October 11, 2005

Mideast peace decades away - Israeli Nobel winner

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Israeli professor who won a Nobel prize on Monday for his research on strategy and conflict had few words of comfort for compatriots wondering when their decades-old fight with the Palestinians would end.

"It's been going on for at least 80 years and as far as I can see it is going to go on for at least another 80 years. I don't see any end to this one, I'm sorry to say," Robert Aumann told reporters when asked about prospects of achieving peace.

Israeli Professor Robert Aumann looks on at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem October 10, 2005. (REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

Aumann and American Thomas Schelling shared the 2005 Nobel prize for economics for their work on "game theory", the science of strategy that attempts to determine what actions rival groups should take to secure the best outcome for themselves.

Aumann's work on parties which interact many times over a long period -- so-called repeated games -- showed that peaceful cooperation is often an equilibrium solution, even where the parties have short-term conflicts of interest.

Despite his pessimism regarding Israel and the Palestinians, Aumann, 75, suggested science could give insight into a conflict that has ebbed and erupted since the early 20th century.

"I do hope that perhaps some game theory can be used and be part of this solution," the white-bearded academic said in separate remarks by telephone to Nobel officials in Stockholm.

German-born Aumann lost a son who was serving in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, aimed at crushing Palestinian guerrillas.

Hopes for a rapprochement between the two sides rose in 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat signed interim peace accords. Along with Israel's elder statesman, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, they won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.

Rabin and Arafat are now dead, their achievements all but forgotten in the fury of a Palestinian revolt that broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2000 after peace talks stalled.

Peres, the last surviving peace laureate, is now Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's key coalition partner and a major backer of last month's withdrawal from occupied Gaza, which stirred hopes that peacemaking could be revived.

Sharon called Aumann to say "he was very excited to hear he had won and Israel and its citizens were very proud," a statement from the Prime Minister's Office said.

Sharon was also glad Aumann had "found common denominators between game theory principles and those of Israeli tradition."

Several Israelis have scooped Nobel prizes in recent years.

Biochemists Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko were among recipients of the Chemistry prize in 2004, while Daniel Kahneman shared the 2002 Economics prize. Writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

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