hmmm...i should say, the kidnap was the cheating part. the border violations and bombings seem kinda similiar to the ritualized flight border violations along the east german border between the US and the sovs. sortof an established protocol that was tolerated as an unwritten part of the treaties. 
here is a very interesting analysis from wretchard. and the follow up. david, you may be correct that israel had always this plan bank-rolled. ;) 
the thing is, our DoD, and the Israeli DoD, do rely on wargaming and sims for planning and analysis. i sorta doubt hizb' does. games theory works for war and economics, tho, that is widely recognized. 
 
it is my hypothesis that we have some relative genetic fitness conferred by moral behavior, a sort of god-in-the-genes. we attempt to amplify this "right" or "just" behavior with religions, governments and philosophies.  
But my question remains, can "immoral" behavior, like that exhibited by the terrorists, become a stable strategy? 
Are terrorists consistant defectors, non-cooperators? 
And is it a winning strategy? Like SDB says, saints vs. sinners is a loser for the saints every time.

The Israel-Palestine dynamic is such that any individual player or factional leader, especially among the Palestinians, can commit his side by breaking discipline. 
 
defectors. 
this isn't gnxp current events, this is a field lab for the iterated prisoner's dilemma. ;)

hmmm...i wonder if terrorists can be reliably predicted to be defectors instead of cooperators?

arcane, from what i know, Sameer Kuntar was the deal-breaker. 
his co-murderer was exchanged in 2004, can you blame hizb' for thinking they could work it out by upping the payoff? 
i stand by opportunistic. 
israel is taking advantage of the US waittime, the saud, jordanian and egyptian condemnation of hizb', any number of favorable conditions. 
why is that negative? 
Israel is playing classic tit-for-tat. 
it should be unbeatable. ;)

ugh! 
none of you brainiacs ever read my links. 
from SDB's excellent explanation of the prisoners dilemma and the tit-for-tat paradigm...There's been a lot of analysis of this, and it turns out that honesty isn't the best policy. One guy decided to run a computer tournament; people were permitted to create algorithms in a synthetic language which would have the ability to keep track of previous exchanges and make a decision on each new exchange whether to be honest or to cheat. He challenged them to see who could come up with the one which did the best in a long series of matches against various opponents. It turned out that the best anyone could find, and the best anyone has ever found, was known as "Tit-for-tat". 
 
On the first round, it plays fair. On each successive round, it does to the other guy what he did the last time. 
 
When Tit-for-tat plays against itself, it plays fair for the entire game and maximizes output. When it plays against anyone who tosses in some cheating, it punishes it by cheating back and reduces the other guys unfair winnings. 
 
No-one has ever found a way of defeating it. 
 
Now let's analyze two different and even more simplistic approaches; we'll call them "saint" and "sinner". The saint plays fair every single round, irrespective of what the other guy does. The sinner always cheats. 
 
When a saint plays against another saint, or against tit-for-tat, the result is optimum but more important is that everyone gets the same result. When a sinner plays against another sinner, or against tit-for-tat, everyone cheats and the result is still even, though less than optimal. 
 
But when a sinner plays against a saint, the sinner wins and the saint loses. 
 
Which brings me back to the point of all this: Is there anything I would rule out in war? Nothing I'd care to admit to my enemies, because ruling out anything is a "saint" tactic. The Tit-for-tat tactic is to be prepared to do anything, but not to do so spontaneously. In other words, if the other guy threatens to use poison gas, you make sure you have some of your own and let him know that you'll retaliate with it. That means that he has nothing to win by using it, and he won't. (A war is a sequence game and not a single transaction because each day is a new exchange. If you gassed my guys yesterday, I can gas yours today.) 
 
I chose that example carefully because that's actually what happened in WWII in Europe. After the horror of poison gas in WWI, the world agreed to ban its use in one of the Geneva Conventions, and in fact no-one did use poison gas in Europe in WWII. Not even Hitler, who apparently knew no bounds at all, was willing to. Because he was following international law? Hell no. It was because the Americans and British maintained stocks of poison gas in Europe and were ready to retaliate in kind. (In fact, an A
More....

Krampon, i still think the game was two-player prisoner-exchange that escalated into Tit-for-Tat. 
;)

dave, All-out terror war would not be an innovation—it was the original kind... 
i don't think so dave, in the EEA the practice of sacrificing the tribes woman and children would have conferred a negative fitness hit.

John Emerson, dave and i were originally discussing the israel/hizb' entries into war. i think actually both sides sorta bumbled into the war based on miscalculations, so i widened the discussion to include games theory to try to formalize the actions of the two parties. 
i agree about aquinas, however.

Dan Dare, 
One day we will have Bayesian Expert Systems that will... 
a priori data is (imho) the cause of the current mess in leb. hizb' thought israel would make the prisoner swap, 'cause they had before. israel thought they they would get called off before they got mired in a quaqmire, because that is what always happens since '82. 
bayesian inference is not terribly useful in an evolving game with environmental change.

David B, that quote is also featured in Boyd and Richerson's book. ;)