angel said, ‘I have to go.’ Cease-fire. Let’s make a truce. Let’s go.
“‘No,’ responded Jacob, ‘I will not stop until you accept me. You have to make peace with me. You have to bless me.’
“Then the angel said, ‘OK, I bless you. Why do I bless you? Why do I make peace with you? Because you have held out in the struggle. You have shown to me you will not collapse. You are holding on to your principles. I have become finally convinced that you are not going to let go. You have convinced me of that. You will not let go. You have struggled with the concept, the idea of Esau, and with physical human beings, and you have overcome both on the spiritual plane and on the physical plane.’
“That is when Israel was created. It was three thousand six hundred years ago. Sixty times sixty years ago. Not sixty years ago.
“So it was up to Jacob. It was up to him and he did it. Just as in Caroline Glick’s beautiful remarks at dinner, it’s now up to us and we must do it. We have to keep on. If we want the blessing of our cousins, not only of our cousins, but if we want the blessing of the world, we have to keep up the struggle. Although we are wounded. In spite of our wounds. Which we have suffered again and again throughout this struggle, throughout this long night. This is what we have to do. If we want their blessing we have to keep up the struggle from our side.”
Then, in the question and answer period, apparently in order to shake up his audience for a learning moment, he insisted, “The terrorists are rational. They are giving their lives. They are heroes of their people. They are heroes….”
The moderator, Adrienne Gold, a Canadian television personality, had had enough of this. She interrupted: “You mean there is no objective rationality? It’s all relative?”
“Yes,” he burst forth, “Of course there is no objective rationality. Congratulations. You have got it right. Rationality is the effective pursuit of your goals. The suicide bombers are rational, and they are getting their way. We have to understand they are rational in order to fight them.”
“All right. But there is an objective morality. You don’t deny that.”
“Oh, now you are talking morality.” Aumann said. “Morality is something else.”
Morality perhaps is the rationality of the law. Or the rationality of the universe.
“For example, morality,” Aumann said, “dictates not evicting people from their homes. Ever.
“Over history,” he observed, “many peoples have been expelled from their homes. But never before have they expelled themselves. Only the Jews have been expelling themselves, their own people, from their own homes and synagogues, towns and farms. From Sinai, from Gaza, from the West Bank, from Jerusalem. Only the Jews….
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he concluded, “if we want to survive as a nation in Israel, we have to go back to Jewish values. There is no other way. We have to reclaim our belief in the holiness of our cause.
“The state of Israel was founded by the Jewish people sixty years ago. It was founded by and large by people who were not observant, [Chaim] Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, people like this, and people who came before them. What these people did not realize is that Jewish values do not pass on automatically from generation to generation. They still had the vision. Their children didn’t. Or if some of their children had it, their grandchildren did not.
“In Israel, in general, we do not have it any more, not just the political leadership, the intellectuals, the media, the universities, the courts, these people have lost the raison d’etre of this state. They have forgotten that it is not sixty years old; it is sixty times sixty years old. They have forgotten the struggle of Jacob with the angel. And so the whole thing comes apart in their hands.”
Here Aumann entered into the realms of game theory: “What has happened is that nothing to us is holy any more.”
Unifying his two visions of rationality and religion, Aumann believes that a vision of holiness is critical to a game’s theoretic grasp of Israel’s predicament.
He tells a story.
“About eighteen years ago, the last time there were serious discussions between Syria and Israel about some kind of understanding between the two countries, a high officer in Israel, a major general, came by my office in the Center for the Study of Rationality. Why do we call it the Center for Rationality? It’s the only place in Israel where there is any rationality at all. It’s on the second floor of the Feldman Building on the Givat-Ram campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That’s where it is.
“The general came to me and identified himself by his first name. He discussed the situation with Syria. Said if we are going to reach any accommodation with the Syrians, we are going to have to give up all the Golan Heights. We will have to expel all the Jews who have been living in the Golan Heights for forty years. They’re going to have to leave the synagogues, leave [northern Galilee], which was one of the last bastions of the Jewish people in Israel at the time of the revolt against the Romans. We are going to have to leave all that, all the homes, all the farms, all the culture. Have to expel all the Jews.
“‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why can’t you compromise with them? Why?’”
He said to me: “Because to the Syrians the land is holy.”
I answered: “That’s the trouble with us. Not only is the land holy to the Syrians, but they have managed to convince you that it is not holy to us. Nothing is holy to us. Not the Golan Heights, not Jerusalem. Not Tel Aviv. Nothing is holy to us. We do not have any red lines. Nothing at all. And because nothing is holy to us, we are going to be left nothing if we continue this way.”
These echoes from the Torah and the primal religious predicament of the Jews might seem anomalous from a man who was awarded the Nobel Prize for advances in a science invented by the very secular and eminently pragmatic titan von Neumann, a science that attempts to reduce to mathematical logic all the strategic interactions of human beings, from poker and chess to love and religion to naval maneuvers and nuclear war. It is a way, in the words of the late polymathic strategic thinker Herman Kahn, to “think about the unthinkable,” to extract the emotion and blood from scenes like Masada and Mumbai, Nagasaki and 9/11, and to arrive at purely rational rules and predictions that render these eruptions more manageable and amenable to mitigation, remedy, or deterrence.
Three years earlier, Aumann concluded his Nobel lecture with a comment on Isaiah: “When Isaiah speaks of lions lying down with lambs and nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations learning war no more, he is describing what can happen when a central government prevails — in the presence of a Lord recognized by all…
“In the absence of such a dominant hierarchical power, one can perhaps have peace — no nation lifting up its sword against another. But the swords must continue to be there — they cannot be beaten into plowshares — and the nations must continue to learn war, in order not to fight.”
This recognition is indispensable to the survival of Israel — and of the United States.
CHAPTER TEN
Both in the United States and in Israel, the first decade of the 21st century ended with political change that brought the Israel test to the fore as the crucial conflict and major line of division in international affairs.
The United States elected Barack Obama, a charismatic exponent of Peace Now, tribune of nuclear disarmament, fervent protagonist of the economics of envy, a tireless and empathetic spokesman for Third World misery and Muslim grievances, and a prominent believer in the idea that among the greatest threats to the world is the impending increase of a couple of hundred parts per million (0.02 percent) in the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Under the influence of his community-activist mentor Saul Alinsky, Obama brings an unusual anti-capitalist perspective to the Oval Office, unique in its history.
One of Obama’s first acts as president was to remove from the Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill, sculpted by Sir Jacob Epstein and loaned to President George W. Bush by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on behalf of the British people after 9/11. To the new American president, it is safe to assume, Churchill represents a retrograde imperial figure sullied by his support for the British occupation of the Obama family’s ancestral domains in Kenya.
Supported by 78 percent of American Jews, Obama’s election was a disaster for Israel redeemed only by the
