TORONTO — Nobel Prize laureate Robert Aumann, left, warned last week that Jews in Israel may not survive as a nation unless they em-brace Jewish values.
Speaking at an Aish Toronto seminar at Shaarei Shomayim Congregation on
the topic of Israel’s future, Aumann, a Hebrew University
mathematician and game theorist, said, “If we want to sur-vive as a
nation in Israel, we have to go back to Jewish values.”
Aumann, who is Orthodox, added: “There’s no other way. It’s got to go that way.”
Aumann, who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics with Thomas Schelling, expressed certainty that the Jewish People will endure. But in a reference to Israel, which marked its 60th anniversary last spring, he said, “I have my doubts about the 60-year-old entity.”
Suggesting that Israel can be saved by a massive infusion of Jewish values, Aumann warned the country could be “finished” if it continues to be underpinned by western values.
As he put it, “Mozart won’t save us.”
Aumann, a 78-year-old German-born yeshiva graduate who earned a PhD in the United States, said Israel was largely founded by secular Jews imbued with a love for Zion and Jewish values. But he voiced regret that they have not succeeded in passing on these ideas to their children and grandchildren.
Claiming that Israel’s secular elite has lost its raison d’etre, he said its members have forgotten that Israel’s history goes back 3,600 years. Suggesting they are not proper custodians of the Zionist dream, he said, “And so the whole thing comes apart in their hands.”
In a survey blending history and religion, Aumann said, “The state of our future is in the past. Israel is not 60. Israel is 60 times 60, or 3,600 years old. That’s when Israel was born.”
In a reference to the territories captured by Israel in the Six Day War, Aumann said that too few Israelis regard these places as holy. “We don’t have any red lines,” he declared.
“And if we continue this way, we’ll be left with nothing,” he added, referring to previous Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank.
Urging perseverance in the face of Arab hostility, he called on Israelis to “keep up the struggle.”
Blasting Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Aumann said it marked the first time that “a people have expelled themselves.”
Fearing that Israel may give up still more settlements in the territories, he said, “The Israeli government should not re-peat that crime against humanity.”
Aumann said neither Jews nor Arabs should be expelled from their homes. “We have to find a way to live with our cousins,” he said of the Palestinians.
Disagreeing with the argument that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Semitism, Aumann said, “There are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionists, who don’t want a Jewish state in Israel.”
No logical relationship exists between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, he observed. “But in practice, the two get all mixed up,” he added, alluding to the Muslim terrorists who murdered Jews earlier this month in Mumbai.