Yisrael (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.”

“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.