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(JNS) – Israel (Robert J.) Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to Game Theory, a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic interactions between individuals or groups.
Aumann has said that if he could describe Game Theory in one word, it would be “incentives.”
JNS caught up with Aumann on Feb. 23 at his offices in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is a member of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, to ask what he thought of the current prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
The deal called for the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for about 1,900 imprisoned terrorists, many of them murderers serving multiple life sentences.
“The basis of Game Theory is to give incentives to the other side to do what’s good for you,” Aumann told JNS. “And we keep doing the opposite. We are literally killing ourselves. We are killing our own children. It’s not only that they will kidnap more. We are incentivizing them to attack us again and again, to make war against us, to repeat Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.
Q: Do we know the recidivism rates of these released prisoners who return to terror?
A: We don’t have the exact number. It’s important. Someone should pull together those numbers. It doesn’t even require any analysis. It’s just a matter of gathering the available data. There are a lot of sources.
When it comes to recidivism, not every terrorist attack is successful. In fact, my subjective impression is that most terrorist attacks are not successful. Most of the time, they kill the terrorist, or they stop him before he manages to kill someone.
Let’s say the number of unsuccessful attacks is somewhere between 50% to 75%. But that leaves successful ones between 25% and 50%, and if you talk about 1,000 terrorists released, we get maybe between 250 and 500 successful terrorist attacks where they manage to kill somebody, at least one person. That’s at least 250 dead for 33 live hostages.
Just on that basis alone, it’s obviously a terrible deal.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that again and again we’re going to have people kidnapped. We’ve shown the enemy that it’s worth it, that we will completely give up and raise a white flag even if you abduct one, like with Gilad Shalit [an IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and exchanged five years later for 1,027 terrorist prisoners.]
We’ve given them incentives to go and kidnap more and more. And they’ve said they’re going to do it. They did it in the past. So we better believe them.
Q: Is Game Theory relevant to understanding this deal?
A: There’s a game that’s more or less relevant to the conflict, and that is the Blackmailer’s Game. I don’t even think that the Blackmailer’s Game is that relevant, but I’ll tell you what it is.
Anne and Bob are given $10,000 and told, “You get the $10,000 if you can agree how to split it.”
Anne is overjoyed. She says she doesn’t have that much money and $5,000 means a lot. She says, “Bob, we have $10,000— $5,000 to me, $5,000 to you.”
Bob says, “No way, I’m not leaving this room with less than $9,000.” Anne says, “Be reasonable.” He says, “I won’t go away with less than $9,000 and if you want, you don’t have to agree. We’ll both go away with nothing.” So Anne thinks it over for a while, and says, “Okay, $1,000 is better than nothing.”
And that’s how they split it. Now the trouble with that is that Anne is rational and Bob is the one who’s irrational, but the irrational guy comes out with a lot more than the rational one.
Q: If you were Israel’s chief negotiator, what would you tell the other side?
A: I would say one for one. One prisoner per hostage is the maximum. And if they say it’s out of the question, I would say, “Okay, now we wipe you out.” I would stop this hostage business. One for one, that’s my answer. And if it means that no hostages are released, so be it. Let the people in Kaplan do what they want. [The Israeli protesters calling for a hostage release deal gather near Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv.]
Q: How can Israel break this pattern of handing over enormous numbers of prisoners for a handful of captives?
A: You just change it. At the beginning, I guess they will just kill the kidnapped. Or they’ll keep them, hoping we relent. A specific part of the deal of this last exchange, stage one [of the ceasefire agreement], was that the released prisoners do not even have to sign a non-binding statement that they will not return to terrorism. That’s an explicit part of the agreement—that they don’t have to agree. So we are actually killing ourselves.
And the tremendous amount of fuss that’s made over bodies is absolutely terrible. We should give zero for bodies. Even people on the right make a big fuss about the bodies that are released. A body is a body. It’s not a person.
We should take a very tough stance, one that will probably simply be rejected by the other side. We should do this for the future. My children are no longer of army age. But I have grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and I want them to live. I’m almost 95, but I’m worried about them.
People wave these banners at the protests that say, “What would you say if it were your father?” If it was my father, maybe I’d say something different. I’m not sure. But our government has to worry not only about the people whose father is captive, but about the whole population. If we’re going to get 10 people killed for one captive released, then that’s bad.
Q: What do you think of the death penalty as a solution? If we kill all the terrorists, then there are none to exchange.
A: It’s something to consider. That’s a big step to take, and I’m not sure. The original law that there’s no death penalty in Israel except for Nazi [criminals]—in fact, it was only carried out for [Adolf] Eichmann—I think that that is good because it sets the Holocaust apart from everything else.
I’m also afraid of ourselves, of our judicial system, that this would lead to complications.
There’s something I want to say that I haven’t said before. The other side are idealists. Yes, they are terrorists and they want to kill me, but their motives are not low or degraded. They stick by their ideals, and they’re willing to give their lives for their ideals. I want to kill them, but I respect them.
Q: You have criticized the campaign of the hostages’ families as raising the price that Hamas demands for the hostages.
A: Let’s be honest. It’s not the hostages’ families. The handful of hostages’ families could never have raised the billions that this campaign cost. [There is a movement of] people who are opposed to the government. We know some of their names. [Former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak is prominent among them. This is an attempt to bring down the government, or to [force them] throw up their hands in the war, to give up. There are people here opposed to the Zionist enterprise. They want a country for all its citizens, one-state or something like that.
I would add that not all the Kaplan people are post-Zionists. But the leadership is, the people who drive it. And the others sort of go along. There are some very good Zionists there. Some of my own descendants are part of the Kaplan protests.
Q: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the Gilad Shalit deal and now he’s making another Shalit deal. How do you explain that? Why isn’t he putting a stop to it?
A: [U.S. President Donald] Trump threatened. He said before he was sworn in that there’s going to be hell to pay if there’s no deal. This was generally interpreted as a threat to Hamas, but actually it may also have been a threat to Netanyahu.
Also, one of the main people on the negotiating team was the head of the Shabak [the Israel Security Agency], who is left wing.
Now this is changing, but maybe part of the problem was that the negotiating team was no good. But it’s a small part of the problem.
Q: If we know where these deals lead, why do we keep doing them?
A: It’s a post-Zionist tendency. They actually control what’s being done. They can throw out cases; laws that are passed by the Knesset. They’re in charge of the army. They’re in charge of the police. I won’t say that they’re totally running the country. But they have tentacles and that has a lot of practical effects.
Earlier I said I respect our enemy. But I don’t respect—I won’t call them the enemy—but the other side, the post-Zionists. If they don’t like it here, they should leave.
