Impediments to Reason: Israel’s Survival “In Time”

Whether its objective is war-winning, war-avoidance or counter-terrorism, Israel should assess primary survival options “in time.” More precisely, with conspicuous intent, the Jewish State’s pertinent policy makers will need to differentiate Israel’s specific ideas of chronology from those of its adversaries. Though Israel “lives” according to traditional notions of “clock time,” its jihadi foes regard these same measurable increments as “profane time.”

This is not just a matter of semantics. Serious policy consequences are attendant to the different conceptualizations. For jihadi adversaries, “real time” is only discoverable within opportunistic moments of “martyrdom.” In essence, because personal immortality can be allowed exclusively in “real time,” only this subjective notion of time can properly be called “sacred.”

At first, all of this may sound excruciatingly theoretic or academic. Nonetheless, it is tangibly crucial to Israel’s survival. Jihadi notions of “sacred time,” state and sub-state, actively encourage “martyrdom operations.” For the present, at least, this means “just” terror-violence. “In time,” however, it could also enlarge variously unacceptable risks of a nuclear war. Moreover, even before Israel has any authentic nuclear adversaries, it could still find itself embroiled in an “asymmetrical nuclear war.”[1]

There are multiple nuances to several worrisome scenarios. A state enemy of Israel (most plausibly Iran) could sometime become a jihadist terrorist writ large. If macrocosm follows microcosm, a suicide bomber could then become a “suicide state.” For the Jewish State, prima facie, no such force magnification could be considered tolerable, especially where the state aggressor has already become nuclear. Not to be overlooked, in this connection, is that Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.

For Jerusalem, policy-relevant issues will need to be framed in both legal and military terms. Though generally unrecognized, Israel’s jihadi adversaries (a category that now includes reconfiguring terror groups in post-Assad Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Somalia) define ultimate victory as “power over death.” Derivatively, for these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” or shahid also represents “power over time.”

These are bewilderingly complicated ideas. Still, Israel needs to think concretely about how to undermine such intangible elements of adversarial power. For example, how should a beleaguered Jewish State best meet the existential challenges of chronology posed by Iran – a steadily-nuclearizing enemy country? “It is through death,” we may learn from Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “that there is time.” The reciprocal is similarly unassailable: It is through time that there is death.

For Israel. these challenging matters contain dense and perplexing ironies. Though Jerusalem’s defense and security policies ought always to be science-based, such policies would still benefit from certain understandings of “time-as-lived.” Facing jihadi enemies, these difficult understandings will require prior acknowledgement that “survival time” could be explained in part as “subjective duration.”

Because “clocks slay time” – an oft-quoted observation by American writer William Faulkner – narrowly “objective” chronologies could prove injurious for the Jewish State. But what would constitute a suitably personalized and policy-centered theory of time for Jerusalem? It’s an altogether reasonable question.

Here, history deserves some pride of place. The notion of time as “subjective duration” or “felt time” has its origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as a simple linear progression, the early Hebrews generally approached chronology as a qualitative experience. Among other things, this view identified time as logically inseparable from its personally infused content.

In terms of prospective nuclear threats from Iran, Israeli planners should consider chronology not only at obvious operational levels (e.g., how much “time” before Iran becomes nuclear?), but also at the levels of individual Iranian decision-makers. What do authoritative leaders in Tehran actually think about time in shaping their military nuclear plans? For Israel’s prime minister and concerned citizens, there could be no more urgent question.

From its beginnings, the Jewish prophetic vision was of an imperiled community living “in time.” With this formative vision, political geography or “space” was rendered vitally important, but not because of territoriality as such. Instead, the relevance of particular geographic spaces stemmed from certain unique events that had allegedly taken place within its boundaries.

For present-day Israel, the space-time relationship reveals several less-philosophical security lessons. Any considered territorial surrenders by Israel (Judea/Samaria or “West Bank”) would reduce the amount of “objective time” that Israel has to resist war and terrorism. Accordingly, serious questions are now being raised about the wisdom of PM Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza back in 2005.[2]

Some past Israeli surrenders, especially if considered “synergistically,”[3] provided “extra time” for Israel’s enemies to wait patiently for optimal attack opportunities. In the future, similar territorial concessions could produce more genuinely intolerable costs. These potentially existential costs would concern jihadi terrorism and Iranian nuclearization.

Eventually, a subjective metaphysics of time, a reality based not on equally numbered chronological moments but on deeply-felt representations of “time as lived,” could impact ways in which (1) Iran chooses to confront the Jewish State; and (2) Israel decides to confront both Iran and its sub-state proxies.

If it could be determined that Iran and/or jihadi terror groups accept a shortening time horizon in their search for a “final victory” over Israel, Jerusalem’s response to enemy aggressions would have to be swift. If it would seem that a presumed enemy time horizon was calculably lengthening, Israel’s expected response could become more or less incremental. For national security decision-makers, this would mean a greater reliance on the passive dynamics of military deterrence and military defense[4] than on any active strategies of nuclear war fighting.[5]

In the final analysis, a worst case for Israel would be to face an already-nuclear and seemingly irrational Iran. Such an adversary could reasonably be described as a “suicide bomber in macrocosm.” Moreover, there could present a simultaneous or antecedent problem of a suicide bomber in microcosm, i.e., the “original” flesh-and-blood jihadi terrorist.

What else should Israel know about time? “Martyrdom” is widely accepted by hard-core Islamists as the most honorable and heroic way to soar above mortal limits imposed by “profane time.” Looked at from a more dispassionate analytic perspective, this practice is accepted by jihadists and Iran as a gratifying way to sanitize barbarism and justify mass murder of “unbelievers.” Sometimes, as we ought to have noted after October 7, 2023, this is also a lascivious way to overcome “profane time.”

Israel faces an overarching question: How can such perplexing correlations of death and time be suitably countered? One way would require the belated realization that an aspiring suicide bomber sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. This would signify a jihadist adversary’s primal hope to escape from time that lacks deeper meaning, a desperate hope to progress beyond “profane time” to “sacred time.”

From the standpoint of Israel’s most urgent survival concerns, the adversary could be an individual jihadi terrorist, the sovereign state of Iran or both acting together. In the third scenario, the effects of an Iran-jihadi terrorist fusion could be not “just” interactive, but also “synergistic.” By definition, this would mean inflicting a “whole” injury upon Israel that is greater than the sum of its “parts.” Ipso facto, the prospective dangers to Israel of any such unprecedented synergy would be more catastrophic if Iran were able to proceed with development of nuclear weapons and supporting infrastructures.

Israeli policy-makers will need to recognize these dense problems of chronology as policy-relevant quandaries. They will also need to acknowledge that any still-plausible hopes for national security must be informed by Reason. The critical importance of Reason to legal judgment was prefigured in ancient Israel, a fighting civilization that easily accommodated this standard within its sacred system of revealed law.

Jewish theory of law is unique in its synthesis of logic and belief. It offers a transcending order revealed by the “divine word” as interpreted by human Reason. In the commands of Ecclesiastes 32.23, 37.16, 13-14: “Let reason go before every enterprise and counsel before any action…And let the counsel of thine own heart stand…For a man’s mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in a high tower….”

An immediate task for Israel’s cumulative or collective “mind” should be greater understanding of the Jewish State’s mortal enemies “in time.”