Political Scientists Barbara Walter and Andrew Kydd Beclown Themselves with Theory of Palestinian Bargaining

Here's the authors' op-ed from yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "A win-win strategy for the Palestinians." And the key passage of beclownment:

The Palestinians are playing a long-term bargaining game, and any move toward the goal of statehood has to be considered a victory. Statehood will not come immediately, or when a vote is taken in the Security Council. What will happen is that support for it will slowly and surely increase among average citizens around the world. The extreme positions of Israel and the United States — their refusal to pursue real efforts to allow Palestinians to rule themselves and be free of military occupation — will be increasingly revealed, and tolerance for these positions, even among Israelis and Americans, will decline. Going to the Security Council knowing the bid will be publicly and persistently rejected, therefore, is an inspired strategy. Palestinians appear peaceful and reasonable. Israel and the United States do not.

Walter and Kydd are offering a strategic theory, and any theory like this is based on a number of assumptions, like the assumption of actor rationality. As highlighted above, the authors also assume Israeli and American intransigence. But a model is only as good as its assumptions, and the intransigence assumption here is fatally flawed, and hence their larger analysis falls apart. Case in point: Also out yesterday was Charles Krauthammer's column at Washington Post, "Land without peace: Why Abbas went to the U.N." Krauthammer explicitly challenges Walter and Kydd's assumption that Israel and the U.S. "refuse to pursue real efforts" free of military occupation:

While diplomatically inconvenient for the Western powers, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to get the United Nations to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state has elicited widespread sympathy. After all, what choice did he have? According to the accepted narrative, Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses to accept a Palestinian state and continues to build settlements.

It is remarkable how this gross inversion of the truth has become conventional wisdom. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu brought his Likud-led coalition to open recognition of a Palestinian state, thereby creating Israel’s first national consensus for a two-state solution. He is also the only prime minister to agree to a settlement freeze — 10 months — something no Labor or Kadima government has ever done.

To which Abbas responded by boycotting the talks for nine months, showing up in the 10th, then walking out when the freeze expired. Last week he reiterated that he will continue to boycott peace talks unless Israel gives up — in advance — claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. Meaning, for example, that the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. This is not just absurd. It violates every prior peace agreement. They all stipulate that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition.

Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called “right of return,” which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state. And he has repeatedly declared, as recently as last week in New York: “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.”

Nor is this new. It is perfectly consistent with the long history of Palestinian rejectionism. Consider...

Keep reading for Krauthammer's examples, from Camp David in 2000 to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert peace deal of 2008.

So think about it: Who's intransigent? It's the Palestinians who are refusing "to pursue real efforts" at self-rule, which would allow themselves to "be free of military occupation." And it's for this reason that the Palestinians have gone to the United Nations. They don't want to negotiate. They've never wanted a final negotiated settlement, because it would mean leaving the Israeli state at the center of the territory to which they claim historical rights.

So notice what we really have: Two fairly prominent political scientists, writing in one of the nation's national newspapers, offering a fancy theory of Middle East bargaining and diplomacy that's based on a theoretical assumption that's a pure lie. And notice further: This example illustrates the power of the global left's campaign of delegitimation against Israel. Statements alleged as fact are shown to be complete fabrications after an elementary review of the historical record. But it goes on and on like this. Modern "progressive" societies buy into a historicism of deceit the exists for the sole purpose of exterminating the Jewish state. And notice one more thing: Walter and Kydd, who I've never met, again show us how often tragically useless is contemporary political science in explaining the world. At a basic level, rigid ideology is a poor foundation for problem solving, since to sustain an ideology requires the erection and perpetuation of myths such as, in this case, Israel's strategic intransigence. By contrast, some basic historical pragmatism shows that in fact the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected peace, having instead opted for violence --- indiscriminate violence, at that --- and war. And when Israel responds it's the one who's rebuked for employing force. I have hard time taking a lot of modern political science seriously precisely because scholars have poisoned their minds with really dishonest ideological presumptions. The idea that Israel is the reason for the failure of peace in the Middle East is false. It's an enormously malicious falsehood. And it's one more tragedy of the political science discipline that scholars rest serious substantive arguments on it.

RELATED: "The Tragedy of John Mearsheimer."