A Review of the Book Life Is Negotiations

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Deanship of Scientific Research at An-Najah National University recently published a book by Dr. Saeb Erekat titled Life Is Negotiations. Its release was accompanied by a large media campaign emphasizing the book’s scholarly and professional quality and its having been peer-reviewed. Professor Rami Hamdallah, president of An-Najah University, prefaced the book by saying: “The value of this book made me eager to take on its printing and publication, to place it in the hands of readers and thinkers, because it truly constitutes solid, rich, and robust ground for students, and I am not exaggerating if I say it is among the most important political books of our time.”

I read the book and found that it engages in three main areas: the political philosophy of negotiation, negotiating methodology, and the technical aspects of the negotiating process. The book as a whole does not speak directly about the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, but treats the question of negotiation in general, as a near-daily human activity, whether at the level of individuals, groups, or states. Yet the reader would not be mistaken to assume that the book is, at bottom, concerned with the negotiating process that has been under way between Palestinians and Israelis for a long time, a process in which Dr. Saeb has been one of the key figures on the Palestinian side.

I recorded many observations on the book’s arrangement, methodology, and ideas, and I will lay them out in this review with a good deal of brevity. Let me note first that the book’s usefulness lies largely in its treatment of the technical aspects of negotiating performance — such as attending to a certain appearance, cultivating eloquence in speech, the ability to understand the other side, and reading feelings and what lies behind words, and so on. But even this is not free of problems, which I believe the author has overburdened and pulled out of the register of negotiating skill. I will come to some of these below.

The Title of the Book

The title Life Is Negotiations is harshly reductive — harsh not only toward the human being but toward the very concept of life itself. There is no doubt that negotiation is never absent from the daily life of individuals and peoples, but it is neither wise, nor fair, nor just to reduce life to negotiation. Most human activity is not negotiation; it falls under countless other headings we could scarcely enumerate. A person plans for his future, for instance, exerts effort on his farm or in his shop, works to develop his children’s abilities, and makes decisions about his food, his comings and goings, and so on, without needing another party to pull against him or negotiate with him.

The title is violent because it constrains life in an arbitrary way, such that it can be read as the projection of a personal experience — one the author may not himself be at ease with — onto everyone else. Perhaps it is a form of self-justification, through excessive insistence on the soundness of the negotiating path Dr. Saeb has walked. A different title could have been formulated that affirmed the importance of negotiation without asserting its dominion over every facet of life.

Technical Aspects of the Writing

There are a number of technical, writerly matters that ought to have been taken into account. I note some of them:

1. The book is a personal account, not a scholarly study, and its proper place for publication is not the Deanship of Scientific Research. There are publishing houses interested in personal accounts, ready to publish a book like this one. From a research standpoint, the book is documented only rarely, and if I were to accept it academically, I would accept only certain parts of it as an introduction to the technical aspects of negotiation.

2. The book repeats itself constantly, restating the same ideas from one moment to the next. For example, the author mentions interests as the basis of the conduct of individuals and states on page 12, and repeats it on page 16. The phrase “the factors shared among human beings” is repeated in several places, as are the points of commonality between negotiators, and understanding and empathizing with the other side.

3. Many paragraphs are extremely short and serve no purpose, because they are unexplained and lack logical sequence. It is well known in scholarly research that the material of a study is organized into paragraphs, each beginning with an idea carried in its first sentence, followed by several sentences that explain the idea. One then moves to the next paragraph, logically and informationally connected to the one preceding it, and so on. For example, a paragraph on page 8 reads: “Conflict has accompanied human beings since the beginning, and so has negotiation.” This is an extremely important sentence that would need an entire volume to substantiate, and no scholar can simply state it and turn his back. Another paragraph, on page 79, reads: “What we wish to say here is: the most important thing that makes negotiation a successful process rests on our capacity to understand human nature, on preparedness, on our identification of the interests we are trying to reach, and on the common ground we must reach with the other side through a defined strategy. All this, and more, comes together to form the tools of negotiation.” Notice here that the word “preparedness” is left unpaired with anything. As for human nature, scholars have so far been unable to define it; it remains the subject of complex and thorny scientific research across various fields of knowledge, and I do not think the Palestinian negotiator will be capable, over the coming decades, of understanding human nature.

4. Logical sequence throughout the book is shaky, and topics are interwoven in a fragile, unflowing manner. Consider, for example, page 15, which is crowded with scattered ideas from here and there. It is true these ideas relate to the subject, but there is no flow between them, and no paragraph is given its due explanation. The page opens with “life is negotiations,” then moves to voluntary negotiations, then to negotiation as a science built on the intersection of disciplines, then to the negotiator’s interests, then to the notion that negotiation carries no shame, then to studying the other side. The ideas rush past as though the author is carrying a burden in his mind that he wants to unload.

Philosophical Aspects

The book contains a number of philosophical fallacies and logical fractures. I note some of them:

a. The book says on page 6: “Wherever interests are found, conflicts are found.” Someone might counter that wherever interests are found, cooperation is found. Hobbes, the British philosopher, would agree with Dr. Saeb, but Locke would find it very hard to agree. This is a sentence carrying an extremely broad generalization that cannot possibly encompass the whole history of relations among human beings, or of humanity’s relationship with its surroundings.

b. The author says on page 7: “It is self-evident and natural that we should raise such questions. Wherever conflicts are found, negotiations were found, and both are means to reach ends.” And in the same vein, on page 13: “If conflicts are inevitable, and part of our daily life, then negotiations are — also inevitable, and part of our life.” These two sentences contain a major philosophical fallacy: the derivation does not belong to the same category as the basic premise, and is not contained within it. In logic, an author sets out a basic premise he believes to be true, then descends through a chain of successive derivations, each resting on and implicitly contained within the one before it; otherwise the derivation is invalid. For instance, I might say that rain falls only when clouds are present, but I commit a grave error if I then say the sky will rain because there are clouds. The clouds may bring rain, or they may not.

Dr. Saeb, in the derivation above, sets out a basic premise that is not easily accepted, and then makes a derivation that falls outside its scope. If conflicts are inevitable, the means and methods of waging them are many, including surrender, continued war, and negotiation. Negotiation is one form that waging a conflict can take, not the only form. History offers us lessons on this score. Beyond that, conflicts are historically contingent occurrences, and I cannot, as a matter of scholarship, affirm their inevitability. And if the basic premise is in doubt, the derivation is in doubt as well.

c. The author says on page 12: “The factor shared among the negotiating behavior of different nations and peoples lies in the fact that individuals, like states, act as though they were slaves to their interests.” If we trace history, many nations have moved according to things other than interests — nations wishing to spread a religion or an idea, for instance. Someone might say these nations, too, seek their interests in the end, because they want the reward of the hereafter. Here I cannot explain the material by the metaphysical, or offer any explanation that does not belong to the same category as the phenomenon it explains. Scientific material rests on causality, and the metaphysical does not explain the material — at least not for me, since I have no knowledge of the metaphysical, notwithstanding the possibility of faith-based certainty.

d. A paragraph on page 15 reads: “Life is negotiations for human beings; what we will try to establish in this work are the shared factors among human beings for replacing discord with cooperation. Negotiation is not merely one of the tools of necessity — negotiation is a need.” Here the author removes all doubt and affirms that life is negotiations for human beings, but he fails to distinguish between bashar (humankind as a biological species) and nas (people, as social, communicating beings). Negotiations do not take place among bashar but among nas, given that bashar only became human (insan) through its distinguishing capacities, among them interpersonal conversation and the transmission of information. Do we not see that the Qur’an does not address al-bashar, but al-nas?

The bigger problem here is that Dr. Saeb considers negotiation a “need.” I would ask him to consult the psychologists on this point, because a need pertains to natural matters embedded in human constitution, while a necessity pertains to human movement within the flux of life. There is nothing at all in current scholarship to suggest that negotiation is a need in the way food and drink are needs; rather, there are many necessities that crystallize for a person as his dealings with his surroundings and environment expand. A need has a natural dimension, while a necessity has a historical and social dimension. And I would note here that Dr. Saeb uses the word “natural” a great deal, which is a philosophically mistaken usage. It may be acceptable at the popular level, but it is not acceptable at the scholarly level.

e. The author says on page 14: “Everyone is keen to replace discord with cooperation, and to have regard for interests by building common ground.” Who is this “everyone”? This is a sentence no scholar should dare utter, because it contains a sweeping generalization covering everyone above the earth, and perhaps everyone beneath it too. And has Israel ever, even once, respected this rule Dr. Saeb speaks of?

f. The book says on page 15: “For all human beings, negotiation is a voluntary process.” It seems the author has forgotten that he wrote negotiation is a need and that life is negotiations. Here it has suddenly become voluntary rather than inevitable.

g. The book says on page 13: “Everyone seeks a free, stable, secure, and prosperous life, far from the pains of deprivation, poverty, and scarcity of resources.” This statement is simply not true. There are, on this earth, the greedy, the exploitative, the covetous, and the occupiers, and we cannot issue absolute behavioral generalizations when we see with our own eyes, as history shows us, that evil often prevails. There are those who plunder the wealth of peoples, sit atop their glories, and inflict injustice on others, and so on.

h. There is a passage that reads: “Negotiation is not a match or a battle; it is the way to achieve interests, goals, and aspirations, and to protect rights and achievements.” In another passage the author says negotiation is “the means”… He adds the definite article to “way” and “means,” restricting them, whereas negotiation constitutes a way toward achieving interests, not the way. It is as though the author wants to project his own experience with the Israelis, and his own view of the way to a solution, onto his readers. Negotiation, historically, is a means, not the means; a way, not the way.

i. On page 17 the author says: “Are we all, together (jamee’an), a group (majmoo’ah) of negotiators?” One cannot pair a word expressing quality with a word expressing quantity in this way. “Jamee’an” expresses a quality — collectiveness — while “majmoo’ah” expresses a quantity — a grouping; the first expresses collectivity, the second individuality.

j. On page 18 there is scholarly confusion when the author says that “after that we will devote space to the hypothesis (al-fardiyyah), and try to distinguish between hypothesis and truth, and how one reaches truth through assumptions (al-iftiradat).” Dr. Saeb: a hypothesis is an intelligent guess as to what the outcome of research might be, but research may end up confirming or refuting it. As for how one can reach truth through assumptions — assumptions are basic theoretical rules the author (not the researcher) adopts and builds upon as though they were truth itself, which is an unscholarly method. On page 113, the author places a heading titled “The Hypothesis,” and then proceeds to speak about assumptions, as though he does not distinguish between a hypothesis and an assumption.

k. On page 57, and elsewhere, the author confuses the words “understanding” (fahm) and “empathizing with” (tafahhum), using them as though they carry the same meaning. He wants us to understand the other side in negotiations, and then he wants us to empathize with it. What negotiation requires is understanding the other side so that we can plan our next steps, while empathizing with it carries a positive connotation — acceptance of its position.

Themes of the Book

Dr. Saeb touches on many themes in the book, most of them centered on the technicalities of the negotiating process, but he also brushes past other subjects quickly and offers hasty conclusions about them that he asks us to accept. Among these themes:

1. Interests and positions. Dr. Saeb says in several places that negotiations should not proceed according to positions but according to interests. For instance, he says on page 58: “Upon discovering a contradiction in positions, one must study the reasons each side adopted its position, and we will find that positions develop according to what we see as interests we want to preserve and not compromise. Accordingly, instead of focusing on positions, one focuses on interests, and then the chances are greater of finding solutions that accommodate the interests of all parties.” Here Dr. Saeb does not indicate how these interests take shape, or whether they are legitimate by any given standard. For instance, what interests governed the Zionists’ seizure of Palestine with British assistance? Or must I accept interests as the Israelis define them, after they displaced a people, killed its sons, and destroyed its country? Is there any way to measure the question of interests in the negotiating process, and must I understand interests by their historical roots, or by their present reality?

Positions are what determine interests, and positions spring originally from the strategic goals a nation sets for itself by national or patriotic consensus, recorded in writing and preserved constitutionally and judicially. A negotiator does not go to the negotiating table to explain his positions, but to obtain his demands, or part of them — yet positions remain the guide for shaping and presenting interests, and must remain alive in the negotiator’s mind. And if a negotiator finds himself with no choice but to make a concession, he must return to his nation to have the positions themselves changed.

We, for example, signed the Oslo Accord even though it contradicts the Palestinian National Charter, and we did not amend the Charter until years after implementation had begun. This was a crime against the Palestinian people. Israel, meanwhile, says it supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, yet to this day it has not changed its security doctrine, which holds that there is to be no state west of the river other than the State of Israel. Why must we change our positions, while we do not demand the same of Israel? I know that the American school of thought inundates us with hollow positions and drowns us in the mire of financial “requirements” (not needs), while, in return, it supplies Israel with ever more weapons of destruction. And if the matter is one of interests rather than positions, then it is entirely possible we might sell Al-Aqsa for a few billion and build a more beautiful, more spacious mosque than the one now standing, and save some money besides for entertainment and leisure.

Interests are directly bound up with positions, which may be material, moral, historical, educational, or a mixture of several kinds. Some people, for instance, have no material interest that outweighs the interest of national unity, in which they see their own dignity. Others will never agree to trade what they feel to be their personal honor for any amount of status, money, or power. And there are certainly those who accept humiliation and disgrace for themselves in exchange for media exposure or proximity to power. Interests are, moreover, difficult to define: they have a short, attractive range and a longer range that requires prolonged and exhausting effort, and the interests of nations in particular require the concerted scholarly, national, and moral effort needed to define or change them according to new strategic standards.

2. Interests and power. Dr. Saeb speaks a great deal about interests, but refers only bashfully to the power needed to achieve them. Achieving interests requires will, allies, resources, weapons, ethics, scholarly research, and so on. The elements of power are numerous and varied and hard to enumerate exhaustively, and there is no escaping the need for them if interests, at any level, are to be realized. Dr. Saeb writes on pages 127–128: “Individuals, like states, are slaves to interests; in the pursuit of interests, alliances, agreements, and conspiracies are formed, roles are exchanged, and spoils divided. Individuals, like states too, become strong, or find alliances with the strong that enable them to face those stronger than themselves. Power in politics is relative. And as long as there are human beings, there will be no permanent alliances, partnerships, or friendships — just as there will be no permanent conflicts, states of hostility, or rivalry. It is a world of variables and becoming. You must always read these changes well, so that you can protect what you believe to be your interests.” It is clear the author is confused, or torn, and does not quite know what he wants to say. In the same paragraph he jumps from one topic to another, with no logical thread holding it together for the reader to grasp anything from it. He speaks of alliances and conspiracies, of continuity, muddles variables and changes, and speaks of power and its relativity. In any case, he broaches the subject of power and does not follow through, and his sentence about power arrives with no depth or connection to what precedes or follows it.

There is no need for shyness in saying that interests unsupported by power are never realized, and that a right lacking power remains lost in the corridors of the promises of the powerful.

Continuing this very timid treatment of power, Dr. Saeb writes on page 74: “As for the power of the company, or the power of the other side’s guns and weapons — the greater the strength of the one facing you, the better it is for you to negotiate, and if the equation rests on the logic of power on the other side, your own equation must rest on the power of logic, and on building the best alliances.” This is a tragic statement, one that not even the most extreme theorists of submission among philosophers would accept as a strange notion of this kind. It is as though Dr. Saeb is telling us to pack our bags and leave Palestine for good. The power of logic is necessary, but it can never be a substitute for power itself; and if anyone looks to the Indian experience, that too was an experience never devoid of the force of popular momentum that imposed itself on Britain. Logic alone cannot accomplish anything essential when facing tyrannical powers that respect no human values and are restrained by no moral deterrent.

Negotiations do not begin when a person is weak; otherwise they turn into the weak begging the strong. The negotiating table requires parity, and parity is achieved only when two or more parties possess comparable power. The Palestinian leadership chose to go to the negotiating table at its weakest moment, and so it has continued to hope for something substantial regarding the national rights of the Palestinian people, but to no avail. After long years, the weaker party obtains the opening of a checkpoint here or there, or the release of a small number of prisoners, and so on. Negotiation requires moral, material, ethical, military, and logical strength, or else hopes are lost in the depths of a weakness justified by the “power of logic.” Israel today will give the Palestinians nothing but what amuses them in their daily lives, and it will continue with its customary measures unless it finds someone who deters it by force.

In the paragraph cited above, Dr. Saeb asks the negotiator to “build the best alliances,” without explaining to us how we are to build these “best” ones. But he does, on pages 125–127, tell us what he means, through the story of the rabbit allied with the lion. The doctor wants us to ally with a lion, without telling us which lion has been chosen. This, in itself, is also a form of dependency. One must first search within oneself for the sources of strength, then in one’s environment, and only after that in external forces that might extend a hand of help or mutual cooperation — but whoever insists on his own weakness will find no one willing to ally with him. The Palestinian negotiator’s Arab allies are selling out the Arab nation, even as he calls on them to support him against Israel’s daily measures of Judaizing the land and uprooting its people.

Dr. Saeb calls for negotiating as the enemy gains ever more power, resting his case on the logic of the weak, but he does not tell the reader that Israel and America believe in the theory of power in international relations, that Israel has repeatedly declared its policy rests on deterring the Arabs militarily, whether collectively or individually, and that America has repeatedly declared that peace cannot be achieved in the Arab-Islamic region except with a militarily strong Israel. Dr. Saeb’s adversaries believe in power, even if they occasionally, in rare moments of ease, present themselves as reasonable, but they show no human moral value whatsoever when they feel their interests are threatened. For this reason it is difficult for the negotiator to accomplish anything unless Israel knows that the one facing it has trained to lift heavy weights.

3. Commands to the reader. There are commands issued to the reader throughout the book, repeated in several places. In addressing newcomers to negotiation, the book says on page 80: “… and you must remember that the hardest stage in building a bridge is the beginning, …” and: “At the outset you must realize that, whatever the background against which you view the person sitting across from you, and however sharp your past experiences, or however negative the ideas you have formed — which may reach the point of hatred, resentment, fear, and mistrust — remember that you are about to turn a new page. You must begin anew, for you are searching for common ground.”

I believe it is the right of one who has succeeded at something to offer advice to those who wish to enter his field, but it is not the right of one who has failed to issue commands to others. The entire Palestinian negotiating team has failed, has not delivered on a single one of the promises it made to the Palestinian people, and has led the country to further deterioration on both the internal and external levels. For this reason it is important for Dr. Saeb to reconsider this whole failed experience, stretching across twenty years, before he issues the reader commands and guidance. Had commands been of any use, the Palestinian negotiator would have achieved something by now.

4. Soliciting the reader’s sympathy. Amid the book’s internal contradictions, the author tries to solicit the reader’s sympathy, as though wanting to say he tried sincerely and simply could not succeed. This is clear on pages 77–80. These pages are full of terminological confusion, lack focus, and are dominated by an emotional tone.

5. The Western school of negotiating conduct. A school has emerged in the West, particularly in the United States, that provides guidance for weak negotiators who possess no leverage of their own, and it is now widespread across the world, taught to young trainees in centers or non-governmental organizations concerned with conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This school arose because intellectuals, thinkers, and politicians from oppressed or wronged peoples hesitated to negotiate and reach solutions that settle matters in favor of the strong, with the weak simply signing off. The exercise of brute force failed to produce solutions, particularly regarding the Palestinian cause, and alternatives had to be sought.

The West resorted to recruiting Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, through money and under the banner of scholarship and research, to open and run non-governmental organizations working to promote Western culture and thought, in order to ease the passage of Western solutions to the Palestinian cause. These intellectuals need a great deal of time to build up a strong stratum working among the people, in direct contact with Western states, on the best ways to soften positions. The Western states have succeeded in establishing footholds, and have deployed their media to promote individuals who adopt their ideas so that they might become “national leaders.” These individuals now sit atop millions of dollars, enjoying broad local and foreign media coverage.

A fair portion of Dr. Saeb’s book consists of a reproduction of Western ideas on the foundations and premises of negotiation. I invite the reader to examine the second chapter, first part. This part echoes the most important Western ideas aimed at the intellectuals of subjugated peoples: focus on interests, not positions; build relationships of trust with the other side; recognize that the other side has requirements too; separate from the past at the negotiating table; understand the other side’s premises; and detach the negotiator from himself. These are ideas built by the strong, because through them the strong can control the weak. Under the banner of scholarship and rationality, intellectuals adopt propositions of this kind. It may be worth remembering that peoples who freed themselves from Western domination did not cling to these ideas, and that only those who did cling to them ended up with nothing but scraps of financial support.

Technical Aspects of Negotiating Performance

Dr. Saeb offers, in his book, a great many technical points on negotiating performance in general — points of real importance to young students who will wage the battle of life at its various levels. The book’s final chapters cover these matters under several headings, such as working hypothesis, two-party negotiation with a third party present, and mediation. But even here the treatment is not free of flaws. For instance, Dr. Saeb translates the word “assumption” as fardiyyah (hypothesis), when it in fact means iftirad (assumption). The difference between the two words is vast. Likewise his advice on page 194 about using legitimacy “with both firmness and flexibility.”

On the question of legitimacy, it is historically well known that it is the powerful who write the laws, and when the laws conflict with their interests, they revert to their own unwritten legitimacy, meaning simply that power is legitimacy. I recall here that the leaders of Palestine met in Nablus in 1923 and swore to achieve the country’s independence through the legitimate frameworks then in force. Britain, of course, was the source of that legitimacy — and the greater part of Palestine was lost, and the people were driven out. Even now, Palestinians are still searching for a state of their own, or independence, or a right within the legitimacy of those who conspired against them, displaced them, and killed their children.

Conclusion

The book lacks scholarly methodology and coherent logical thought, and is dominated by a lack of focus and a failure to give assumptions their due explanation. It is full of repeated ideas, and sometimes repeated phrases. It could easily be condensed to about sixty pages concerned solely with the technical matters, set apart from the intellectual and methodological issues.

I invite students to read the book — each with his own analytical capacity — and to take part in the debate it invites, for the enrichment this brings to scholarly and intellectual life on the Palestinian scene.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “مراجعة لكتاب الحياة مفاوضات” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.