Sometime around my 60^th birthday it dawned on me that I’m not an economist (though I play one as a citizen in a democracy!). Yes, I’ve read books and articles by Nobel laureates and other prominent economists. I know the standard arguments on the right and left for, say, raising or lowering taxes. But is there any doubt that the liberal economist Paul Krugman or the conservative Eugene Fama, both Nobel Laureates, could demolish any of my arguments in the blink of an eye? How could I have been so foolish all these years? I know what expertise entails in the field in which I was a scholar for 30 some years; it should have been obvious to me that I’m not an expert in economics. Or foreign policy, although I subscribe to Foreign Affairs and read a lot. Or military science, although I worked as a civilian researcher in the Navy. Or, other areas of public policy. But it’s our job as citizens in a democracy to make up our mind on questions of government. And we all like to feel that we are good at our jobs. Recognizing that we are not experts, we should muddle through with humility: do our best, inform ourselves from the most reliable, expert sources of information and analysis, etc. But if we delude ourselves into having greater certainty than we have a right to, we will certainly make poor judgments.

That’s not just speculation. The prominent psychologist, Philip Tetlock, has been conducting research on what makes some political experts better at prediction than others.   His earlier results are summarized in the book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?” Here experts were making predictions prior to major political events, such as the fall of the Soviet Union, the failure of the Communist regime in China to fall after the Tienamin Square uprising, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the economic bubble of the “Asian Tiger” nations in the late 1990s. One of his strongest findings was that experts who were strongly wedded to an ideology or theory were worse predictors than those who were more open to various perspectives. Ideologies here included the familiar ones, such as liberal and conservative. Theories included realpolitik, shared by the Republican Henry Kissinger and the Democrat President Obama, as well as theories less familiar to laymen.   Another finding worth noting was that confidence in ones judgments was negatively associated with accuracy. In sum, even among experts, partisanship impairs judgment, and humility is an asset. Imagine what partisanship must do to the rest of us!

Thus, the first reason to abandon partisanship is that partisanship leads to error.   We, both layman and expert, don’t know enough to be certain about political questions and our ideologies are simply not adequate. The best we can do is to listen to people with expert knowledge holding diverse opinions.

For us non-experts, the typical fallback (cop-out?) strategy to compensate for our paucity of knowledge is to reduce political judgments to personal judgments. Normally, this involves claiming that the people who hold opinions different from ours are bad or stupid (or both). From a liberal perspective (with which I am more familiar) this involves believing that conservatives are either rich and bad or not rich and stupid, with some allowance for the possibility that some of the non-rich are bad and, perhaps, some of the rich are stupid. Certainly, conservatives have their own ad hominem arguments. Relying on ad hominem arguments, we don’t need to understand or evaluate the factual claims people make; we simply impugn their motives or character instead. Such arguments represent bankrupt thinking and have done so much to polarize our nation and dumb-down our politic discourse. Thus, partisanship drives us apart needlessly.

Third, reading the former Soviet refusenik, Natan Sharansky, made me realize that the ideological differences that so tear apart democratic societies such as ours pale in comparison to the differences between us collectively (which he refers to as “the world of freedom”) in contrast to dictatorships, extremists, terrorists, etc. (“the world of fear”). In his book, The Case of Democracy, Sharansky writes “..there is a far greater divide between the world of freedom and the world of fear than there is between the competing factions of a free society. If we fail to recognize this, we lose moral clarity….[The lack of moral clarity] is why people living in free societies can come to see their fellow citizens as their enemies, and foreign dictators as their friends.” This should sound familiar today, when some liberal Jews express greater hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu than they do for the murderous leader of Syria, Assad or Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran who promises to exterminate Israel, or when President Obama shows greater animosity towards a democracy like Israel than towards a terrorist dictatorship such as Iran. In the aftermath of the tragedy of 911, after being attacked on our soil by the world of fear, I think Americans experienced a renewal of moral clarity, and thus a spirit of unity, but the feeling was sadly short lived (ending well before the divisive invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the way). I prefer the term moral perspective to moral clarity, because it is a failure to put things in proportion from a moral point of view. Thus, partisanship undermines our moral reasoning.

A fourth reason to reject partisanship is related to the last reason. Both the right and left have experienced major moments of losing moral perspective at crucial times in history.  During the 1930s, it was unpopular among those on the right to support a strong stand against Hitler. One reason for this was that Hitler was seen as an opponent of Communism. For the opposite reason, those on the left tended to be more opposed to Hitler. Similarly, during the Cold War, it was unpopular in left-leaning circles, even moderate liberal ones, to be overly critical of the oppression of people living under Communist rule. (It must be mentioned that people tend to undergo a kind of amnesia about having held such views years later, and so may some of you.)   Being sympathetic or even apologetic for oppressive, aggressive dictatorships because they are on the same side of the left-right spectrum as we represents a gross distortion of moral perspective. The distance between the typical American liberal and conservative is miniscule in comparison to the distance between either of them and a left or right wing dictatorship overseas.

A major source of such gross moral distortions is social conformism, to which all of us are prone.   One must read about the actual thinking of common people at crucial moments of history to see this. For instance, during the 1930s the following argument seemed unimpeachable to conservatives, especially if delivered with aggressive self-confidence to like-minded people: “The ethnic Germans in the Czech-ruled Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia are being oppressed by the Czechs. So, of course, it is right for them to seek the shelter of the German state.   Germany has good reason to take control of the Sudetenland, and Hitler has guaranteed in the treaty that he has no wish to control the remainder of Czechoslovakia, or any other European lands. Cassandras like Churchill want war and should be dismissed.”  The power of social conformism is what makes arguments such as these seem so powerful at certain moments in history in certain social environments.   Yet people who espoused such arguments held core beliefs that were widely different from Nazism, and they soon came to see their error (except for those who forgot they ever made an error, as many did and do).

Thus, partisanship encourages social conformity. Social conformity is a very power force influencing human thinking, as demonstrated by massive psychological research. We belong to many groups, such as country, religion, ethnic group, etc., in addition to party and ideology. Some of these groups we can’t easily leave and some we reasonably don’t want to abandon. But groups that are not essential to our way of life or our identity we may well consider abandoning, since identification with any group will tend to distort our thinking, both rationally and morally. In my case, I decided that I can live quite happily without identifying with an ideology or political party, and given the costs of such identifications, I would rather do without them. Social conformism overlaps with the other three problems with partisanship (rational distortion, divisiveness, and moral distortion) and exacerbates them.

In sum, my four arguments in favor of nonpartisanship are that partisanship promotes intellectual distortion, needless divisiveness among people who really have much in common, loss of moral perspective, and social conformism.

So you say you want to see a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a Palestinian state alongside Israel? And, like many people, you feel that pressuring Israel is the way to attain it. But have you ever considered whether the Palestinian leadership, and President Abbas in particular, really wants to reach a two-state accord?   Look at the evidence. Abbas turned down a two-state solution offered by Prime Minister Olmert in 2008.   Following Obama’s lead, Abbas insisted that Israel halt settlement construction as a precondition for negotiations, yet when Prime Minister Netanyahu halted construction for 10 months, Abbas failed to come to the negotiating table. He turned down a framework for peace offered by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and then one offered by Secretary Kerry. When the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators Livni and Erekat pursued a separate track of negotiations towards a peace agreement, Abbas put a stop to it.

Consider too the nature of Abbas’ rule over his people. He and his cronies have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from their people. Abbas eventually sacked his Prime Minister Fayyad, who was working doggedly to fight corruption and grow the Palestinian economy on the West Bank. Finally, Abbas has illegally extended the four-year term to which he was elected into its eleventh year. Some have argued that Abbas’ reluctance to negotiate to achieve Palestinian statehood stems from his fear that statehood would jeopardize the flow of booty that he, his family and friends enjoy at the expense of their people. I am not certain I follow that argument, but I do think the nature of his rule betrays a callous lack of concern for the welfare of his people, which makes it appear improbable that he would take any risks for them.

For all of these reasons, I think it unlikely that Abbas will accept any two-state solution that any Israeli leader might realistically be expected to offer. But I can always be wrong. For that reason, among others, I wanted the Labor candidate Herzog, rather than Netanyahu, to win the recent Israeli election. Most liberals feel certain that Netanyahu has no desire to make peace. As with most questions, I have less certainty, but on the chance that they are right and the slight chance that I am wrong about Abbas, in addition to other issues, such as economic ones facing Israel, I felt it was time for a change. Even a small possibility of peace is worth a lot as far as I am concerned.

A second reason for wanting Herzog’s party to win centers on my concerns for what would happen in the probable case where Abbas turned down Herzog’s peace proposals.   Abbas’ refusal would make it more likely that the world would start to see that Abbas stands in the way of peace. But though I say it would be more likely, I hardly think that outcome likely at all.   How many people were ready to believe Arafat’s claims that he turned down Labor PM Barack’s two-state proposal in 2000 because the Palestinian state offered was a “Bantustan,” a set of disconnected pieces of land? Who believes that argument now? (If you do, please refer to the book The Missing Peace, by Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s chief negotiator, among other sources.) But most of us have moved on and forgotten Israel’s proposal was ever made, as we have forgotten about Barack’s 2001 and Olmert’s 2008 peace proposals. Unfortunately, future Palestinian rejectionism is unlikely to have any effect on world opinion either.

I honestly don’t know what could convince the world that Israel wants peace. Not only were the Palestinians offered statehood in 2000, 2001, and 2008, they were offered 85% of all of Palestine back in 1937 by the British Peel Commission. The Jewish Palestinians (Yes, Jewish Palestinians! Palestinian was not yet an ethnic identity, but only a place of residence) accepted this meager offer, while the Arab Palestinian leadership, under Haj Amin al-Husseini rejected it, instead demanding all of the land and expulsion of most Jews. The consequences of their refusal were tragic. As a result of Palestinian terrorism at that time, Britain began to greatly restrict Jewish immigration just at the time when the Nazis were tightening their grip on Europe, and these restrictions remained in place throughout the Holocaust. Had the Jews held even the small piece of land offered by the Peel Commission, a coastal strip in and around Haifa, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives might have been saved. These include the parents of my father-in-law, Michael Kesler. As he relates in his book, “Shards of War,” his parents applied for the family to immigrate to Palestine before the war, but were turned down as a result of Britain’s new restrictive policy towards Jews, and were subsequently killed by the Nazis. Michael and his sister Luba, both teen-agers, barely escaped, after surviving harrowing dangers.

Of course after the war, the Arabs turned down the United Nation’s two-state proposal, which the Jews accepted. After the 1967 war, when Israel acquired the so-called occupied territories–which had been occupied by Egypt and Jordan, without international protest–Israel immediately proposed exchanging land for peace, but were turned down in the Arab leaders’ famous “3 No’s” declaration in Khartoum. However, in 1979, Israel gave up 90% of the lands captured in the 1967 war to Egypt in exchange for nothing more than Egypt’s agreement to stop trying to annihilate Israel, though that agreement has held fast. In 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon (and were then attacked from that land) and in 2005, they unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza strip (and were subsequently attacked from there).

With the long record of Israel–and before its creation, the Palestinian Jews–accepting two state solutions and exchanging land for peace, it is mind-boggling that so many in the world believe that Israel is unwilling to accept such solutions. What part of “yes” don’t they understand? And where do they get the idea that the Palestinian leaders are willing to make peace? So go ahead, and pressure Israel to make peace, but unless you exert equal pressure on the Palestinian leadership as well, they will never be motivated to negotiate with Israel seriously. On the other hand, if the Palestinian leadership could be so changed as to help their people have a state, they might also be ready to give their people a state worth having.

1. Saudi Arabia will soon start developing nuclear capabilities in response to the nuclear agreement with Iran.

2. Some time after 1, some smart pundit will marvel at the fact that Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Israel, has had nuclear weapons for decades and yet the Saudis have never before felt the need to develop their own nuclear weapons. Said pundit will search for the reason and may  or may not hesitate to hazard that the reason for this is the greater humanity of Israel compared to Iran (or at least Iranian leadership).

3. The pundit in 2 will not be associated with the NY Times or the BBC.

Why are the Palestinian refugees different from all other refugees? For the other 130 millions of refugees that the United Nations has helped since its founding, the goal has been to resettle them. But for the half million or so Palestinian refugees, the UN had no such goal; the descendants of many of these refugees remain stateless 67 years after the 1948 war in which Arab nations tried unsuccessfully to annihilate the new Jewish state and most Palestinians fled. Many of their descendants live in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, where they are denied citizenship (except in Jordan, where they are very much second-class citizens) and denied basic benefits such as public school education or access to any other than the most menial jobs.  Such refugee camps are also found in the Palestinian-administered West Bank and the independent Palestinian Gaza strip.

While all other refugees are handled by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinian refugees have their own agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which operates according to its own rules.

While all other refugees diminish in numbers with time, the number of Palestinian refugees has increased tenfold since 1948, as a result of the unique definition of refugee status reserved for them:   Whereas the descendants of refugees are not normally considered refugees, the descendants of the Palestinian refugees are.   By that definition, I, my wife, and our daughter are all refugees from World War II Europe and the early twentieth century pogroms in Russia.   Normally people cease to be refugees once they are granted citizenship in another country. Not so the Palestinians in Jordan, or many in the West Bank, who were Jordanians when it was ruled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.

While the Palestinian refugees have received far more aid from the UN, other agencies and foreign governments than any other refugees in post-war history, they have seen no improvement in their livelihoods as a result.   Since no effort is made to integrate the refugee descendants into Arab societies, this aid constitutes a form of welfare, allowing the recipients to subsist in poverty.  Deprived of the benefits of a fulfilling, economically-stable life for the past 67 years, whole lifetimes have been wasted as a result.   The unique discriminatory treatment of the Palestinian refugees indeed constitutes a human rights abuse of Arabs by Arabs.

There is certainly no justification for the unique treatment of the Palestinian refugees. Millions of other refugees fled their homes under far worse circumstances, such as ethnic cleansing or genocide, including the Biafrans from Nigeria in the 1960s, the Tutsi from Rwanda in the 1990s, the Darfuris from Sudan in the early years of the present century, and the Syrian refugees recently.   They have been assisted by the UNHCR, like the other 130 million refugees, to resettle and rebuild their lives.

The common explanation for preserving the Palestinian refugees in amber for two-third of a century is that they constitute a bargaining chip in negotiations with Israel. Where have we ever heard of a bargaining chip of this kind? Normally, a bargaining chip is something I have that you want. The West Bank is a bargaining chip for Israel, because they Palestinians want it. But Israel does not want the Palestinian refugees—quite the contrary—so how do they constitute a bargaining chip? Again, the Palestinian refugees constitute a bargaining chip in a unique way: Arab leaders claim that the hardship of the refugee (descendants) is the fault of Israel and insist that these Palestinians will remain refugees until they are allowed to be transferred to Israel. This is the so-called “right of return.” But most of the Palestinians have never lived in Israel, and so could not be said to be returning there. Moreover, there has been no such “right” for other refugees who fled under much worse circumstances. The one possible exception was the Dayton Accords at the conclusion of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995.  But the exception proves the rule: the effort to repatriate refugees failed in that instance, but the peace held firm nonetheless. Finally, no Israeli government of the left or right will ever agree to such an influx of Palestinians, since it would eradicate the Jewish character (if not the Jews) of the country.  This position was exemplified by the Labor PM Barack’s refusal to accept this demand by Yassir Arafat in 2000. The Palestinians will hopefully one day have a country in the West Bank and Gaza strip, but they will not turn Israel into a second Palestinian country. And so the descendants of the refugees suffer in vain.

In sum, Arab leaders bear the primary responsibility for the plight of the so-called Palestinian refugees. They caused these people’s forebears to become refugees in the first place by trying to destroy Israel in 1948 and they perpetuate their refugee status in the service of their own political ends.

Despite all of this, much of the world appears to accept–or at least acquiesce to–the Arab claim that Israel is to blame for the plight of the Palestinian refugees in Arab lands.   If they actually care about the Palestinians, the world must come to its senses and start to treat these refugees like all other refugees in the past 70 years by demanding that the Arab countries finally integrate their brethren into their societies, release them from the camps, grant them citizenship and all the rights, benefits and opportunities that go with it.   In short, it’s time to tell the Arab leaders to let their people go.

Hello! My name is Len Breslow. (No, I’m not related to the baseball player!)  I am a retired researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science.  My original training and research were in developmental psychology.  I plan to write posts about history and current events, especially concerning Jewish issues, as well as about the relationship between cognitive psychology and politics, and other topics of interest to me.  I’ll also post pieces of a more personal nature from time to time, in which I’ll tell you more about myself.  Enjoy!