In the final analysis, Israel’s wars against jihadi terrorists concern intersections between death and time. While these wars highlight sub-state adversaries, they also point toward existential conflicts with Iran. All such wars, whatever their particular nuances, could become many-sided and tactically bewildering. Worst-case scenarios, prima facie, would involve mutually reinforcing expressions of nuclear terrorism or nuclear war.
As a matter of law, any catastrophic war between Israel and its Islamist adversaries would have little to do with Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. Though veiled from the ordinary assessments of politicians, pundits, and strategists, variously animating causes would stem from primal needs to overcome individual human mortality. It follows, among other things, that all visible struggles between the Jewish state and jihadi enemies are essentially reflections of much deeper personal expectations.
These are increasingly complicated matters, unprecedented prospects that now urgently require uncharacteristically imaginative thinking. Accordingly, Israeli planners should inquire at specifically conceptual levels: What are the authentically reflected images, the truly motivating human needs? If Iran and jihadi terrorist groups seek nothing less than “power over death,” how can Israel meaningfully respond? This query is especially daunting because the presumed jihadist path to immortality is linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.”
For Israel, the most plausible existential threat is an adversary that regards violence against individual Jews and the Jewish state as inherently “sacred.” Today, merely identifying such adversaries has become more difficult because of the Assad regime collapse in Syria. Among other things, this recent collapse has generated multiple augmentations and recalibrations among jihadi foes.
To further distinguish Middle Eastern reality from shadows of reality (in the classical Platonic metaphor, “shadows” replace “reflections”), three basic concepts should be examined in concert: death, time, and immortality. What can these intersecting concepts teach Israeli planners about the imperiled national future?
To answer thoughtfully, capable thinkers and scholars should begin their disciplined inquiries at the level of the individual person or microcosm. Though an invisible capacity, a promise of power over death offers jihadists the ultimate reward for faith-based compliance, both as recipient beneficiary and as a reciprocally bestowing benefactor.
Answering a two-part question
But first a two-part question will need to be posed: How can any one individual, terrorist group or state gain “power over death,” and what can any such presumed gain have to do with Israel’s fate?
On occasion, the search for “power over death” can demand a religion-confirming end to the individual jihadist’s transient life on earth. Though revered by Iran-backed terrorist proxies as “martyrs,” virtually all jihadi leaders actually strive desperately to avoid personal death. These openly unheroic commanders are more inclined to endure Israeli military retaliations while residing in Qatari or Turkish five-star hotels. For such senior leaders, life amid secular affluence is generally preferred to existence in the airless tunnels snaking beneath Gaza, Jenin, and Beirut.
Nonetheless, jihadis have no problem with “allowing” the “martyrdom” of despised “unbelievers.” Many thousands of would-be Islamist terrorists oblige the rape, torture, and murder of designated foes as a firm religious imperative. On October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females, and then burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.” For these terrorist “battles,” Hamas leaders in absentia sent large sums of money to their families, generously promising all personal immortality or “power over death.”
There is more. In his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Such widely believed views link loyalty to the state with the promise of “power over death.” In world politics, this is always a monumental promise, but one recognizable only in the eternal shadows of death and time.
Indisputably, there can be no greater promise. For Israel, therefore, it is a promise of potentially unique potency.
Though it is an incomparable promise, personal immortality must still represent an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This judgment owes to both the promise’s calming expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and the fact that any search for life everlasting can foster war, terrorism, and (bearing witness to incessant Iranian calls for Israel’s annihilation) genocide. The necessary Israeli task should not be to remove adversarial hopes for personal immortality, but to “de-link” such a cowardly search from barbarous human behaviors. For the moment, of course, it remains a Herculean intellectual task.
In Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), Karl Jaspers comments: “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational....” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those that offer to confer some otherwise inexplicable “power over death.” It is somewhere within the twisted criteria of such a “selection” (a term made infamous at Auschwitz) that rapidly force-multiplying acts of violence can be spawned. This is because any jihadi promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of specifically despised “others.”
TO DEAL satisfactorily with immediate and long-term security threats from Iran (both direct and surrogate-declared), Israeli policy-makers will first have to understand the most elemental sources of war, terrorism, and genocide. These sources, which generally evade serious analytic scrutiny, are rooted in the stunningly complex intersections of death, time, and immortality. In the end, it is at the underlying conceptual level that Israeli scholars and policy-makers should fashion their calibrated operational responses to jihadist terrorism.
The Iranian nuclear threat has not disappeared. Though seemingly “defanged,” this elemental country danger to Israel depends on far more than usual assessments of “clock time.” More exactly, it is to “sacred time” rather than the “profane time” of clocks that Iranian and other jihadi leaders will turn for compelling reassurances of life everlasting. “It is through death,” explains Levinas, “that there is time,” but it is also though time that Israel can meaningfully understand death.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).