The Genius of Negotiating With a 1% Chance

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian people are truly fortunate that Mr. Mahmoud Abbas leads the Palestinian Authority, and that he will keep charging into peace and negotiations even if the odds of success shrink to a mere 1%. Here is a leader of exceptionally high self-confidence, one who does not bend even under the darkest circumstances and the harshest odds. He is persistent, patient, determined, and possesses an extraordinary capacity for sustained failure. At a Ramadan iftar celebration, he announced that he would continue with negotiations no matter what — without objection from those who regard themselves as representatives of Islam, the men of the white turbans with a red patch at the center.

Leaders of states, parties, and organizations calculate the odds bearing on the success of their policies, and constantly try to take the steps needed to raise those odds; they hesitate a great deal before proceeding with a given policy if they find the chances of success to be low. Good leaders calculate carefully: they add and subtract, multiply and divide, they think matters over again and again, and they summon advisors, experts, and specialists to help weigh, estimate, and evaluate. They guard against haste, knowing that their decisions touch entire peoples, even an entire nation, and understanding that their errors carry consequences far too great to be confined to a small handful of people.

There are leaders who are not reassured by a 70% chance of success, and who deliberate at length over the measures needed to raise or maintain that figure before deciding to act; there are leaders who agonize a great deal over their assessment when the odds of success stand at 60%; and others who change the entire course of their thinking when they see the odds at 50%. Leaders of states and peoples do not gamble with their peoples’ destinies, and are not prepared to bet everything on the hope that the wheel of fortune will spin in their favor. A true leader builds, plans, develops, improves, involves his people and asks for their support, and continuously weighs matters in order to build the capacities that will bring him success across every field.

This holds true for the surgeon who weighs the odds of a surgical operation’s success before ever picking up the scalpel, and it holds true for individuals who want to carry out some particular act in pursuit of some particular goal. Everywhere on earth, a person, a group, or a party thinks carefully about the odds of success for the steps they intend to take, and if they find those odds falling, they retreat in favor of devising a new plan and new steps. Those whom falling odds do not deter are not distinguished by intelligence — or perhaps success was never really part of their calculations to begin with, or the success they actually intend to achieve is not the one they have publicly announced.

From Abbas’s persistence, the following can be deduced:

First: for Abbas, negotiation is an ideology, not a mechanism for reaching a goal. For him, negotiation is a goal in itself, or a way of life he will never divorce — and his own chief negotiator expressed exactly this in a book titled Life Is Negotiations. Life is never free of negotiation, whether at the individual or collective level, but negotiation is properly a mechanism or a tool for reaching understanding and resolving existing problems; when it turns into an ideology, however, it becomes an absurd activity with no goal of its own. An ideology of negotiation is a pagan ritual, empty of substance, whose value lies solely in its own ritual performance.

None of this is strange, coming from Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, who adopted the idea of negotiation back in the 1970s, and stood against resistance on the grounds that it was futile — the very man who has repeated, again and again, that he will negotiate even if negotiations fail, and negotiate again if they fail once more, and go on negotiating and negotiating.

[…] by his declaration that he will continue negotiating, Abbas is insisting on failure, since it is extremely unlikely that the 1% will blossom into success, while the 99% probability collapses into failure. Palestinian logic calls on Mr. Abbas to reconsider every aspect of the negotiations the moment the odds of success deteriorate to 60%, or 50%; but his disregard for logical reasoning, and for the simplest rules of successful political action, means that he is insisting on failure. And if he insists on Palestinian failure, then he is, by the same token, insisting on the other side’s success — and this is a calamity of the first order.

Third: through his declaration, Abbas defies the sentiments of the great majority of Palestinians wherever they may be, and defies the various Palestinian factions and parties that have announced their opposition to resuming negotiations. Logic dictates that Abbas, were he genuinely concerned with the unity of the people and the unity of the factions, would call for broad meetings and open discussion across the Palestinian scene, at home and abroad. But having chosen instead to defy differing opinions, he is plainly unconcerned with extricating the Palestinian people from the impasse of division and fragmentation.

Fourth: Abbas’s declaration is entirely consistent with the ongoing security coordination with the Israelis, and with the defense of Israeli security. Defending Israeli security stands in flat contradiction to the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people, and Abbas’s declaration regarding negotiations stands in flat contradiction to those same rights. In other words, the declaration is consistent with preserving Israeli security, which means the negotiations are never aimed, in the first place, at recovering national rights. The negotiations may perhaps achieve certain humanitarian gains — an increase in the number of Palestinian workers allowed into Israel, say, or the release of some detainees — but this will never develop into a discussion of the people’s fixed national rights, foremost among them the right to self-determination.

Fifth: it is possible for a person to negotiate while, at the same time, taking care to develop his alternatives, so as not to find himself standing out in the open with nothing. Mr. Abbas develops no alternatives whatsoever, and leaves the people at the mercy of that 1%.

Sixth: it is a basic principle of the art of negotiation that one must never expose oneself before one’s enemy, or before the other party, at the negotiating table. Through his declaration, Mr. Abbas is telling the Israelis that he is not searching for alternatives, and that the only road open to him is negotiation. By implication, he is telling the Israelis that they may continue confiscating land and building settlements, since whatever they do, the negotiations will not stop.

Seventh: here we see the full depth of the crime committed against the Palestinian people when their very livelihood was tied to money coming from the donor states. People like myself said, back in 1994, that this was a tremendous crime, and that the people ought to reject such an arrangement — but logic, it seems, was nowhere to be found in the face of self-interest, and the result is that we have had to surrender our political will in exchange for money. Our slogan now is: “we will kneel, but we will not starve.” And yet a people determined to live free does not starve — free people, in the end, are the ones who make the bread. Now, it is our political decisions that make the bread; we are hostages to the salaries of the Authority’s employees and the cars of its dignitaries.

Despite everything said above, I return once more to tell people what I have been repeating since 1979 about the inauthenticity of the Palestinian leaderships. My assessment has been clear and plain for decades: that the Palestinian leaderships are not genuine leaderships, and that the people will find themselves moving from one concession to the next, driven by repeated setbacks and by the forces of division and fragmentation. However strong the logic may be, the upper hand will always belong to the entanglements.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “عبقرية التفاوض باحتمال 1%” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.