The photo showed a chartered Israeli airplane on a South Korean runway and the freight it had just brought from the far end of Asia: crates containing 700,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine against coronavirus. South Korea, facing a new surge of cases, needed more vaccines quickly. It will pay Israel back with the same number of doses, which it’s due to receive from Pfizer in the fall. Israel expects to need more by then — possibly to give third shots as boosters.
Think of this as a no interest loan, denominated in small, lifesaving vials. The cooperation in fighting the pandemic is reason to celebrate.
Alas, in this case, it’s all reason for sadness about the human condition, because those crates contained a large portion of the vaccines that Israel’s new government had offered to the Palestinian Authority — vaccines that the Palestinians first accepted, then rejected. Herein lies a story about the psychological barriers to bridging a conflict, and an indication of why Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking requires an outside mediator that both sides regard as an independent, honest broker.
Israel announced the handover of vaccines to the Palestinian Authority on June 18. It was to include over a million doses due to expire at the end of July or August, but they actually expired at the end of June. As in the eventual deal with South Korea, the Palestinians were to repay Israel with an equal allotment they were due to get from Pfizer later in the year.
Reportedly, negotiations began under the previous government headed by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The new government — with the rightwing Naftali Bennettas prime minister and leftwing Nitzan Horowitz as health minister — wrapped up the arrangement five days after taking power. Bennett is trying to show that unlike Netanyahu, he gets things done. Horowitz tweeted that he believed the deal would “advance cooperation between Israel and her Palestinian neighbors in other areas as well.”
Hours after being announced, the deal fell apart. On Palestinian social media, claims spread that Israel sought to poison Palestinians with out-of-date doses. Yielding to public pressure, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh backed out, claiming that the end-of-June expiry date on the first doses was too soon, making them worthless.
The failed handoff, by coincidence, occurred just as the delta variant brought a new surge of covid-19 in Israel. From under 20 new cases a day, the has number climbed into the hundreds. With the virus spreading via schools, the government launched an intense campaign to vaccinate teens — using the very vials that the Palestinians rejected. Enough were left over to trade with South Korea.
The Palestinian distrust of vaccines provided by Israel, alas, was mistaken but utterly predictable. In 2007, psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Jonathan Renshon published an article called “Why Hawks Win.” Kahneman’s stature comes from showing how human beings are hardwired to make irrational decisions. Here, he and Renshon listed our inborn biases that favor conflict: We automatically devalue a concession “offered by somebody perceived as hostile.” In one experiment that demonstrated the point, they wrote, “Israeli Jews evaluated an actual Israeli-authored peace plan less favorably” when told it was a Palestinian proposal.
We humans are flawed. The Trojan horse myth is not about a long-ago, probably fictional event. It describes a universal dark fantasy. Their offer is a trap. Their gift is poison.
Meanwhile, as Kahneman and Renshon wrote, we assume our own sincere intentions are obvious.
It makes sense to be cautious when dealing with a current or former enemy, but our bias is to take distrust to an extreme. This bias, I'd suggest, particularly blinds people to changes in an opponent's policy or government, to real political shifts that could reduce conflict or even bring peace.
For Israelis and Palestinians, the failed vaccine deal is just the latest misinterpreted offer and missed opportunity. And it points to why an outside power is needed as a mediator.
In the past, the mediator of choice was the United States. The role is still available, if only for the lack of another candidate. A mediator can make proposals that one side wouldn’t trust if it came from the other. A mediator can even use the justifiable deception of presenting an Israeli proposal or Palestinian proposal as its own. Former president Bill Clinton reportedly tried this gambit at the Camp David conference in 2000. One reason it didn’t work may be that Clinton’s deception was poor, the proposals too obviously Israeli.
The United States only has a chance to mediate if both sides believe it’s fair and independent, which means it can’t be Israel’s spokesperson, or an advocate for hardline Israeli positions, as happened under former president Trump. For President Biden to push even small steps toward peace, he must show that there’s bright daylight between Washington’s position and Jerusalem’s.
There’s no vaccine for mistrust, a congenital human condition. But it can be treated and overcome, if someone is willing to try.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist. He is author, most recently of “War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East.” He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and has written for The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, among others.