Death, time and immortality in the Middle East

 potentially catastrophic war between Israel and Iran will have little to do with sovereignty, national security or self-determination. Though veiled from superficial assessments of politicians and pundits, true conflict causes will stem from primal jihadist needs to “overcome death.” In essence, shamelessly proclaimed grievances of the Islamic Republic of Iran are merely reflection of what animates that aggressor’s belligerent intent. In this aptly conspicuous case, what we might ordinarily accept as authentic conflict origins are really just “shadow.”

These are bewilderingly complicated matters, unprecedented prospects that require imaginative thinking. To proceed, Israeli planners should inquire: What are the truly motivating human needs? More precisely, if Iran and its surrogate jihadists seek nothing less than “power over death,” what can Israel do?

This query is especially daunting because the jihadist path to immortality is linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.” For Israel, the underlying existential threat is an adversary who identifies deliberate violence against Jews and the Jewish State as “sacred.” None of this is meant to suggest that ordinary geopolitics are irrelevant to Israeli self-defense calculations (to the contrary, such geopolitics have already created a driving momentum of their own), but that it is time for Jerusalem to look more insightfully at animating causes.

To continue at deeper assessment levels, three basic concepts should be examined together: death, time and immortality.

What can these intersecting concepts teach about the imperiled Israeli future? Capable thinkers and scholars should begin their disciplined inquiries at the level of the individual – the microcosm. Though an invisible property, power over death represents Iran’s ultimate reward for faith-based compliance with religious injunction, both as a recipient beneficiary and as a bestowing benefactor.

First an antecedent question should be posed:

How can any one individual or single state gain “power over death,” and what can such a presumed gain have to do with Israel’s “fate”?

On occasion, presumptively an occasion for religious celebration, the search for “power over death” can demand a faith-confirming end to the individual jihadist’s life on earth.

Though revered by Iran-backed terror proxies as “martyrdom,” virtually all leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) strive desperately to avoid personal death. To wit, these openly unheroic leaders are more inclined to endure Israeli military retaliations in Qatari or Turkish five-star hotels than in the airless tunnels beneath Gaza, Jenin or Beirut.

In any event, Iran and its surrogates have no problem with “allowing” the “martyrdom” of others. Accordingly, many thousands of would-be Islamist “resistance fighters” oblige the rape, torture and murder of “unbelievers” as firm religious imperative. On October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females, then burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.”

For these “fighters,” Hamas leaders (in absentia. of course) sent money to their families, promising them all (extended families included) personal immortality or “power over death.” As to the origins of these “hero payments,” they are discoverable in United Nations bank accounts.

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.”

There can be no greater promise.

hough an incomparable offering, personal immortality must always represent an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This assessment owes both to its expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and to the fact that the search itself can foster war, terrorism, and (bearing witness to incessant Iranian calls for Israel’s annihilation) genocide. The plausible Israeli task should not be to remove adversarial hopes for personal immortality, but to “de-link” such futile hopes from barbarous behaviors.

In Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), philosopher 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 earlier made infamous at Auschwitz) that force-multiplying violence against Jews and the Jewish State can be spawned. For Iran and its surrogates, any promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of these specifically despised “others.”

To deal satisfactorily with immediate and long-term security threats from Iran (both direct and surrogate-declared threats), Israeli policy-makers will first have to understand the most elemental sources of regional war, terror and (potentially) genocide. These core sources generally evade serious analytic scrutiny, and are rooted in stunningly complex intersections of death, time and immortality. In the final analysis, whatever the intellectual difficulties involved, it is at the conceptual or theoretic level that Israeli scholars and policy-makers should fashion their remedies for Iranian aggression and jihadist terror.

Whenever informed observers think of time as a pertinent factor in Middle East war-planning, they are thinking of “clock time.” Still, the “clock time” it will take for Iran to become operationally nuclear could prove far less important to its war-planning decisions than another form of chronology. This is the time that Iran’s leaders would associate with compelling assurances of life-everlasting.

“It is through death,” explains the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “that there is time.