Political Spinner

Israelis are supposed to be innovative, imaginative and proactive; in their dealings with Hamas, as they attempt to negotiate the release of Israel’s captive soldier, Gilad Shalit, Israel’s negotiating team shows none of these attributes: instead, they are rigid, conservative, reactive and in general smell like a bunch of yesterday’s alpha males.

What do the Hamas want most? They want to present themselves to their constituencies as assertive, and most of all as successful in dealing with their arch enemy, the Israelis.

What do the Israelis want most? They want to deny Hamas a public relations (as well as a political) coup – an almost sure thing in the aftermath of a deal, with its mass victory parades, and emotion-filled reunions between released prisoners and their families. Another thing that Israelis are desperate to avoid is the wave of gloom and anger that they know will wash over their country in the face of Hamas’s victory celebrations.

The only way Israel could hope to mitigate a Hamas public relations coup is by either scuttling the deal (which many in Israel wish), or by creating a worthy diversion to Hamas’s victory parade. In order to do that Israel’s negotiators and its decision makers have to think creatively, something they appear to be almost genetically incapable of (for a long time now).

Israel’s first mistake is its instinctive resistance of Hamas’s demand for an exchange ratio of 1000:1. Instead of leveraging the demand into a public relation demonstration of Hamas’s apparent low opinion of its own people, to the extent that they think that a single Israeli is worth a thousand Palestinians, Israel is creating a bargaining situation that is irrelevant and cannot be won under any scenario. So what if Israel manages to keep two or three prisoners in prison? So what if they manage to have a few prisoners exiled to Gaza or to Ireland? How would that mitigate Hamas’s victory? It would not.

But if Israeli negotiators had the guts, the imagination and the ability to think creatively, they would have dealt with the situation differently from the start.

The best way to mitigate a Hamas victory is to create another, competing and compelling, winner in the same arena. Such a winner can be the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel had a chance to strengthen Abbas’s position, get rid of some of the thousands of prisoners it keeps in its prisons, and throw cold water over Hamas’s victory, by starting a gradual, continuous, release of Palestinian prisoners to the West Bank, to the hands of Abbas’s officials. Such a release, say 50 prisoners every week, over a long period (years now), would have created a situation where prisoners releases are a routine; the population and the media are inured to the spectacle, Abbas’s administration is collecting the good will of its constituency, and Hamas is gradually being pushed to the shadows of the vaunted prisoners release process. Even if Hamas does get to bring home a few hundred prisoners to seal the deal with Israel, that would not play the same exclusive tune after a long period of prisoners release to the West Bank.

If they wanted to be even more creative, Israeli negotiators could have told Hamas: “Why only a thousand? You are right, one of our soldiers is worth thousands of yours; we’ll give you two thousands.”

But these are all idle thoughts. Israeli negotiators will not become nimble thinkers. Israeli decision makers, mostly ex generals and other “accomplished” negotiators and dispute resolution pros, will never learn how to do anything but jockey for position, gritting their teeth and searching for a place to unleash some violence. A pity for all of us.