The Ultimatum Game

On the Ultimatum Game

“Indeed, God has comforted Zion, comforted all her ruins. He has made her wilderness like Eden and her desert like God’s garden. Joy and gladness will flourish there, thanksgiving and song.” – Isaiah 51:3

“. . . We will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood (October 7) is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. . . . On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000, everything we do is justified.” – Ghazi Hamad, Hamas leader.

“In Britian, the government has said the backlash against Israel is stoking fear among lawmakers and is in danger of making them too scared to express their views. . . .Mike Freer a Conservative Party lawmaker whose north London constituency includes a large Jewish community, said he would quit politics at the next general election after an arson attack on his office and an email saying he was ‘the kind of person who deserves to be set alight.’ Freer said it was the last straw after years of threats.” – Wall Street Journal (Mar. 9. 2024)

Days after October 7, a friend and I wondered at what point the barbarism of Hamas attacks on Israel – the killings, the rapes, the torture, the dismemberments, the burning of people alive – would fade in the shadow of war intended to exterminate that terrorist threat.

It seems that point was reached rather rapidly.

And it’s not just political or war policy debate. It’s incidents of ugly anti-Semitism, clocked by numerous estimates as increasing more than 350% since October 7 and cloaked in familiar tropes.

It is surprising, and yet in some quarters not surprising, all at the same time.

Despite footage from security cameras and Hamas’s own Go-Pros, it took the U.N. five months to conclude that it found “reasonable grounds to believe” that sexual violence was perpetrated by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova Music Festival and on kibbutzim. The preceding (if not ongoing) silence, including from many women’s rights groups and stunning demands that victims “prove it happened” (impossible when many were among the more than 1,200 killed or kidnapped that day), inspired a grave #metoounlessyoureajew.

The collective actions and inaction stirred unsettling feelings reminiscent of Genesis 31:5: “I have noticed that your father’s disposition is not toward me as it was in earlier days.”

Anemones bloom each spring throughout Israel, typically in hues of white, purple, scarlet, and blue. In southern Israel, only red anemones are seen. They serve as the eponymic duty for the annual Darom Adom (Red South) festival that in ordinary times features agricultural tours, farmers markets, and bike treks, among other activities.

This year, Red South conveys different, terrible connotations. Southern Israel was the site of the October 7 massacres. In the open fields of the Supernova Music Festival alone, 364 concert attendees were killed; scores sexually assaulted; and at least 40 taken by Hamas, which still holds 134 hostages. A small section of those fields is cordoned off as a quickly sprung memorial, hundreds of stakes in the ground topped by Israeli flags and adorned by photos and other memorials to each victim of the attack, including letters and poems left by friends and survivors. And about 200 feet away, a monument that would be more at a home in a cemetery than a flower-filled field that less than six months ago was the site of an all-night rave, a party where fans initially mistook incoming rocket fire from Gaza as fireworks to celebrate dawn. The etched granite face of the monument bears the likenesses of a young man and woman, murdered on October 7, and a prophet’s assurance of better future days.

Israel is a small country. It is about the size and shape of New Jersey, with roughly the same population. If in the United States we talk about “six degrees of separation,” Israelis experience roughly two degrees of a separation. Everyone knows everyone. From school. National service. The draft. A friend of a friend who grew up in the same town, or someone who at some point who crossed paths with another.

And so in the terminal of Ben Gurion Airport, where individual photos of each of the 134 remains hostages are displayed in the walkway from the gates to the baggage claim (and when departing, from the ticket counters back to the gates), the posters are less an installation and more a family photo album. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. And the feeling repeats itself throughout the country where posters and placards are tied, taped, fastened to bus stops, fences, buildings, any place reminders of loved ones held hostage can be placed.

The calls for a cease fire miss several salient points: (1) There would be an immediate cease fire if Hamas released the hostages and stood down from terror; (2) There was, in fact, a ceasefire in effect on October 6; Hamas shattered it by sending wave after wave of terrorists into Israel by sea, land, and air; (3) Hamas has been clear that it would intend to repeat the horrors of October 7 again, and again, and again; (4) Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, pulling out every civilian and troop from the strip; there was no “Gaza occupation,” yet Hamas spent the past 16 years firing rockets over the border and building tunnels beneath the strip; (5) No Israeli solider whether enlisted or called up from reserves wants to leave his or her family for the urban hell of the Gaza war.

But every soldier wants to bring back home the brother or sister, the “someone who knows someone I know” and make sure that October 7 never happens again.

And nowhere is this more evident in the signs and placards and banners that saturate the landscape. The displays do not rally revenge. They say, simply, “Bring Them Home.” Or invoke a prayer now said too frequently, “Deliver them from darkness and distress and bring them to their families’ embrace.”

The Ultimatium Game is an economic exercise in “take it or leave it” alternatives. One player, the proposer, is granted a sum of money and directed to split it with another player who is known as the responder. The proposer decides how the money should be divided. The responder has a choice of whether to accept, or not, no matter how irrational the offer. But there is no chance for a second offer. If the responder accepts the terms, the money is divided between the two, whether 50/50, 60/40, or 90/10. If the responder rejects the offer, no one receives anything; the proposer must return the money to the original grantor. The game identifies the point at which the responder will accept an irrational offer. Of a $10,000 grant, John can offer Jane $5,000, or $3,000, or $1,000, or even less. Jane can accept what is offered, or get nothing at all. “Take it or leave it.”

With 134 hostages still in Hamas tunnels, this is the situation in which Israel finds itself. Accept a deal that returns only 40 hostages? Agree to a pathway that leaves Hamas able to launch October 10, or October 1,000,000?

What rational decision would any other nation make?

So where does this leave us?

Hamas has declared that it intended October 7 to be only a step in its campaign to annihilate Israel. The silence of too many whose disposition is not as it was in earlier times makes many wonder where they stand. The glacial pace of U.N. response to October 7, and its numerous calls on Israel to stand down without concomitant calls on Hamas to release the hostages and recognize Israel’s right to exist signal where the U.N. stands. And then silence, which only provides a vacuum in which more hatred grows. As a civilization, have we reached a point where terrorist sympathizers have cowed political leaders into silence? Or worse, implicit support?

The irony of hope is that it often springs from tragedy. The prophecy of Isaiah inscribed on a monument in a field of joy that became a field of death reminds us that we pray for fields of better times again.

But that promise can be realized only if the threat that seeks to obliterate decency, life, and goodness is itself removed.