Irony and imagination: Israel’s unseen path to survival

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)
Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
lberes@purdue.edu

Jorge Luis Borges, the late Argentine writer and philosopher, sometimes identified himself as a Jew. Though lacking any basis in Halacha, he still felt himself a kindred spirit: “Many a time I think of myself as a Jew,” he is quoted in Willis Barnstone’s, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (1982), “but I wonder whether I have the right to think so. It may be wishful thinking.”

With this welcome declaration there are accompanying ironies. For Jews, especially Israelis, one such irony is positively uplifting. These days, after all, it is distressingly rare to encounter explicitly philo-Semitic sentiment. This uncommon sentiment is even more charming because it was expressed by one of the modern world’s most insightful authors.

But why should anyone care? Why even take account of such little-known feelings and connections? Here is an uncommon answer: Jews in general and Israelis in particular should pay close attention to Borges’ wisdom because of its inconspicuous implications and because some of its implications could produce existential benefits. In essence, Borges’ thinking could help focus Jewish/Israeli security postures on core factors of transcending urgency.

What does this ultimately mean? In one of Borges’ best stories, a condemned man, having noticed that human expectations rarely coincide with reality, imagines the circumstances of his own death. Because they have become expectations, he reasons, they can never actually happen.

Metaphorically, Israel is this condemned man in macrocosm. By more fully recognizing that fear and reality go together naturally, the People of Israel could begin to imagine themselves within variously contingent spaces of individual and collective mortality. Then, with no continuous tinkering ‘round the edges of national security measures, Israel could suitably undertake the political and military policies needed to secure its basic survival.

In Israel, many have long concluded that God’s “eternal promise” of permanence will allow the Jewish State to stay confident in “higher” spheres of national protection. Still, any such faith-based conclusion, with its correlative disregard for tangible strategic preparations, would misrepresent both Torah and Talmud. Nothing in Judaism’s sacred texts could ever excuse a national security posture drawn from “first-line” expectations of divine intervention.  Even in Islam, the murderous Iranian regime and its obeisant surrogates (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc.) acknowledge that the primary responsibility to protect is human.

There are pertinent nuances. On a secular political level, any “Borges-based” logic to encourage Israel’s existential apprehensions could appear inappropriate or self-destructive.  Isn’t human death fear always debilitating? Don’t a great many people take pills precisely to assuage this problem? Don’t Israel’s jihadist enemies base their defiling policies of war and terror on enthusiastically presumed links to religious sacrifice?  Aren’t “martyrdom operations” designed above all to confer immortality or “power over death?”

When openly expressed, existential dread is almost always a confession of human weakness. For Israel, confronted by enemies that are consumed by overwhelming death fears (ironically, jihadist suicide bombers “kill themselves” in order to avoid death), what possible advantages could there be to actively nurturing thoughts of collective disappearance?

Sometimes, truth may emerge through irony and paradox. Imaginations of collective immortality, notions that Israel is necessarily forever, could discourage imaginative steps to collective self-preservation. Even in circles where there exists a willingness to accept worst-case scenarios, most Israelis would instinctually resist intimations of personal and national annihilation. Ignoring Borges’ counter-intuitive reasoning, the result would likely be still-greater levels of Jewish national transience.

In the fashion of its enemies, Israel imagines for itself, scripturally, strategically or both, life everlasting.  But unlike these barbarous enemies, Israel does not see itself achieving immortality, individually or collectively, via ritualistic murders of adversaries. For Israel, moreover, any upcoming war with a still pre-nuclear Iran and its proxies (a war that might pit the IDF against already-nuclear North Korean assets) could prove unprecedented in its destructiveness. More plausibly than before, such sui generis conflict could become extinctive.

There is more. Any asymmetry of purpose and expectation between Israel and its implacable foes would place the Jewish State at a notable disadvantage. While Israel’s enemies, most evidently Iran, express “positive” hopes for personal immortality by slaughter of “Jews,” Israel’s leaders display expectations for national immortality by agreeing to faux “cease fires,” land surrenders and (ultimately) “Palestine.” With state and sub-state enemies who calculate only a zero-sum conflict with Israel, such display is effectively suicidal.

In the end, Israel – a country half the size of America’s Lake Michigan – does not have the luxury of strategic depth.  It follows, inter alia, that any honest national assessment of impending harms would allow an otherwise “condemned man” to imagine the worst and thus “stay alive.” For most Israelis, this advice will seem arcane and meaningless, but in such complex security matters, policy ought not to be detached from challenging philosophical thought.

Under prevailing circumstances, the expanding clash between Islamic believers in “religious sacrifice” (war and terror) and Israeli believers in reason will likely favor the former.  Unless this asymmetry is replaced by far-reaching and deliberate Israeli imaginations of approaching disappearance, Jewish believers in “compromise” could be forced once again to depart the Promised Land.

Exeunt omnes.

Israel does not need more American-style “positive thinking.” It does not need more “common sense.” It needs disciplined and dialectical thinkers, strategists who could finally understand the ironic benefits of “thinking the worst.”

Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt warns ominously but correctly, “The worst does sometimes happen.” Though counter-intuitive, it would be redemptive for Israel to nurture latent survival benefits of “negative thinking,” of imagining “the worst.” Even in this eleventh hour, if spurred on by realistic imaginations of disaster rather than unceasing delusions of political settlement, the People of Israel could ward off a perpetually relentless enemy. Contrary to contrived exclamations of heroism, this Islamist enemy does not “love death.” Rather, it approaches individual death with vastly greater cowardice than does humankind in general. The Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah jihadist criminal fights feverishly against “The Jew” not because he is an honorable warrior, but because he is a uniquely wretched kind of coward. Seeking “martyrdom” above everything else, this terrorist rapes and slaughters not for any defensible reasons of “self-determination,” but in order not to die.

“The worst does sometimes happen.” For Israel, any coinciding appearance of Iranian nuclearization, Palestinian statehood and regional war would come precariously close to “the worst.” Only by facing up to this unprecedented intimation of final disaster could the People of Israel declare necessary limits to absurd good-will gestures and the pointless offerings of unreciprocated risk-taking. It is only by signifying such essential limits that this beleaguered People could reasonably expect “the best.”

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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on Israeli security matters. He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II and served as Chair of Project Daniel (Israel. PM Sharon, 2003-2004). Professor Beres’ twelfth and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016; 2^nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy  He is an annual contributor to Oxford University Press, Oxford Yearbook on International Law and Jurisprudence, and to many major law journals and foreign policy publications. Dr. Beres is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University.