The following interview with Prof. Robert J. Aumann, a
game theorist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the
winner of 2005 Nobel Prize for Economics, is excerpted from the
Israeli weekly, Sha’ar
La’Mathil (6/23/09). The interviewer was
Dania Amihai-Mikhlin. Translated from the Hebrew by
Joseph
Shattan.
In your opinion, what must Israel do to finally bring peace
to our part of the world?
In the past, we’ve made mistakes that can’t be quickly undone.
When you break a tool, it’s often impossible to fix it, so I
don’t anticipate that peace will come to our part of the world in
our time. I hope peace will come in our grandchildren’s and
great-grandchildren’s time, but it won’t come in our time,
because we’ve made too many mistakes. The biggest mistake was the
expulsion from Gush Katif. [ Gush Katif was a bloc of 17 Israeli
settlements in the southern Gaza Strip. In 2005, its 8,000
residents were forcibly evicted by the Israeli government, and
their homes demolished, as part of Israel’s unilateral
disengagement from Gaza.] This was an irrevocable mistake. We
won’t ever return to Gush Katif.
What we did there was send a message to the other side — namely,
the more they pressure us, the more they’ll succeed. This was
what we taught them, and since it’s difficult to teach the
opposite lesson — and we obviously don’t intend to clear out of
Israel — the problem is bound to continue for many years. It’s
not a pleasant thing to say, but there you are. What we need to
do, from now on, is send the opposite message over the next
thirty years. Maybe they’ll learn from that.
Do you mean that we should be more consistent in carrying out
our decisions?
Our flexibility, our various concessions and gestures achieve
precisely the opposite of what they’re intended to achieve, and
this is so obvious and simple that everyone knows it. Throughout
history, peace was never achieved — neither from a
scientific-theoretical perspective, nor from a common sense
perspective — through concessions and demonstrations of
flexibility — never. In conflict situations, it has first of all
been necessary to demonstrate resolve, and only afterwards to sit
down at the negotiating table — but not in the wake of
concessions. These only invite more pressure and more explosions
and more Kassam and Grad missiles. They invite these things
because the adversary realizes that he’s succeeding.
If you’re succeeding in whatever business you undertake, it’s
obvious that you’ll step up your efforts. If you’re succeeding by
blowing yourself up, you’ll continue to blow yourself up. That is
to say: the young people who up themselves and us aren’t crazy;
they’re idealists. They’re people who are prepared to sacrifice
their lives for something they believe in. I don’t share their
beliefs, but they do believe, and there’s a certain insight from
game theory here, that in order to play a game effectively you
need to understand what the other side is doing. If you’re
playing chess, and the other side makes a move that you don’t
understand, if you say: “I don’t get it, it’s all nonsense, I’m
going to continue my attack” — you’ll lose. First of all, you
need to ask yourself why he made his move and after you’ve
understood, you need to adjust your behavior accordingly.
And it’s not just in chess, it’s in everything. If you think that
the other side is irrational, blowing themselves up for no good
reason, so let’s ignore their behavior and keep making
concessions for the sake of peace — you won’t achieve your goal.
Because all those tales about 70 virgins and such-like — they’re
nonsense. The young people who are prepared to lay down their
lives to advance what they regard as an exalted goal are
idealists — let’s understand that. What we did with the
expulsion from Gush Katif — we said to them, “Bravo! You’ve
succeeded.” So if they were successful, they’ll continue doing
more of the same.
What are the greatest threats facing us today?
We are. We’re threatening ourselves, and that’s the greatest
threat; we, and our insane race after peace, that’s what brings
war. When Chamberlain returned to Great Britain from Munich in
1938, he said, “I have brought peace in our time.” Back then,
too, everyone was racing madly after peace, and Chamberlain
brought war.
Then what really will bring peace?
What will bring peace is our readiness for war. The Romans
already knew this: If you want peace, prepare for war, not just
materially, but also psychologically. You should be
psychologically prepared for war, and not go around all the time
yelling, “When will peace finally come?” The other side wants
war? Fine, bring it on! Only then will peace come, only when the
other side is convinced that we mean it. We’re not doing anything
to convince them. On the contrary, we’re doing precisely the
opposite, which is why we are the greatest threat to ourselves.
