by Thomas Reifer
At the height of global demonstrations against Israel’s radically disproportionate response to the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel, which killed some 1,200 people with 240 hostages taken, headlines around the world proclaimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to go ahead with his long-planned full scale invasion of Rafah, in Gaza — at a time when some 30,000 Palestinians have already been reported killed by Israel.
How to explain Netanyahu’s determination to proceed at all costs, defying massive protests in Israel and across the world calling for a hostage deal and a ceasefire? It may be useful to revisit Daniel Ellsberg’s concept of the “Desperate Proposal Pattern,” a theme to which Ellsberg returned many times in his lectures, discussions and private writings on contemporary and historical happenings.
Ellsberg described the Desperate Proposal Pattern this way: “To avoid an ‘intolerable’ (infinitely negative) outcome, any measure with some chance of success is justified, no matter how low its probability of success, or how high its costs and risks. Hence there is no need to report or even calculate the latter considerations; it is enough to say that, unlike current policy, the one proposed is not certain to fail.”
Ellsberg coined the term after reading the Top-Secret Pentagon Papers. As first formulated and applied by Ellsberg to U.S. decisionmaking in Vietnam, the concept sought to illuminate the willingness of U.S. Presidents, officials and advisers, when facing a certain short-term loss, to take wild, reckless gambles that risk catastrophe — if doing so would potentially avert such outcomes (and possibly lead them to come out even or win, as they defined such terms.)
Such seemingly paradoxical decision-making was later explored in the groundbreaking work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their famous article, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decisionmaking Under Risk,” in Econometrica. (1) This body of work was influenced by Ellsberg’s dissertation, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision, as well as his related early articles on decision-making and what became known as the “Ellsberg paradox.”
For Netanyahu, the sure losses that he is trying to avert are intertwined: the break-up of his coalition, the most right-wing in Israeli history, whose extremist members are demanding such an invasion; the related prospect of his having to reckon with his failure to take the intelligence warnings of reports of the October 7th terrorist attacks seriously, alert the public, and respond; and his possible fall from power — not to mention having to face criminal prosecution on other charges which still loom over his political future.
Other Israeli leaders, most notably former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2006-2009), have argued that Netanyahu’s goal of supposed “total victory” was always unattainable, a chimera — and that the invasion of Rafah is dangerous, reckless, and certain to cause massive casualties among innocent Palestinian civilians as well as members of the Israeli Defense Forces.
This week, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published “THE PATTERN OF BIBI’S DESPERATE PROPOSALS: What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu.” In the article, Hersh says that a “former Israeli officer, who suffered a grievous injury in combat and survived, acknowledged the failures of the current war against Hamas. Following the Ellsberg thesis, he told me that Bibi viewed his ‘survival in power’ in the wake of the failures in Gaza as ‘more important than finding an alternative to Hamas in Gaza, getting on the road to ending the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and normalizing Israel’s situation in the region.’”
For more, see “The Desperate Proposal Pattern,” an abridged version of Daniel Ellsberg’s 4/11/99 unpublished memo to which Seymour Hersh’s article refers.
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Thomas Reifer, PhD is Daniel Ellsberg’s longtime research associate, colleague and friend.
(1) Kahneman later won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with Tversky. Kahneman died in March 2024. For further background, see his obituary published this week in Science Magazine, as well as his New York Times obituary .