Wrong Move

The key to a lasting peace, argues Israeli Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann, is not to insist on ‘peace now’

Lee Smith
Tablet Magazine
22 September '10

Why, despite the backing of the American superpower, has the Middle East peace process failed again and again? I was in Jerusalem last week when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Washington’s peace parade through town, and there was so little fanfare that I was almost forced to conclude that Time Magazine was right: Perhaps given the current dynamism of Israel’s one-time quasi-socialist economy, Israelis are now too busy making money and going to the beach to participate in the secular passion play of the peace process.

But it is also true that the excitement of the Oslo peace agreements culminated in the second intifada, and the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza brought thousands of Hamas missiles directed at southern Israel. Maybe then the problem is not that Israelis don’t want peace, but that the context into which they have been forced is fatally flawed. So, why do Western diplomats and policymakers keep pursuing the same formulas even though the evidence of failure is plain?

For answers I went to visit Robert Aumann, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics whose work in game theory, or interactive decision theory, is a formal analysis of repeated games. “Repeated games model long-term interaction and account for phenomena such as altruism, cooperation, trust, loyalty, revenge,” Aumann said in his Nobel lecture, “War and Peace.” If anyone could explain the repeated failure of the Middle East peace process, I thought, it is a Nobel laureate who actually lives in the region and who has experienced the results of diplomatic failure in his daily life.

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