Confidence-building is essentially a string of concessions, and each concession is a mini-victory. Victories encourage.

When the opponents exhibit hostility rather than free will, confidence-building does not work even in theory. The confidence is already there: each party is confident of the other’s hostility. No amount of handshaking between their leaders can obviate the fact that the Jews and Palestinians would love to see each other dead. The Jews who recite daily, “Remember, O LORD, against the children of Edom the day of Jerusalem” are not as nice as your temple “rabbi” leads you to believe.

The alternative to confidence-building is clearly laid out: tit-for-tat. Anatol Rapoport’s algorithm is probably the closest to the lawgiver’s intent: cooperate on the first move, then repeat your opponent’s move. Jews tried cooperating with Arabs eighty years ago; now it’s the time for unforgiving retaliation. There islittle doubt that adequate, unrestricted retaliation would be more efficient in reaching a peace deal with the Arabs than any confidence-building. Indeed, retaliation too builds confidence.

Various tit-for-tat scenarios generally presume that both sides are equally powerful. Israel has a better strategy: instead of decades of tit-for-tat retaliation, she can get rid of her opponent once and for all by expelling the West Bank Palestinians into their own state, Syria. Sixty years ago, Syro-Palestinian nationalists did not imagine themselves a separate nation.

There is an Axelrod problem to the conflict. Researching various tit-for-tat strategies, Robert Axelrod figured out that pure retaliatory strategies do not win. Predictably, in multi-player systems the other players line up against the harsh retaliator – if, like Israel, he fails to extinguish the threat soon. Israel failed to extinguish Arab presence in our land, and scores of countries lined up against us for our retalitary anti-terrorist operations.

This is a very important thing: pure tit-for-tat always wins in the short-to-medium term with a moderate number of players. The fact that the game extends into the long term shows the retaliation to be inadequate. The Torah prescribes tit-for-tat only on a personal level: no individual offender is sufficiently strong to threaten society. It is, therefore, enough to punish him in tit-for-tat fashion. But a totally different logic is applied to nations: according to the Torah, enemy nations must be exterminated. Unlike modern politicians, our lawgiver did not imagine that Palestinian Arabs would cease their terrorism because Jews kill a Palestinian for every Jew murdered by terrorists. For Arabs, a murdered Jew is not just a casualty, but a military, nationalistic victory. Jews, accordingly, need a victory of their own, not just a single dead Arab.

Much fuss is made out of Axelrod’s forgiveness. From various simulations, it seems that the best strategies forgive past offenses and switch to cooperation after the opponent starts cooperating. In practice, such conditions never hold. A previously hostile opponent would cooperate only half-heartedly, waiting for the chance to defect and strike in the back. It is foolish to cooperate with someone like that. In the simulations, cooperation is defined narrowly as piggy-backing your opponent’s friendly moves. Good enough. The Arabs refrain from terrorism, we refrain from retaliation. The Arabs claim none of the land we hold, we claim none of theirs.

Any other strategy is demonstrably a losing one.

There is no evidence that harsh punishments are more effective than mild ones. Robbery exists in Saudi Arabia despite the cutting off of hands, and homosexuality exists in Iran despite executions. The threat of jail has failed to condition the Americans into so little a thing as abandoning marijuana.

Punishments have only marginal utility. A society completely without punishments invites criminals, but beyond a certain low level, the increasing severity of punishments does not curb crime any better. Why is the Torah so different?

Consider that most Christians practice forgiveness only in theory. They harbor a grudge against their neighbor when the law fails to rectify their grievances. The reason has to do with human mentality and the natural desire for revenge. It is futile to argue whether the desire for revenge is good or bad; it is a fact of nature, like rain or sex. Arguably, revenge is a positive evolutionary trait because it allows people to live in otherwise lawless societies. In law-abiding societies, good Christians rely on the unforgiving ones to provide for their safety.

Here is the key to understanding the Torah’s punishments: they are not really punishments, but institutionalized, civilized revenge. In other instances too, the legist chose regulation over unrealistic prohibition. Jews are practically banned from owning their compatriots, but are allowed foreign slaves almost without restraint. To have too many wives is frowned upon even for kings, but polygamy is accepted. Offerings, abundant in the pagan world, are carefully minimized in Judaism, but are still allowed so as to provide people witha vent against their superstitious fears.

Legalized revenge is the only practical way to keep the commandment that, “You shall not bear a grudge against your neighbor.” People are not only allowed, but mandated to take legal revenge. The approach exactly parallels the one taken for sacrifices: whereas superstitious pagans haunted themselves with the question of whether they had committed a transgression and sacrificed enough, Jews had a clear list of transgressions and expiatory sacrifices. Sacrifices allowed Jews peace of mind regarding their superstitious transgressions; punishments allowed us peace of mind about blood revenge.

Contrary to the modern understanding of ancient people as brutes, they apparently had moral qualms about the punishments. The Torah, therefore, repeatedly pronounces, “Their [the offenders’] blood be upon them,” meaning that those who carry out the punishment incur no guilt.

The US Supreme Court first struck down capital crime laws because of their arbitrariness: the difference between jail and death is unlike that between different prison terms; the offender must clearly understand what he is risking by committing his crime. Three thousand years earlier, the Torah enunciated the same approach: Jews have no latitude is disbursing significant punishments. The moral importance of preset sentences cannot be overestimated. The judges act as God’s instrument with no input of their own. They acquire authority and shed remorse. Likewise, the Torah has no option for personal forgiveness: the offender must be punished, with no exceptions or extenuating circumstances. Witnesses—likely, the victim’s relatives—are commanded to execute the offender in the case of a capital crime; they receive the best of two worlds: the right of revenge and immunity from the ensuing vendetta because they acted according to God’s will.

Another problem with forgiveness is that, like any theory, it loses applicability on the fringes. You really don’t want to forgive terrorists, serial killers, or a gang that terrorizes the locals. Forgiveness might possibly reform many criminals, but unquestionably it provokes some petty ones to commit crimes more often or in a more grievous manner. Forgiveness thus tends to increase crime committed by people on the fringes. One can easily see how a humble yet morally strong Christian stops a robber; any sane person would hesitate to rob someone who refuses to harm him as a matter of principle rather than weakness. Snobbishness would also play a role: harming a (morally) superior person is against human nature. “Weakness,” however, is the keyword. Eventually the robbers would convince themselves that the Christians are physically weak rather than morally strong, and proceed to rob them without reservations.

But revenge too is a theory, and should fail on the fringes. It does. We don’t want to punish an orphan who has stolen bread even though he was not hungry to death, and certainly not Yigal Amir. There is a huge difference between the Jewish and Christian fringes: the former occur when the society is basically stable while the latter tend to occur when the society is endangered. Fining the orphan or making Yigal a martyr in the fight against tyrants won’t really harm society; someone would step up to pay the orphan’s fine, and decades from now Yigal will be praised in school textbooks. But an unreservedly Christian society would fail under the onslaught of criminals.

When a Union Carbide factory accident took thousands of lives in the Indian city of Bhopal, Mother Theresa flew there on the company’s plane and pleaded with the locals for forgiveness; in short, to refrain from lawsuits.

Forgiveness is a beloved child of oppressors. Not surprisingly, many states embrace the Christian doctrine of forgiveness: sovereigns can do anything to their subjects, subject them to vagaries of war and taxation, and then simply say, “sorry.” Forgiveness is often justified by imaginary bonds: the oppressed subjects and their dishonest rulers belong to the same people, work for the common good, and similar nonsense.

Forgiveness is even more critical for democratic governments whose politicians are inherently demagogic. They lie to voters, telling them the things they want to hear, and afterwards carry out altogether different policies. Consider the case of Rabin: during his election campaign he promised Jews tough measures against Arab terrorists, but at the same time secretly promised Arafat the Oslo Accords in exchange for Arab votes. To all purposes, Rabin was guilty of breach of trust, betrayal of his fiduciary duty to the Jewish majority, and treasonous dealings with the enemy—which resulted in the mass murder of Jews during the Oslo intifada. Yet, the establishment decries his just execution by Yigal Amir, insisting implicitly on forgiveness for Rabin’s crimes against Jews. A similar attitude prevails for Ariel Sharon, whose past merits are employed to claim forgiveness for the crime of expelling the residents of Gush Katif and delivering Gaza to the Hamas government. The majority of Israeli politicians are guilty of gross offenses before their voters, and forgiveness is essential to maintain the political order.

Certain dishonest rabbis have entered the lucrative field of government apologia and teach that Jews are obligated to accept the law of the land, must not hate each other, and so must bear with the government. The Torah, however, is explicit, “You shall not follow the majority to evil.” Jewish compliance with the law of the land has two qualifications: the law should not be predatory or evil. In other words, it should not grossly worsen the Jews’ situation or run contrary to the Torah, in which case we are obligated to circumvent and even fight it. The prohibition of hating applies only to decent Jews; as for non-decent ones, a psalmist has said, “Do I not hate, O Lord, those who hate you?” And the prohibition of taking revenge against another Jew hinges upon a working system of justice which would take care of him. Clearly, that is not the case in modern Israel, where leftist courts have aligned themselves with our Arab enemies.

The alternative to forgiveness is justice, and in our circumstances justice has nothing to do with the courts.

Rambam’s approach is mistakenly thought to be rooted in the biblical proverb, “Give me neither poverty nor riches that I would ask in my pride, Who is God? or would be forced steal and desecrate his name.” The author, King Solomon, spoke about material things, which indeed drive people away from transcendental values. But he longed for a girl in the Song of Songs, and King David extolled his own zealousness for God in the psalm. Nietzsche was correct that zealous feeling is a great, possibly the best thing: who in his right mind can denounce love, the most zealous thing of all?

The government, however, does not welcome zealousness and cultivates submissive moderation. In a telling example, Eichmann’s trial so much shook the society that the government moved promptly to quell the public zeal. It abandoned the search for another prized German, Mengele, and even refused its extradition offered by Paraguay.

Rabbis opted for controlled mediocrity. Rabbi Akiva’s zeal in supporting Bar Kochba’s insurrection became outdated. Josephus described Jews as exceedingly zealous: they confronted Romans on religious issues and the Diaspora Jews routinely marched to aid their Judean compatriots burning pagan towns en route. Centuries of persecutions made modern Jews hysterical, which is the closest thing to zealousness. Jews gave their lives and efforts to any suitable idea, from communism to anti-apartheid. Qumran scrolls indicate that messianic expectations were strong among Jews at all times; persecutions made us longing for messiah even more.

Jews so far apart as yeshiva dropout hooligans, God-fearing rabbis, and leftist do-gooders can join hands in some zealous enterprise, provided that it is actionable. Cleansing the Land of Israel from our enemies is one such example.

Punishment is traditionally thought to incorporate three components: revenge, compensation, and personal and societal prevention. In the history of justice and modern practice only the first component has persisted while the other two cover it in rational and moralistic terms.

Rational compensation is impossible in many cases. Thieves are punished, according to the Torah, with fines of two to five times the original damage, in order to compensate for unsolved crimes. The compensation, however, almost never reaches the victims for the very reason most robberies remain unsolved. In modern jurisprudence, thieves are sentenced to jail terms rather than fined, thus even theoretical compensation is abrogated. Nor is compensation possible in permanent injury cases: given the American standard of multi-million-dollar awards in work-injury cases, almost no attacker has adequate means to provide this level of compensation.

Neither is punishment about personal prevention. Consider a hypothetical case of two men and a woman on an island; one of the men rapes her and she drowns herself. Since there is no other woman around, further prevention is unnecessary—but we would still cry for punishment.

The notion of societal prevention depends on whether punishments deter would-be criminals. There is no hard evidence to that effect, nor is it possible to commission such a study: differences between countries and even towns which practice punishments of varying severity are so great as to make any comparison meaningless. Strong circumstantial evidence raises doubts about the effectiveness of punishment in crime prevention, in Europe in the Middle Ages (and in many Muslim states now) punishments were exceedingly severe, yet the crime rates exceeded current Western levels. The efficiency of punishment likely peaks very low: raising the punishment from a one-year jail term to mutilation would not significantly reduce the robbery rate. Now a test: imagine that a scientific study showed beyond doubt a total absence of correlation between punishment and crime rates in society. Even though punishment would be pronounced objectively useless, we wouldn’t set criminals free. Thus, punishment is not about societal prevention or deterrence.

Leviticus 19:18 prohibits revenge toward “children of your nation,” though not against foreign enemies. The prohibition deals only with personal revenge: people must refrain from vengeance and allow the legal system to handle things. When the justice system fails, individuals are allowed to act: thus, when an inadvertent murderer leaves the town of refuge (the elders failed to detain him), the blood avenger is allowed to take his life.

Absence of revenge makes punishments ugly: for a victim’s relative to take the murderer’s life is natural, understandable, and acceptable; but the sterile environment of the death chamber strips execution of its meaning—vengeance. Purposeless execution unrelated to vengeance is ugly.

In the Torah, execution of the offender removes impurity from the society. Impure society would incur the divine wrath, this execution is a form of societal defense. But more importantly, punishment shows the society’s will to establish justice, as it was commanded to do. The terms “justice” and “righteousness” are synonymous; righteousness lays in adequate punishment of criminals. Punishment reinstates the society’s righteousness which was damaged by the crime. Here we see the exact correlation between crime and punishment: just as a crime removes society from the equilibrium of righteousness, so the punishment must return it to the original position.

Consider the objections to long imprisonment for relatively small crimes: such punishments are pronounced “unjust.” Justice here is a sense of correlation between crime and punishment. There is an implicit understanding that punishment should be proportional to crime. That is exactly the meaning of revenge.

In the wake of the Genovese scandal, researchers conducted numerous experiments proving that people usually rush to help in emergencies when no one else is present. The researchers concluded that people embrace responsibility when they have no way of shirking it. This can be seen in the example of Jews walking obediently to their slaughter by Germans and Ukrainians; individuals conform to public inaction and evade the personal responsibility of action even in the face of certain death. Both the victims and their individual murderers obeyed authority: the former in submission, the later in action.

It is possible to speculate cynically that coming to another’s aid means partaking in their sorrowful state. In that sense, compassion is degrading, and people are loathe to express compassion in the presence of bystanders. A compassionate person, in a sense, descends to the victim’s level. You can compare this to deictic center shift. Or recall, when you see an obviously honest pauper. Instead of taking a few minutes to console him, you just drop a coin in his box and hurry away: it is embarrassing to be seen with a degraded person.

Sometimes, the victim’s situation is so abhorrent that common citizens, relatively comfortable in their status quo, are simply afraid to partake in it through compassion.

Think of how people are prone to erecting “us vs them” barriers. Losers are immediately distinguished by real or imagined traits, so that they don’t look like us. Cambodians under Pol Pot were thought of as Asians, who are used to tyranny. Starving Africans―well, they are Africans, it’s natural for them to starve. A neighbor’s drug-addict kid―his parents did not care enough of him, and their family is unlike ours.

Compassion has to cut through this natural human tendency to dissociate ourselves from degrading circumstances. And all too often, people just refuse to be degraded, to be brought down to the victims’ level. When they are alone, people are more likely to help precisely because no one sees them being degraded, standing beside a victim or a drunk.

In various experiments, people always helped the “accidental victims,” such as a worker who had suffered an injury. Such victims are deemed normal, and association with them does not harm one’s public image.

Individuals are inherently good, and mobs are not always bad. When a crowd serves a higher ideal and looks to that ideal as a principle to guide their actions, that crowd may be acting for good. But in everyday life, crowds lack any higher goals, and everyone in a crowd looks to others for guidance, so their behavior descends to the lowest common denominator. During the Holocaust, crowds experienced the breaking of the societal order, goals, and common way of life. The behavior of the rest of the public emerged as their only guidance. Everyone was looking at everyone else, and no one set a public example by helping the Jews, and so the crowds did not help us.

Darwin thought that animals have an innate sense of beauty. Modern biologists, far removed from metaphysics, believe that beauty is a visible manifestation of hidden genetic advantages. Perhaps. What is more important is that humans also consider pheasant males beautiful. The sense of beauty transcends species. We don’t know if pheasants can appreciate the beauty of a mating dance by male birds of paradise, but humans see many species as beautiful. Our sense of beauty encompasses many animals.

It is possible that our comprehension of beauty relates to health. In Rembrandt’s time, the food supply was limited, and obesity was a sign of health; therefore his beautiful women are overweight. In our age of abundant food and limited physical effort, health is attained by exercise, and beautiful women for us are slim. A century ago, healthy women were pale because they did not have to endure working in fields; today, healthy skin is tanned through winter skiing, summer sunbathing, and year-round tanning.

But why do Playboy models change type every few years? Why do standards of beauty changes quickly? To illustrate in a more personal way: I very much liked the shape of the early Toyota Camry. When I recently saw the new model, I snorted at how ugly it was.

And this is the problem. Our innate sense of beauty, whether it conveys deep-seated genetic advantages or not, is on the way out. It is being supplanted by fashion. Evolution taught us that a widely accepted standard of beauty is indeed beautiful. Call it a mental shortcut which spares us the necessity of careful evaluation. That standard of beauty slowly changed over centuries to reflect real underlying advantages. Today, what is widely accepted is not necessarily good or efficient―often quite the contrary. Rather, it is a product of the arbitrary decisions of fashion masters, amplified by their mammoth advertising budgets.

Pheasant females prefer partners with longer feathers. They value rarity, as we do. Probably, that preference holds until the rarity of a quantity reaches the point of deformity. In the human mentality, rarity is associated no longer with the force necessary to rob others of an item, but with cost of buying it. And so all things expensive became desirable. Compare the time it takes the cars behind an expensive car idling at a green light to start honking with the time that elapses before they begin to honk at a cheap one. Expense is to humans what raw power is to animals. It is thus no wonder that people want a Cartier watch rather than a particularly attractive-looking model of watch. Expensive rarity is especially appealing to women since such gifts proclaim their closeness to powerful males.

People now find themselves surrounded with beauty, which is quasi-rare (expensive), but not rare in a quantitative sense. At some recent time in human history, desirable objects of beauty suddenly became available, and people rushed for them, just as evolution taught us to behave. That has led to consumerist hysteria: the advertised products seem beautiful, but they are also available, and thus must be possessed. The age of abundance should have made humans content; instead, through fashion and advertising it has given them more reasons to be discontented. Three hundred years ago, a peasant wanted perhaps a dozen or two things in his life; today, an average person wants thousands―and cannot buy hundreds. TV imbues people with empty goals, and they strive for those goals. This approach, which exploits the behavioral traits we developed through evolution, is evident in other areas of consumer and political marketing. Eventually, we may expect people to restrain their automatic responses or even abandon them. But when we ignore a commercial promoting yet another fake charity, we may well become less compassionate in situations of real need. Or if we are cynical about a commercial in which actors pretending to be members of the general public rave about some shampoo, we might well become cynical about public opinion in general―and ignore our neighbors. Under the onslaught of exploitative techniques, human behavioral patterns are changing fast and unpredictably.

Now that fashion has eroded our sense of beauty, one of the most basic human instincts, is it any wonder that, unable to evaluate complex political mechanisms, people lean toward things like the peace process simply because they are fashionable?

Some argue that punishment, especially capital punishment, has no deterrent effect. Let us consider the opposite possibility: suppose punishment actually encourages more crime, perhaps in protest. Would that be a reason to forfeit punishments? Clearly, punishments have nothing to do with deterrence. Punishment is only about retribution.

The above case is far from theoretical, but very common in foreign relations. It has long been argued that Israeli and American reprisals against terrorist-harboring states do not eradicate terrorism, but cause resentment and so increase the enlistment of people into the ranks of terrorists. But it is not an acceptable policy to swallow the terrorist acts and refrain from punishing the offending nations.

Fringe cases exist. Sometimes, when retaliation cannot force the offender to change his ways and might, on the contrary, provoke him, it might well be advisable to hold off the retaliation for a while to see whether he might cease the aggression. In retrospect, British were wrong to bomb German cities in response to the first German bombardment of London―which, as we know now, was done by mistake.

Modern societies are ill-equipped to condemn the supposed immorality of retribution. In an important sense, they are more brutal than the ancient Jewish society. Consider the common law that allows employers to be punished for the harm done by their employees, even though the employers acted in good faith. By enacting such laws, states transfer their security responsibilities onto employers. The state is under no illusion that employers can thoroughly monitor their workforce. The punishment of employers neither deters them from hiring bad employees, nor prevents those employees from committing crimes. If anything, the law taxes an innocent person (employer) to compensate the victim. In Jewish law, a master is responsible for his slaves’ actions, but the presumption is that slaves are merely instruments under full control of their master.

Another example is parents’ responsibility for the harm inflicted by their children. Jewish law is explicit: parents are not responsible for their children. This is the opposite of a master-slave relationship: children are not their parents’ tools, but from the youngest age are fully responsible for their own actions. Rabbis mitigated that responsibility with low bar mitzvah age, but that innovation is not rooted in the Torah. It is absurd to imagine that children younger than 13 do not understand that theft or murder is a crime. According to this silly modern doctrine of infantilism, Israel cannot prosecute Palestinian children who throw firebombs at Jews.

If parents are responsible for their children, and employers for their employees, though they cannot control them, then nations are all the more responsible for their terrorists. Just as punishing parents and employers does not prevent misbehavior by their dependents, so the punishment of enemy nations need not prevent terrorism. The Torah arrives at a similar conclusion from another angle, namely that nations are treated as a whole without singling out individual (terrorist) members. We were commanded to exterminate Amalek for the actions of its long-gone ancestors. In foreign relations, punishment is mainly about vengeance.

Arabs have not the slightest problem with mass casualties in internecine conflicts. Egypt shelled Gaza in the 1950s, Syria murdered some 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood adherents in Hama, Iraq and Iran killed upward of a million Arabs in their war, and Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians continue to kill Palestinians. And yet they beat their collective chest over the ridiculously low death toll Israel inflicted on Gaza in the 2009 war.

This is not hypocrisy, but an evolutionarily justified attitude. When one’s own society prosecutes outcasts, it is about keeping oneself safe. When foreigners repress one’s brethren, it endangers his society: war might be the next step.

Many Arabs were drawn into the ranks of terrorists by unpleasant stories from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram. Westerners may defend these prisons endlessly. True, the facilities are very decent by the occupied population’s standards. But don’t you torture my SOBs.

The American administration made the cowardly decision to deliver the terrorists to Pakistan to be tortured there. Sure, they had written assurances from Pakistan that the detainees wouldn’t be tortured. Right, and croissants for breakfast. Muslims have no problem with ISI torturing Taliban, but dislike ISI doing the dirty work for the CIA. The Taliban is not the issue: Westernized, superficial Muslims hate the Taliban in the same way liberals hate righteous fundamentalists; the Taliban is a constant reproach for less fervent Muslims. But even the Taliban is better than the CIA in their mentality.

Israel holds 11,000 Arab terrorists in her jails. They range from stone throwers (in and out in a few months) to terrorist leaders. They have long been a rallying point for anti-Israeli sentiment in Arab countries. In a sense, the Arabs are right: Israel unjustly humiliates the fighters by jailing them. Jails are normally reserved for one’s own criminals. Foreign fighters might be killed or interned, but not jailed. Think of the outrage in the Jewish community when the British occupiers flogged several resistance members—and how quickly the British were humbled by the reciprocal flogging of their policemen by Irgun. Scores of political dissidents around the world insist on being treated as a regime’s enemies rather than criminals. The Palestinians are not honest soldiers because they do not wear uniforms, hide behind their civilians, and misuse Israel’s reluctance to inflict collective punishment, as is customary in wartime. But they are not criminals, either. We have the right to kill them on sight or execute them later, but not to humiliate them by keeping them in jail.

Many stone-throwers are underage. If they are not responsible, then they are their parents’ instrument, and the adults must be jailed for their offenses. In that sense, a stone is no less a high-risk object than a car, and parents ought to be presumed guilty for allowing their children to use it.

When 0.5% of the West Bank’s Arab population is kept in Israeli jails at any given time and some 10% have passed through these jails, we’d better not believe we can normalize relations with the Palestinians or score high PR marks with other Arabs.