The Genius of Negotiating with a One-Percent Chance

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian people are very fortunate that Mr. Mahmoud Abbas leads the Palestinian Authority, and that he will continue his peace-and-negotiations offensive even if the chances of success shrink to 1%. Here is an authority president who enjoys extremely high self-confidence, who does not bend even under the darkest conditions and the harshest odds. He is persistent, patient, and determined, possessing an astonishing capacity to persist in failure. He announced, at a Ramadan iftar gathering, that he would continue negotiations no matter what, without objection from those who consider themselves representatives of Islam, the white-turbaned ones marked with red spots.

Leaders of states, parties, and organizations calculate the probabilities regarding the success of their policies, and always try to take the necessary steps to raise the probability, and hesitate greatly to proceed with certain policies if they find the chances of success are low. Leaders calculate carefully: they add and subtract, multiply and divide, think again and again, and summon advisors, experts, and specialists to help weigh matters, assess, and evaluate. They are wary of haste, knowing their decisions affect peoples or an entire nation, and aware that their mistakes carry enormous consequences that do not fall on just a few people.

There are leaders who are not reassured by a 70% success rate, and think long and hard about the measures that must be taken to raise or maintain that rate before deciding to act; there are leaders who busy themselves greatly assessing matters if the success rate hovers around 60%, and others who change the course of their thinking if they see the probability of success hovering around 50%. Leaders of states and peoples do not gamble their peoples’ fates on luck, and are not prepared to wager, hoping the roulette wheel might spin in their favor. A leader builds, plans, develops, improves, involves his people, and asks for their help, weighing matters constantly in order to build capabilities that lead him to success in various fields.

This logic holds true for the surgeon who weighs the success rate of a surgical operation before picking up the scalpel, and holds true for individuals wanting to undertake a particular action to achieve a particular goal. Everywhere on earth, a person, group, or party thinks long and hard about the probabilities of success for the steps they intend to take, and if they find the rate is declining, they retreat in favor of thinking through a new plan and new steps. Those undeterred by declining probabilities are not distinguished by intelligence — or perhaps success is not part of their calculations at all, or the success they intend to achieve is not the one they announce.

From Abbas’s insistence, the following can be inferred:

First: negotiations, for Abbas, are an ideology, not a mechanism for reaching a goal. Negotiations, for him, are a goal or a way of life he will never divorce, and his chief negotiator expressed this in his book titled “Life Is Negotiations.” Life is never devoid of negotiations, whether at the individual or collective level, but negotiation is a mechanism or a tool for reaching understanding and resolving existing problems — when it turns into an ideology, however, it turns into a futile activity with no purpose. The ideology of negotiations is a pagan ritual devoid of substance, its value confined solely to its ritualism.

This is not strange coming from Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, who has embraced the idea of negotiations since the 1970s, and stood against the resistance on the grounds that it was futile, and who has repeated that he will negotiate if negotiations fail, and negotiate if that fails too, and will keep negotiating and negotiating.

Second: by declaring he will continue negotiating, Abbas insists on failure, since it is highly unlikely that the 1% will blossom into success, while the 99% probability recedes into failure. Palestinian logic calls on Mr. Abbas to review the various aspects of the negotiations once the success rate deteriorates to 60%, or 50%, but his disregard for logical matters, and for the simplest rules of successful political work, means he is insisting on failure. And if he insists on Palestinian failure, he is insisting on the other side’s success — and this is a great calamity.

Third: with his statement, Abbas defies the sentiments of most Palestinians wherever they are, and defies the various Palestinian factions and parties that have declared their opposition to resuming negotiations. Logic calls on Abbas, if he is truly concerned about the unity of the people and the unity of the factions, to call for broad meetings and open discussion within the Palestinian arena, at home and abroad, but having chosen instead to defy differing opinions, he is certainly not concerned with extricating the Palestinian people from the predicament of division and fragmentation.

Fourth: Abbas’s statement aligns perfectly with the existing security coordination with the Israelis, and with defending Israeli security. Defending Israeli security entirely contradicts the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people, and Abbas’s statement regarding negotiations entirely contradicts these rights. That is, the statement is consistent with preserving Israeli security, which means the negotiations are not aimed, in the slightest, at restoring national rights. The negotiations may achieve certain humanitarian gains, such as increasing the number of workers permitted into Israel, or releasing 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 also taking care to develop his alternatives, so he does not find himself exposed with nothing to fall back on. Mr. Abbas develops no alternatives whatsoever, leaving the people at the mercy of the 1%.

Sixth: it is part of the art of negotiation that a person not expose himself before his enemy or the other side at the negotiating table. Mr. Abbas is telling the Israelis, through his statement, that he is not searching for alternatives, and that the only path open to him is negotiations. He is telling the Israelis, by implication, that they can continue confiscating land and building settlements, because no matter what they do, the negotiations will not stop.

Seventh: here we see the depth of the crime committed against the Palestinian people when their livelihood was tied to money coming from the donor states. People like myself said, back in 1994, that this act was a great crime, and that the people should reject such an arrangement, but it seems logic vanished before self-interest, and the result was that we had to give up our political will in exchange for money. Our slogan now is: “We kneel, but we do not starve.” This, even though a people determined to live free never starves — free people ultimately make their own bread. We, now, have our bread made by our political decisions, and we are hostages to the salaries of the Authority’s employees and the cars of its dignitaries.

Despite the points above, I return to tell people once again what I have repeated since 1979 regarding the inauthenticity of the Palestinian leaderships. My assessment was clear and evident decades ago: that the Palestinian leaderships are not genuine leaderships, and that the people would find themselves moving from one concession to another because of repeated frustrations and the factors of fragmentation and disintegration. However strong the logic may be, the upper hand always belongs to entanglements of interest.

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