Economists like looking at state conflicts through a game-theoretic approach. Game theory is a framework consisting of players, payoffs, and strategies. In this case with two players: Israel and Palestine. Payoffs are inverse fatalities (minimizing fatalities on one's own side). The fabulous paper “The Cycle of Violence? An Empirical Analysis of Fatalities in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” (Jaeger and Paserman, 2008) uses this framework to analyze the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
The Setup
The authors examine fatalities in the conflict between the years 2000 and 2005. In this period there were 3300 Palestinian fatalities and 1000 Israeli fatalities. These are recorded with exact dates. Both Israeli Fatalities (Isr) and Palestinian Fatalities (Pal) get a time-lagged function.
For Israeli action, leading to Palestinian fatalities the function looks like this:
Here Palestinian fatalities in time t are a function of Israeli deaths in time t-1 and Palestinian fatalities in t-1. In general terms, we try to predict today's Palestinian casualties by looking at previous Israeli and Palestinian casualties. The “previous” is defined and calculated 1-14 days prior.
The Palestinian action function looks similar:
Here Israeli Fatalities are a function of previous Palestinian and Israeli fatalities.
Strategies
We now discussed the players and the payoffs (strategies). The authors identify three possible strategies: Incapacitation, Deterrence, and Tit for Tat. Let’s talk those through in an example for the Israeli side.
Incapacitation would be if Israeli fatalities go down because Palestinian fatalities in t-1 went up. The killing of Palestinians leads to Palestinians having a hard time retaliating, thus being incapacitated, thus leading to fewer Pal deaths.
Deterrence has the same causality but different reasoning. Here due to a high number of Palestinian fatalities, Palestine is reluctant to retaliate
Lastly Tit for Tat: It predicts Israeli deaths deaths to go up if Palestinian deaths went up because Palestine strikes back.
The Result:
The results are clear: Every Israeli death leads to 2.19 Palestinian deaths (statistically significant). Every Palestinian death leads to 0.247 Israeli deaths (not statistically significant). Palestinian attacks are non-correlated with Israeli attacks. They do not depend on Palestinian or Israeli casualties. If anything, they are deterred or incapacitated by Israeli attacks. On the other hand, Israeli attacks are depended on Palestinian attacks. Here previous Israeli deaths lead to current Palestinian deaths. Israelis thus use a tit for tat strategy. The authors conclude: “Our results suggest that a cessation of Palestinian violence against Israel may eventually lead to an overall reduction in the level of violence.” I would conclude: The Israeli government is only as bad as the lethal actions preceded by Palestinian authorities.
Limitations:
This study only looks at the action and reaction in terms of deaths. One could argue that Israeli non-lethal aggressions come first, leading to Palestinian aggression, leading to Israeli deaths, leading to Palestinian deaths. This is hard to investigate since there is no tangible data on non-lethal aggression. Another critique could claim that the 2000-2005 period is data picking. Further investigation of other years would strengthen this theory. In general, the paper is set out to study a very concise set of data, which might run into problems
Further reading on the economics of tit for tat:
Tit for tat the best strategy to get defectors to cooperate in a multi-period 2 player game:
“In 1980, Robert Axelrod, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, held a tournament of various strategies for the prisoner's dilemma. He invited several well-known game theorists to submit strategies to be run by computers. In the tournament, programs played games against each other and themselves repeatedly. Each strategy specified whether to cooperate or defect based on the previous moves of both the strategy and its opponent.”
If this were the Palestinian- Israeli conflict we would ask Palestinian authorities and Israeli authorities to submit a attack trigger system dependent on previous deaths of their own or the opponent, or any other strategy that a computer can execute.
“Some of the strategies submitted (in the Axelroud tournament) were:
Always defect: This strategy defects on every turn. This is what game theory advocates. It is the safest strategy since it cannot be taken advantage of. However, it misses the chance to gain larger payoffs by cooperating with an opponent who is ready to cooperate.
Always cooperate: This strategy does very well when matched against itself. However, if the opponent chooses to defect, then this strategy will do badly.
Random: The strategy cooperates 50% of the time.
All of these strategies are prescribed in advance. Therefore, they cannot take advantage of knowing the opponent's previous moves and figuring out its strategy.
The winner of Axelrod's tournament was the TIT FOR TAT strategy. The strategy cooperates on the first move and then does whatever its opponent has done on the previous move. Thus, when matched against the all-defect strategy, TIT FOR TAT strategy always defects after the first move. When matched against the all-cooperate strategy, TIT FOR TAT always cooperates. This strategy has the benefit of both cooperating with a friendly opponent, getting the full benefits of cooperation, and of defecting when matched against an opponent who defects. When matched against itself, the TIT FOR TAT strategy always cooperates.
Several variations to TIT FOR TAT have been proposed. TIT FOR TWO TATS is a forgiving strategy that defects only when the opponent has defected twice in a row. TWO TITS FOR TAT, on the other hand, is a strategy that punishes every defection with two of its own.”
One might argue that Israel represents a TWO TITS FOR TAT to incapacitate and deter the Palestinian side
References
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