Israeli Economics Nobel Laureate Aumann Criticizes the Innocents-for-Terrorists Deal

Israeli Professor Yisrael (Robert) Aumann, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel in Economics for his work on game theory, has considered the innocents-for-terrorists deal made between Israel and Hamas, and concludes that it is “crazy.” More of his views on the exchange can be found here: “Nobel laureate on terrorist release deal: ‘We’re killing ourselves,’” by David Isaac, JNS, February 27, 2025:

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.”

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.

In a word, said Aumann, “Crazy.”

“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.]…

82% of the terrorists who were among the 1,027 prisoners freed by Israel to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit went back to committing acts of terrorism.

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….

Here Prof. Aumann, despite being a clear thinker on game theory, goes off the deep end. Hamas terrorists are only “idealists” in the same way that Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann and Mohamed Atta were “idealists.” Can one really agree with Aumann when he says  “I respect them” because these Muslim terrorists are willing to “give their lives for their ideals”? Does he respect those Hamas operatives who tied Jewish family members together and burned them alive? Does he respect those who mass raped Israeli girls? Or “respect” those members of Hamas who sliced the breasts off women, cut the genitalia off men, and gouged out the eyes of both men and women, before finally killing them? It is a terrible misuse of language for him to declare “I respect them”?

Instead, he ought to have said something like this: “These madmen in Gaza are willing to die ‘for their beliefs,’ like the 19 Muslims who carried out 9/11, or the Kouachi brothers, Cherif and Said, who killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists,, or the follower of Islamic State, who drove the cargo truck that killed 86 people and injurid 434 others in Nice on Bastille Day. The driver was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in France. He knew he would be killed. But he went ahead anyway. Do any of those moral monsters deserve our respect?”

A Nobel economist he may be, but when Aumann claims that the motives of Hamas murderers are “not low or degraded,” he is speaking nonsense. Let’s be charitable and note that he is 95 years old.