moving Israeli and international opinion.
2. Rabin knew that he could not count on soldiers to follow orders if they perceived their orders as out of proportion to the provocations.

Early in the Intifada, he had told his soldiers to shoot to wound, in the legs and feet. As the nonviolence and negative press continued, he issued clubs and ordered soldiers to beat people, breaking bones. But some 100 Israeli military went to prison rather than follow orders; several thousand others similarly refused but were not prosecuted. The first Israeli military to go to prison after the start of the First Intifada was reportedly Ofer Cassif, who later became a vocal supporter of South Africa's genocide case against Israel during the Israel-Hamas war, as a member of the Knesset.

Before the Intifada, Rabin had not wanted to talk with Palestinians, saying, "There was no point", because they always had to check with King Hussein of Jordan or President Mubarak of Egypt or President Assad of Syria. That changed with the Intifada, because the Palestinians "proved that for the first time in their history, they had decided to take charge of their fate."

When the nonviolence continued, Rabin ran for Prime Minister on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. He became Prime Minister in 1992 and was reportedly pleased when his staff told him he would not have to negotiate with leaders of the nonviolence. In September 1993, Rabin explained that the Palestinians would be better at protecting Israeli interests in the occupied territories than the Israeli military,

“ because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Israeli Association of Civil Rights from criticizing the conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli army soldiers from having to do what they will do. ”

Israeli leaders sent in agents provocateurs, who were exposed and neutralized until Israel expelled 481 leaders of the nonviolence and arrested tens of thousands of others. Finally Israel got the Palestinian violence needed to justify overwhelming counter violence. That violence also brought the ultra-Zionist right wing parties back to power in Israel.

Violence and nonviolence in the American Revolution

The "Age of Revolution" (1765-1849, including the French Revolution and the Latin American revolutions of the nineteenth century), plus the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, as well as the violent post-World War II anti-colonial struggles of Africa and Asia all, from at least some perspectives, replaced one brutal repressive system with another. Many, perhaps all, have supporters who claim that common folk benefitted from that violence. For example, Napoleon introduced the Napoleonic Code, which has had a major influence on the civil code in many countries around the world, including the US state of Louisiana and most of Latin America and Eurasia. However, claims that any of this violence made substantive advances for freedom and democracy, liberty and justice are at best controversial, especially in the short term.

The standard narrative of the American Revolution seems to suggest that the American Revolution was different from all those other attempts to emulate it: The US, according to this narrative, got freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all from the violence of the American Revolution.

The reality is more nuanced: The US got independence from Great Britain. However, claims that the US got more than that from the violence are controversial and largely contradicted by available evidence. Gaughan (2022) notes that at the time of the Revolution, Great Britain was a constitutional monarchy, which was extremely unusual during a global era of autocracy. "In the British Isles, only 15 to 20 percent of English men could vote. In contrast, ... [t]he rate of enfranchisement varied from colony to colony. ... [A]s many as 80 percent of men could vote in some colonies but only 50 to 60 percent in other colonies. ... During the Revolutionary era, most states expanded suffrage to at least some degree." However, those expansions of the franchise occurred via nonviolent democratic deliberation as the existing legislatures of the 13 rebelling colonies either wrote state constitutions or revised their colonial charters to delete reference to Great Britain.

After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Parliament ended local self government in Massachusetts. Then crowds of worried farmers prevented many judges appointed by the King from doing anything. A few judges were allowed to continue after promising to ignore the recent acts of Parliament and abide by the colonial charter, under which those judges were answerable to the locals, not to London. If that kind of nonviolent response had been the dominant feature of the American Revolution instead of violence, the experience of Gandhi, King, Badshah Khan, and others described by Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), Chenoweth and Schock (2015), and Chenoweth (2016) suggests that the impact of the American Revolution on world history would likely have been more positive.

Other research on nonviolence

Previous nonviolent campaigns have often succeeded by inventing new methods of protest as needs and opportunities were identifed. After an approach obtains some level of success, people with power often develop countermeasures that reduce the effectiveness of a known technique going forward.

Gene Sharp documented 198 nonviolent tactics. Nonviolence International maintains a growing database expanding Sharp's list of 198. By 2021, Nonviolence International had documented 148 more.

Role of the media in war

It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. We suggest, however, that

Truth typically dies long before the first blow is struck in anger.

In most and perhaps virtually all violent conflicts, each party believes that their actions are justified by atrocities committed by their designated enemies.

Collateral damage that "they" commit proves to us that "they" are subhuman or at best criminally misled and must be resisted by any means necessary. Meanwhile, collateral damage that we commit is unfortunate but necessary -- from our perspective.

However, to supporters of our opposition, the collateral damage that we have committed proves to them that we are subhuman or at best criminally misled and must be resisted by any means necessary. This asymmetry of perceptions is amplified by the media each party consumes: Every media organization sells changes in audience behaviors to the people who give them money. A media organization with no audience has nothing to sell. If they have an audience but displease their funders, they may not continue to have the money needed to produce the content required to retain an audience.

Media organizations everywhere mislead their audiences. They do this easily, because everyone prefers information and sources consistent with preconceptions, a phenomenon called "confirmation bias." Media organizations everywhere exploit confirmation bias to please those who control most of the money for the media. Wolfsfeld et al. (2002) noted that, "The news media remain important agents for demonizing enemies and transforming political and military leaders into heroes. ... News is fundamentally ethnocentric, especially news about enemies ... because they threaten us." And violence attracts more attention than nonviolence. "Battles are considered newsworthy, but ideas for preventing battles are not." Also, peace negotiations are usually conducted in extreme secrecy, because excessive publicity of negotiating positions could reduce the chances of success. Once an agreement is reached, the negotiators representing different parties to the conflict must then sell the agreement to their supporters. Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein collaborated in supporting each other in selling the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty to their respective peoples.

A review of relevant literature identified multiple drivers of increases in political polarization in recent decades:

• Increased concentration of ownership of the media, exemplified by the creation of Israel Hayom by Sheldon Adelson in Israel and its impact on Israeli politics (discussed below), as well as Bolloré in France, Murdoch in Australia, the UK and the US, and Sinclair in the US. Increased concentration of ownership of the media in apparently free societies make them look more like the unfree press in authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, where journalists are more often incarcerated and killed.
• The abolition of the Fairness doctrine by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1987 and the subsequent adaptation of the major media in the US to the belief systems of their increasingly distinct audiences. (Segmentation, a standard business practice, produces political polarization threatening democracy when applied to media markets, especially when control is too concentrated.)
• The rise of the "click economy", with Internet companies, especially social media like Facebook, making money from clicks. Their algorithms exploit confirmation bias in ways that increase political polarization. They herd people into echo chambers in which people become increasingly convinced of the rectitude of their own positions and increasingly ignorant of and insensitive -- and often hostile -- to the constructed realties of people with whom they disagree.
• The decline in the quantity and diversity of local news, including the growth of news deserts and ghost newspapers. The decline in trusted local source(s) makes it easier for people to be misled by increasingly homogenized and biased corporate media and click bait. This has become so pervasive that it threatens the national security of the US and its allies according to retired Lt. General McMaster, former President Trump's second National Security Advisor.

The abolition of the US Fairness Doctrine clearly had no legal implications outside the US. However, Grossman et al. (2022) documented an apparently similar "sea change in the right’s dominance of national politics" in Israel that primarily benefited Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party following the 2007 launch of Israel Hayom by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. It was distributed for free, reportedly to skirt Israel's campaign finance laws. "[I]t soon became the most widely read newspaper nationally." Their "findings highlight the immense impact the ultrarich can exert in shaping politics through media ownership." This shift was described by US Senator Bernie Sanders, himself Jewish, saying in March 2024, "the Israel of today is not the Israel of … 20 to 30 years ago ... . It is a right-wing country, increasingly becoming a religious fundamentalist country where you have some of these guys in office believe that God told them they have a right to control the entire area." Sander's comment is supported by Adelson's support for the claim that, "the Palestinians are an invented people out to destroy Israel", a claim similar to the Zionist trope that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land".

Israel Hayom is often called "Bibiton", which is a portmanteau of "Bibi", a nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu, and "iton", the Hebrew word for newspaper. Adelson was accused but not charged in the on-going corruption trial against Netanyahu and died before he was scheduled to testify in that trial.

A 2022 survey in Israel found that Israel Hayom had the largest weekday readership exposure of any newspapers in Israel at 31%. The second and third most popular newspapers were Yedioth Ahronoth with 23.9% and Haaretz with 4.7% readership exposure. Yedioth Ahronoth tends to support former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni, who has been a leading Israeli politician advocating restraining expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and negotiating with Palestinians; anything like this has been vigorously opposed by the editorial policies of Israel Hayom. However, her support for Palestinians had limits, as indicated by a warrant for her arrest that was reportedly issued by a British court under universal jurisdiction, following an application by lawyers acting for Palestinian victims of the 2008-2009 Gaza war for her role in that operation as Israeli Foreign Minister. (The warrant was reportedly dropped with apologies from British political leaders after her visit to the UK was canceled.)

Political polarization doubtless exists between and within different groups supporting Palestinians and Israel driven by differences in the media they consume. Those differences in perception help perpetuate the conflict to the detriment of all.

More generally,

• we are all prisoners of the media we find credible, except for leaders (especially elected officials), who are prisoners of the media their followers find credible.

Implications for the future

What might be done to break the cycle of violence that has plagued Palestine and Israel since the 1917 Balfour declaration?

Several ideas come to mind:

Equal protection of the laws

• Everyone believes in rule of law, except people with power, who believe that they should be above the law.

Can enough Palestinians publicly and effectively renounce violence that it actually moves Israeli and international public opinion enough to force Israel to provide something like equal protection of the laws? Israel was moved in that direction by the nonviolence of the First Intifada. It could happen again.

It would be great if Palestinians and / or Israelis and their supporters took the lead, but others do not have to wait for that.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has introduced several motions in the US House of Representatives to try to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for having said, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Greene claimed that phrase was a Hamas slogan and "calls for genocide of all Jews." This has created problems for several Jewish members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who oppose Omar's use of that phrase but support her against censure on free speech grounds. If Omar and others could ask instead for "equal protect of the laws", it would be harder for people (like Greene) to oppose and easier for Jews and others to support.

Less well known is the portion of the 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party that, "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Whether or not Ilhan Omar was intending to call for genocide of Jews, the current Israeli government, whose Prime Minister leads Likud, has been accused of actual genocide in a complaint to the International Court of Justice. The alleged denials of equal protection of the laws to Palestinians might be attributed in part to the editorial policies of the leading newspaper in Israel, Israel Hayom, funded by Adelson and delivered for free to anyone who wants it.

Perhaps it's better to avoid phrases like that entirely and instead demand something like "equal protection of the laws." That principle was promised by the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1868 and is still far from being implemented.

Let's broaden this question: What percent of the enemies of any country are primarily a result of routine denial of equal protection of the laws by people with power? The documentation summarized here suggests that the Palestinian violence since the Oslo Accords has largely been due to mistreatment, extended incarcerations without charges or trial, destruction of property, taking property at gun point, and even murder by Israeli security forces and settlers, unreported or underreported in the major media consumed by supporters of Israel, as noted by Ofer Cassif, a Jewish member of the Knesset. He said that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu released Yahya Sinwar, the violent leader of Hamas, in a prisoner exchange in 2011, and did not release Marwan Barghouti, who has been called a Palestinian Mandela. Is nonviolence a bigger threat than violence to the 1977 Likud promise, "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty"?

Similarly, there is substantial documentation of routine denial of equal protection to foreigners by the US and France, to name only two countries for which substantial documentation is available.

Limit state secrets privilege

Equal protection of the laws cannot be guaranteed without limiting the ability of governments to deny equal protection in secret. In the US, this would require modifying the law governing "state secrets privilege".

Under past and current US secrecy practices, US government officials have provoked foreign entities to do things that were then denounced as unprovoked to justify counterproductive uses of military force. Current US government secrecy practices encourage such dangerous behaviors, according to documentation in Connelly (2023). The US responses to the 1998 embassy bombings and the September 11 attacks are examples. The 1997 report of the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy reached conclusions similar to those of Connelly. Lying to Congress may officially be illegal, but exposing such lies has been punished severely while people who deceived Congress were rewarded, as documented with the revelations of Edward Snowden. Worse, Richard Barlow's career was reportedly destroyed merely for telling his managers they should not lie to Congress. He did not expose officially classified government secrets but only filed suit for wrongful termination.

Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking a document that showed that during a five-month operation in Afghanistan, "nearly 90% of the people killed during one five-month period ... were not the intended targets." Rep. Ilhan Omar asked President Biden to pardon Hale, because none of the documents released actually threatened US national security but instead "shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows." Similar things can be said about other whistleblowers and Julian Assange.

The need for that much secrecy is further challenged by the research by Tetlock and Gardner (2015), who reported that their "superforecasting" teams "performed about 30 percent better than the average for intelligence community analysts who could read intercepts and other secret data" in forecasting problems assigned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). If important intelligence questions can be answered -- and answered better -- without government secrecy, that reinforces the conclusions of Connelly (2023) and others, that

• excessive government secrecy threatens more than advances US national security.

We need government secrecy for some things, e.g., design and production technologies for sophisticated weapon systems and military plans for future operations. However, as the Moynihan Commission and Connelly reported, that's a tiny fraction of the information currently held as government secrets. Both claimed that the US would be safer and more prosperous if it limited government secrets to the things where government secrecy is really important.

Might similar considerations apply to Israel and Palestine?

Support training in nonviolence

As noted above, the nonviolence of the First Intifada led to the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel on a platform of negotiating with Palestinians. This, in turn, led to the Oslo Accords and the current State of Palestine. As the time since the Hamas attacks on Israel of 2023-10-07 has increased, more people in Israel, the US and internationally have become increasingly concerned that the ferocity of Israeli attacks on Gaza (and the West Bank) seems far beyond the national security needs of Israel and out of proportion to the provocation. Similarly, people are concerned that Israeli military attacks in Lebanon and Syria threaten unnecessary expansion of the war. A new nonviolent movement led by Palestinians could strengthen people in Israel and elsewhere who are opposed to the current war.

Palestinians and others could ask the US and Israel to support training in nonviolent civil disobedience for anyone interested, including designated "terrorists". A demand like this should be difficult for people to oppose and could make it easier for people in many places to effectively work toward equal protection of the laws and for redress of other grievances.

However, it is currently a criminal violation of the USA Patriot Act to provide such training to anyone designated as a "terrorist" by the US State Department, per the Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010). That law should be changed to support rather than criminalize such training.

How might the world be different if the US had vigorously supported rather than criminalized training Hamas and other designated "terrorists" in nonviolence? In particular, what are the chances that the Hamas-led attack on Israel of 2023-10-07 would have happened if Palestinians could have seen progress in response to nonviolent protests against many of the outrages documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and others? Currently few supporters of Israel seem to have any substantive awareness of the many outrages against Palestinians committed by people they support, because the media they find credible rarely if ever provides a balanced account of such outrages. If the US government had more openly supported such training, nonviolent protests facilitated by that training would likely have gotten better coverage in Israeli and international news. That in turn would likely have made it harder for the Israeli government to continue depriving Palestinians of equal protection of the laws so egregiously. It may also have made Palestinian government entities more responsive to the concerns of their people, which also could have reduced the risks of events like those of 2023-10-07.

Citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits

The Wikiversity article on "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government" suggests randomized controlled trials to evaluate the long-term impact of citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits distributed via local elections, as recommended by McChesney and Nichols (2021, 2022). They suggest distributing 0.15% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to local news non-profits via local elections with a limit on the maximum that any one local news organization could receive. Evidence summarized in that Wikiversity article suggests that the increases in political polarization in many countries in recent years may be due in part to a loss of local news, as advertising money has increasingly shifted to Internet companies that hire few if any journalists.

To apply this to Israel and Palestine, we first note that their nominal GDPs in 2021 were $482 and $18 billion US$, respectively, totaling $500 billion. 0.15% of those numbers is $723 and $27 million, totaling $750 million. That may sound like a lot of money, but it's only 3.2% of the 2022 military budget of Israel of $23.4 billion. It's also roughly three times what Israel was spending each day in the first month of the Israel-Hamas war,, 21% of the $3.6 billion that the US gave Israel in 2021, and 3% of the $26 billion that the US reportedly authorized for Israel 2024-04-24.

If media subsidies like these make a substantive contribution to reducing the political polarization that has driven this conflict at least since the creation of Israel in 1948, it should help build broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term for Israelis and Palestinians. If it also reduced the calls for Israel to use nuclear weapons in Gaza or eased relations between Israel and Iran, it would be money well spent.

If any of these things happen, it would likely be the best investment in national security that Israel has made ever. This conjecture rests on the claims made above about news deserts, the "click economy", and Israel Hayom. If this works as predicted, it would also provide a shining example of new social technology that could help diffuse many other seemingly intractable conflicts around the globe.

Conclusions

We are not advocating an answer but a methodology that leading organizations have used successfully to build effective marketing campaigns worth billions of dollars: (i) Start by enunciating an objective like building broadly shared peace and prosperity while ending a cycle of violence. (ii) Brainstorm alternative approaches. (iii) Evaluate and refine them in focus groups. (iv) Test market the ones that seem most promising, and (v) go with what seems to work, (vi) while continuing to monitor results and adjusting accordingly.

You, dear reader, may have other ideas that might be more effective than any of the things discussed herein to break the cycle of violence and build broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term.

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