A SYSTEM TEST (Part 3). Poking the bear: the logic of my research approach and test
An MOR series: A SYSTEM TEST: Are US bosses managing the next Holocaust?
Back in 2003, I learned that PLO/Fatah (what we now call the ‘Palestinian Authority’) had been created by a top German Nazi to finish Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution in Israel.
I asked myself: Why then had US bosses pushed so hard—via the 1993-94 launch of the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process—to give PLO/Fatah militarily strategic territory inside Israel?
I needed a method to decide between two competing hypotheses: Option A → Incompetence or Option B → Machiavellianism.
I conducted a system test along the lines of systemic action research, the logic of which I explain here.
If you haven't read Part 2 of this series, here it is:
Before World War II, Hajj Amin al Husseini founded the Arab Palestinian movement with four great terrorist attacks against the civilian Jews of British Mandate Palestine. During the war, Husseini was co-director, with Adolf Eichmann, of the German Nazi death-camp infrastructure that murdered the European Jews. (That’s right.) And after the war, Husseini created PLO/Fatah (what we now call the ‘Palestinian Authority’) with the express purpose of murdering all remaining Jews in Israel.
These facts are almost universally unknown to the general public. MOR has provided a short guide to them:
In Part 1 of this series I explained how these facts led me to raise the sharpest possible questions concerning the intentions of US bosses. The bosses were claiming to support Israel, but look: they had supported PLO/Fatah diplomatically, going to the extreme of threatening the Israelis until, via the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, the Israelis had ceded militarily strategic territory to their would-be exterminators.1
Why had US bosses done this? Was this pathological incompetence? Or was it evil Machiavellianism?
And a related question was: Why were these dramatic, obviously relevant, profoundly interesting, and utterly scandalous facts about Husseini so completely unknown?
My own trajectory sharpened the second question for me, as I explain in Part 2.
There I relate how, despite having trained as a Ph.D. in anthropology with a specialization in ethnic conflict and racism; despite getting hired at an Ivy League ethnic-conflict think tank, the Asch Center, primarily focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Oslo Process; and despite the Arab-Israeli conflict being by far the most famous ethnic conflict in the entire world, I had never heard about Husseini until after I developed a personal interest in all this and began investigating on my own the history of the Arab Palestinian movement.
When I did begin investigating I found that Husseini had been forgotten by ordinary Westerners (though not by Arab Muslims!) because, after 1967 or thereabouts, nobody in the major Western media or in our established academic publications had so much as mentioned Husseini and his leading role in the German Nazi Final Solution. In other words, the entire meaning-making system, media and academia (what I call the Extended Fourth Estate), the system that builds our consensus reality, had gone completely silent on this guy.
What explained that? Had everybody just forgotten? Were media and academia just as pathologically incompetent as the US bosses? Or were they all colluding in an evil, Machiavellian system, keeping mum on Husseini so that PLO/Fatah could be inserted into Israel to carry out its nefarious genocidal goal?
I saw an opportunity to run a test that could decide whether incompetence or Machiavellianism was the better hypothesis to explain the nature of our system; a test that could tell me whether US bosses had invented the Oslo Process because they didn’t understand what they were doing, or, on the contrary, because they did.
In Part 3, below, I explain the logic of my system test.
Beware: this research goes against the grain
What I am doing here, which is to take seriously a Machiavellian hypothesis about possible nefarious activities of the powerful, and to test whether that Machiavellian hypothesis explains US policy better or worse than the innocent alternative, is never done in a university setting.
Anyone who even attempts this kind of research in a university is immediately ostracized and attacked. We are called ridiculous, paranoid, stupid, and wrong. In this manner, ‘conspiracy theory’ has become synonymous—among the university-educated—with lunacy.
And yet, it is not as if we are lacking for historically documented cases of massive conspiracies. Here’s a relevant one:
Yes, but that was then, we are always told. This cannot be going on now. (Why not?)
Those who enforce the taboo on conspiracy theory love to single out for special derision the very worst theories, easy to laugh at. I will be the first to admit that lots of conspiracy theories are wrong. But that applies to theories in any domain: most of them will be wrong. Why indict conspiracy theorists on a standard that is never applied to theorists working on other kinds of problems?
Usually such questions simply go unanswered.
When a rare effort is actually made at giving a reason, they tell us that the world is ‘too complex’ for high-level global conspiracies to succeed. But such arguments cannot stand up to the most elemental scrutiny, as I have endeavored to show:
Anyway, if it is really true that conspiracy theories are always stupid and wrong, then why not let us fools collapse of our own weight? Let us work and publish. Others can then point out how wrong we are, and then the whole enterprise, if it really is that foolish, will wither and die.
But no. At the university, we have been censored out of existence. Why? Isn’t censorship in itself suspicious? Are the censors afraid to lose in a fair intellectual fight?
Or think about it this way: Is it really scientific to pretend that powerful people never conspire in secret to increase their power by clandestinely wrecking democratic institutions? Since when is it reasonable to apply a standard that basically says: ‘power never corrupts’? Lord Acton, who taught that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, must be spinning in his grave. Same goes for Maurice Joly, the first great modern conspiracy theorist.
As an anthropologist, I find this ‘polite society’ culture that has wrecked social science by enforcing a taboo on conspiracy theory fascinating. And suspicious, because, in practice, it shields the powerful from a skeptical scientific gaze. I have shared my analyses of this taboo in the following two pieces:
But however we may seek to explain the conspiracy-theory taboo, it is a fact that universities do not investigate conspiracy theories. It follows, then, that this missing science—which aims to decide rigorously between rival system-level hypotheses for the same documented political or geopolitical phenomenon—must be done by citizen scholars outside of the university system, as I have proposed:
For this enterprise, one of the most important methodological tools at hand has been contributed by systemic action research. It was the principles of systemic action research that I applied in the development of my system test, so I’ll say a few words about what this is.
Systemic action research
Action research grew out of of the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. It means taking action to produce social change, then reflecting on the results to update your model of how things work. Systemic action research means that you are intervening social systems and applying the tools of systems thinking as you go.
I had not trained in this particular tradition, so I didn’t know anything about systemic action research when I learned the astonishing facts about Husseini and PLO/Fatah and conducted my system test. But I am an evolutionary and sociocultural anthropologist, and hence heir to two traditions obsessed with functional system design: Darwinian theory and structural functionalism. Starting from there, I arrived at the principles of systemic action research intuitively, out of my own research needs.
This is not the most straightforward kind of research, because even moderately-sized systems—social systems—cannot really be observed: they are too complex and opaque for significant direct observation. However, from limited observations of a system’s ‘behavioral surface,’ as it were, you may try to infer what its inner functional organization or ‘structure’ might be. And that’s how you produce a working theoretical model of a given system.
At a broad qualitative—rather than ‘exact science’ quantitative—level, your model will predict certain system-level behaviors and will also rule out others. So you compare observed system behaviors to your predictions and then you edit your model to fit the evidence. Over time, with rigor, you get a better model, which is to say a model that can predict, qualitatively, the future behaviors of the system.
If you are not improving over time your ability to predict, then you don’t really have a good method, and you are wasting your time and everybody else’s. (This is of course why nobody should censor conspiracy theorists; if we cannot predict the future, like the mainstream political scientists and geopolitical ‘experts’ also cannot, then we are wrong and that’s that).
One way to accelerate and manage this research process is consciously to elicit behaviors from the system. That’s the ‘action’ part: you test your model by deliberately ‘poking’ and ‘prodding’ the system. The design of the poking event must be chosen so that your model makes—with that particular poking—a rather clear prediction concerning the expected system-behavioral outcome, so that, by comparing the system reaction obtained (post-poking event) to your prediction you can learn where and what kind of tinkering your model might need.
Interesting social systems have great stability thanks to robust ‘protective’ or homeostatic mechanisms that ‘seek’ to—are functionally designed to—return the system, after perturbations, to its steady state or teleological path. The mechanisms by which the system springs back to ‘equilibrium’ contain important clues about the underlying functional structure and the general system ‘goal’ or ‘goals.’
To write ‘goal’ (in scare quotes), as I just did, is appropriate for many systems. But for some sociopolitical systems that we might consider, if we believe they are consciously cobbled together and managed (rather than fully emergent), we may remove the scare quotes.
Now, suppose you poke a system of interest and it does something unexpected. That tells you there’s something wrong with your model. Modify the model until the system reaction witnessed is entirely expected. Or, if the mismatch between predictions and outcomes is just too severe, chuck your model entirely and seek a new one. That’s how you do science: by humbling yourself before the most rigorously established facts.
The guys who do systemic action research, such as Danny Burns, get paid to go poke and prod some system (for example, a company), diagnose the functional problem, and design a curative or transformative intervention. The intervention is the ‘action,’ the results of which are then observed and analyzed to refine the model, and, in a ‘spiral’ process, to design the next intervention.
Sometimes these researchers are poking larger systems at the behest of some NGO or government that wants to find ways to promote social change in one direction or another. But there are larger systems, still.
A very large system is the combined academic and media establishment in the West, which (to me) appears functionally articulated into one complex whole with the policy-making system. My test would poke that beast.
The nature of my system test
As explained at greater length in Part 2, I was interested in a test that would decide between the following two hypotheses:
Option A → Incompetence. The bosses—and their ‘experts’—were collectively so incompetent that not one of them had thought to do even the most basic research in a university library—like puny little me had done—on the history of the Arab Palestinian movement, and so Husseini had disappeared from historical consciousness, thanks to a generalized incompetence also afflicting the media and academic systems. Burdened by their encyclopedic ignorance, when the US bosses had brought PLO/Fatah into the Jewish State, created to protect Jews from genocide, they had done so in good faith. It was a royal screw-up.
Option B → Machiavellianism. US bosses had deliberately inserted PLO/Fatah, Husseini’s creature, into the Jewish State precisely because PLO/Fatah was built to finish Adolf Hitler’s job; US bosses—assisted by a corrupted media and academia—had been consciously collaborating with Husseini’s genocidal plan.
I am not claiming these are the only two hypotheses imaginable. For any given problem, the set of possible hypotheses is always infinite. Hypothesis testing is usually done by comparing some hypothesis that seems relevant and reasonable (here: antisemitic Machiavellianism) against the alternative so-called null hypothesis.
For psychologists the null hypothesis is usually ‘randomness’ (in other words, they are testing the possibility of a causal variable against the possibility that no such causal variable is at work). Sometimes that makes sense. But more generally, the null hypothesis can be whatever it is that was being assumed before, or that seems less controversial in that particular community of practice. Here, the null hypothesis is what the academic community, which rejects conspiracy theories, is obligated to propose when policymakers get results opposite to their publicly stated intentions: emergent incompetence.
But what poking action on the meaning-making/policy-making system could give me the desired test? Simple: just publish the documentation on Hajj Amin al Husseini.
The reason this could work as a system test was my privileged position within the meaning-making/policy-making system. I had been recruited to a policy think-tank on ethnopolitical conflict, the Asch Center, housed at one of the most prestigious universities in the world: the University of Pennsylvania (Ivy League, no less), and focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Oslo Process. This was the summit of the meaning-making system.
It was also the summit of the policy-making system. Ian Lustick, an Asch Center director with plenty of media exposure, was internationally recognized as a top expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And his CV boasted of his role as a top advisor to the CIA and the State Department (he had actually been employed for a while in State Department intelligence).
I was interacting with Lustick personally on a weekly basis, on and off campus. And he had recently congratulated me on a piece I had written supporting the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process that had gone viral. Thus, given my strategic location in the meaning-making system, if I now published my new findings on the history of the Arab Palestinian movement, there was little question that US bosses responsible for policy would learn of it. And then we would see the system reaction, in both the meaning-making and policy-making branches of the system.
What did each option predict?
Option A, which presupposes innocent incompetence, predicted that, upon seeing my documentation
media and academia, oriented towards seeking the truth, and always game for a big scandal, would publish material that restored Husseini to public consciousness, explaining the true nature of PLO/Fatah; academics, for their part, would update their geopolitical models by incorporating these highly relevant facts;
US bosses, since they really mean to protect Israeli security, scandalized to have made such a tremendous error, would apologize and quickly correct course, getting back on their intended teleological path of protecting Israeli security; and
perhaps I’d get a prize (or something) for saving everybody’s behind.
Option B, which presupposes an antisemitic Machiavellian conspiracy at the top of our institutions, predicted that, upon seeing my documentation
the corrupted media and academia, in charge of pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes, would either ignore or attack me in an effort to discredit me and my documentation;
US bosses, hell bent on destroying Israel, would try to protect themselves from my effort to divulge this key information, and would try to get the system back to its teleological path of preparing the genocidal destruction of the Jewish State; and
little me, instead of getting any kind of slap on the back, would probably be in for some trouble, and perhaps even some danger.
So what happened? You may read about the results of my test, which supported Option B, up next in Part 4.
On 6 December 2001, US Ambassador to Israel Daniel C. Kurtzer gave a talk at the BESA Center, Bar Ilan University, entitled ‘The American Role in the Oslo Process.’ The US ambassador began, remarkably, by denying that the US had played a role in the Oslo process:
“In dissecting the American role in Oslo, I think the title of my talk should be ‘The American Perspective on Oslo,’ since the Oslo process took place largely outside the direct purview of the United States.”(a)
In fact, the Oslo process could not have happened without the October 1991 Madrid talks, and the US all but forced the Israelis to go to Madrid, as I review below.
On April 19, 1991, The Independent wrote this:
“FATIH JABAR [an Arab whom they interviewed] had some advice for James Baker, the US Secretary of State, who flew to Israel last night to continue his peace-making efforts. ‘Stop financial aid to Israel for six months, and order the Israelis to pull out from the occupied territories,’ he urged, sipping coffee in the cool lounge of his home in this quiet village south-west of Nablus. ‘They'll have no choice but to comply.’
...While [Israeli Prime Minister] Mr [Yitzhak] Shamir continues to indicate support for a regional conference, there is no hint of a new willingness on his part to make meaningful concessions at the negotiating table. If Mr Baker is to shift the Israeli prime minister, it seems he might have to take Mr Jabar’s advice and hit Mr Shamir in the pocket, conceivably by withholding the $10bn (pounds 5.6bn) in housing loan guarantees Israel needs to build homes for Soviet immigrants. For if there is one issue that concerns the prime minister as much as his commitment to the retention of the territories, it is the absorption of Soviet Jews. Only if this process is threatened, might he consider what is, for him, almost the unthinkable - an eventual pullout from parts of the occupied territories.”(b)
And take Jabar’s advice they did! The Independent was prophetic. This is what the Times of London wrote only a few days later:
“...American officials, including William Brown, the ambassador to Israel, and Senator Robert Dole, have warned Israel that it will not receive a sympathetic hearing in Washington if it does not co-operate with the administration's peace plans for the region following the Gulf war.”(c)
Specifically, the US threat against Israel became the following:
“The message to the Shamir government is clear enough: Unless the Israelis agree to a freeze on settlement activity in the occupied territories before and during the [‘peace’] conference, there will be no U.S. loan guarantees to help finance the resettlement of Russian immigrants. Implicit in the warning are two further threats: If Israel remains obdurate, hold the conference without it and let the political chips fall where they may; and further down the line, diminish or cut off the annual U.S. grants and loans to the Jewish state. Whether one thinks the Bush-Baker preconditions are justified or not, and given a visible decline in pro-Israel sentiment in Congress and the country, it is obvious...that the president can make the loan guarantee warning stick.”(d)
In other words, the American message to the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was: go to Madrid and negotiate, or else no money for resettlement of Russian immigrants, and no further grants or loans to the Jewish state: we will choke you off. Moreover, if you don't go, said the US to Shamir, we will hold the conference anyway, and “let the political chips fall where they may.” The US had threatened to decide the future of Israel without Israel—the way Hitler and Britain had decided the future of Czechoslovakia without representatives of that country—“if Israel remain[ed] obdurate.”
There can be no question on this point: the US was passionately interested in making the Madrid talks happen, and flexed all of its diplomatic muscle.
Some American observers simply could not understand why this was going on. Here is Charles Krauthammer scratching his head on the pages of the Washington Post:
“It is a rule in the Middle East: Israel wins every war, and the great powers step in to save the Arabs from the consequences of defeat. Regardless of whose side you think justice is on, one thing is indisputable: The result of such rescues is more war. The losers are given the chance to continue the fight.
In 1956, for example, Israel won the Sinai from Egypt. Eisenhower forced Israel to give it back. Ten years later Egypt broke the agreement under which Sinai had been returned, blockaded Israel and started the Six-Day War. In the 1982 Lebanon war, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were cornered in Beirut. The U.S. and other Western countries intervened to save them. Saved, they later returned to Lebanon to fight another day.
The Palestinians have just lost another war, and the United States is preparing another rescue. The Palestinian intifada, the uprising against Israel, is dead. The Palestinians, exhausted and defeated, are demoralized, having nothing to show for three years of strikes and stone throwing. Worse, in a replay of the Arab uprising of 1936-1939, the intifada has turned most monstrously on itself. Far more Palestinians are dying at the hands of brother Palestinians than at the hands of Israelis.
‘Everyone remains terrified when he hears a knock on his door at night,’ writes the Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr. ‘This fear multiplies when he discovers that the knocker is not a[n Israeli] soldier but rather a masked [Palestinian] man, swathed completely in black from head to toe, armed with an ax or a sword, who requests that his host, or his son or daughter, come out ‘for only five or ten minutes!’ The next day, we hear on Israeli radio or television that a bound and disfigured body with signs of torture and stab wounds has been discovered.’This is how the uprising ends. Moreover, the Palestinians have not just lost the intifada. They managed to lose a second war this year, the gulf war, their proxy war against Israel and the West. They staked their political and diplomatic capital on Saddam and lost again.
In the normal course of events, a people having undone themselves yet again with their extremism, having so exhausted the patience of their friends and sponsors, having maneuvered themselves into political marginality, would have to make their own peace overtures to their enemies or fade away.
Instead, James Baker and the U.S. administration come riding in to rescue the cause at its weakest, to keep the grievance alive and to advance its demands in an international forum. Shouting ‘land for peace,’ they single-handedly revive a cause for which, as the Palestinians will tell you, no Arab state—not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, certainly not Syria—really cares. And they demand that Israel, the only organic American ally in the region (meaning a country that no coup could ever shake from its friendship with the United States), gamble its existence at a conference at which that slogan is to be the centerpiece.
Why? In part, as a reward—‘linkage’—for the Arabs who allowed us to go to war to save them from Saddam. This reasoning is even crazier than it sounds because the Saudis and gulf Arabs, after the Palestinians lined up with Saddam, have lost all enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause.”(e)
I doubt Krauthammer can be right that the Arab states were utterly reluctant to push for a PLO state, given that the idea of a PLO state was theirs long before the PLO itself signed on. However, it is significant that Krauthammer got the distinct impression that the Arab states didn’t want a PLO state more badly than the US did!
The upshot of US Secretary of State James Baker’s strong-arming of the Israelis—with economic threats—was to force them to accept a ‘peace’ process in Madrid.
“The Madrid Invitation, inviting Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians to an opening conference jointly sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union on October 30, 1991, represented the result of US Secretary of State James Baker’s shuttle diplomacy in the eight months following the Gulf War. The Madrid peace conference was a watershed event. For the first time, Israel entered into direct, face-to-face negotiations with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians. In order to make this possible, since Israel would not negotiate with the terrorist PLO, the Palestinians were represented by individuals from the West Bank and Gaza who were not associated with the PLO. This was a sham, as everyone knew, and PLO figures were in the hotels guiding the Palestinian delegation throughout the proceedings.
...Madrid was also the catalyst for the 1993 series of non-public talks in Norway between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs that launched what became known as the Oslo peace process. Once the Oslo process began, the Madrid structure of talks faded away.”(f)
In other words, the Madrid talks, to which the US practically forced Israel to go, were the engine that set in motion the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, the purpose of which was to bring PLO/Fatah—a defeated organization—out of exile in Tunis and into Judea & Samaria (the ‘West Bank’) and Gaza, where it would become the government over the Arabs, in preparation for getting a PLO/Fata State courtesy of the United States. From this position, PLO/Fatah was able once again—and better than ever, in fact—to kill innocent Israeli civilians.
SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:
(a) American Embassy Tel Aviv - Press Section; U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel C. Kurtzer; "The American Role in the Oslo Process"; BESA Center, Bar Ilan University; December 6, 2001
https://web.archive.org/web/20020606043631/http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/mission/amb/120601.html
(b) The Independent (London), April 19, 1991, Friday, FOREIGN NEWS PAGE; Page 12 , 667 words, Baker visit angers Israeli settlers, From DAVID HOROVITZ in Kifl Harith, West Bank.
(c) The Times, May 14, 1991, Tuesday, Overseas news, 302 words, Shamir faces US cash squeeze, From Richard Beeston in Jerusalem
(d) A PRECARIOUS PEACE CONFERENCE THOUGH THE HARD WORK IS FINISHED, MIDEAST TALKS; COULD FALL APART AT ANY MOMENT, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), October 3, 1991, THURSDAY, FIVE STAR Edition, EDITORIAL; Pg. 3C, 915 words, Victor T. Le Vine.
(e) The Washington Post, August 2, 1991, Friday, Final Edition, EDITORIAL; PAGE A25, 923 words, Road to Nowhere, Charles Krauthammer
(f) ‘ISRAEL 1991 TO PRESENT; MADRID 1991’; Palestine Facts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021018093526/http://palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_madrid_desc.php