Seductions of Immortality: A Core Obstacle to Israel’s Survival

In the final analysis, Israel faces existential threats not because of multiplying enemy weapons or strategies, but on account of adversarial death fears. Among other things, this means that Islamist Iran and its assorted terror-group surrogates (most conspicuously Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthi) regard the idea of protracted warfare against a Jewish state as obligatory religious sacrifice. Ipso facto, any fighters who die in the sacred cause of a “holy war” are shahids or “martyrs.” Accordingly, they can expect grateful bestowal of the highest imaginable form of power. This means “power over death.”

Ironies abound. By definition, any promise of such incomparable power must stem from dissembling sentiments of anti-reason, not from reason or  science. Nonetheless, what the philosopher Karl Jaspers calls “whisperings of the irrational” has never effectively neutralized or diminished this seductive promise as a critical factor in world politics. Rather, for assorted Islamist aggressors and terrorists, taking sides with anti-reason has been individually liberating and collectively gainful. Arguably, without choreographed sentiments of anti-reason, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi etc. would represent only secular (i.e., minor) irritations.

There is more. Proudly unhidden, Iran and Israel’s subsidiary jihadist enemies draw power from an almost primal loathing of reason and rationality. If this lascivious power should ever be joined with weapons of mass destruction, most ominously (but not exclusively) nuclear weapons, Israel could have to face the most murderous manifestations of doctrinal anti-reason.

In any such confrontation, the illogical promise of immortality could prove determinative. To clarify further, this promise is not a civilizational problem per se. It represents a problem only because it is inextricably intertwined with the religion-based killing of “unbelievers.” For Iran and its many obeisant surrogates, terror killings of “others” are not simply transient matters of profane secular politics. Instead, they are openly vaunted expressions of religious “sacrifice.”

To best ensure Israel’s national survival, more detailed and nuanced understandings of Islamist sacrifice will be needed. Further Iranian triumphs of delusion over reason could enlarge various primal expectations. This portentous enlargement would take place through war, terrorism, and/or genocide. In short order, the derivative “victory” would be lamented in Jerusalem and Washington but celebrated in Tehran, Damascus and Moscow.

On any such matters of world-historical urgency, Israeli scholars and policy-makers should think creatively beyond the usual parameters of weapons, strategy, and tactics. Their guiding question ought to be expressed as follows: How can Israel best convince Iran and its relevant proxies that faith-based murders of profane “unbelievers” could never offer the perpetrators “power over death?” Though Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah, Houthi, and other Iranian surrogates think of war, terror, and genocide against Israel as inherently ennobling, they should be made aware that such thinking is destined to fail. This humiliating and unexpected fate would happen even amid a coinciding military victory.

Looking at Israel’s “war in the north” and an impending direct war with Iran, a summarizing question will need to be asked: What should Israel do when it acknowledges itself confronted by religion-driven enemies – adversaries captivated by “whisperings of the irrational” and by correlative promises of “martyrdom”? There should also be various antecedent questions: What sort of “faith” can self-righteously encourage the rape, torture, and murder of criminally abducted hostages?  Can still-virtuous nations seriously believe that such crimes against humanity are intended to codify Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination? The answers are hardly hidden or mysterious.

Ex injuria jus non oritur. In law, all law, “Rights can never stem from wrongs.” Why do Palestinian leaders promising life-everlasting to “martyrs’ (shahids) steer clear of danger zones themselves? Why do they prefer five-star hotel suites in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to the tunneled streets of Gaza?  Could it be that they are using the dissembling forces of anti-reason to sacrifice others while staying safe themselves? If so, could there possibly be any more defiling forms of human cowardice than what accelerated on October 7th?

In Jerusalem, thinking will always need to be sharp. Irrationality need not signify weakness. Though it is a lascivious faith, jihadism is still capable of generating unspeakable human harm. To prevent such sufferings, Israel’s decision-makers ought never to forget that the true object of Islamist terror sacrifice is never “The Israeli.” It is “The Jew,” always “The Jew.” The difference here couldn’t possibly be more important to shaping Israel’s security policies.

Israel’s most immediate policy concern is the war with Hezbollah and its visible links to wider war with Iran. Complex dynamics of anti-reason will continue to hold sway in Islamist politics at both state (Iranian) and sub-state (terror-group) levels. In his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank explained these broadly human dynamics at an elucidating conceptual level: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”

There is more. There will be coinciding matters of law and justice. Under authoritative international law, jihadist perpetrators should be distinguished from counter-terrorist adversaries by their willful embrace of mens rea or “criminal intent.”  Though Israel correctly regards the harms it is forced to inflict upon noncombatant populations as the regrettable costs of obligatory counter-terrorism, Iran and its sub-state proxies always target Israeli civilians with openly criminal intent and a boisterously primal ecstasy.

In world law, both customary and codified, responsibility for Israel-inflicted harms lies with the jihadist side for multiple reasons, but most notably on account of the terrorists’ contemptible resort to “human shields. Such unheroic resort is flagrantly criminal. Under international law, the crime is correctly known as “perfidy.”

Israel coexists with all other states in an international “state of nature.” Despite being subject to continuously irrational promises, Iran and its proxies accept the proposition that “sacrificing” specific “others” (most plainly, Jews) offers powerful “medicine” against their own personal deaths. This proposition reflects a grim and growing “triumph” of geo-strategic anti-reason.

For the foreseeable future, such triumph, though intolerable, will be probable. For Iran and its subordinate war planners, attempts to avoid personal death by killing certain designated “others” will remain delusional and futile, but still be dauntingly consequential. Though the legacy of Westphalia, the 1648 treaty that birthed modern international law, codifies reason, and rejects anti-reason, almost no one pays any real attention. Israel is an exception, but its repeated calls for a law-based regional peace are regularly shattered by the primal lure of Islamist violence.

There is more. Scholars and policy-makers may discover prophetic endorsements of anti-reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke, and assorted others. Yet, there have also been philosophic voices of a different sort. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.”  It is, he remarks prophetically in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.”

The 19th-century philosopher could have been writing about present-day Iran or about Iran’s ally, North Korea. Regarding Pyongyang, already-nuclear North Korea could sometimes come to the aid of a still pre-nuclear Iran. Years back, it was North Korea that built a nuclear reactor for another Iranian ally, Syria. This reactor was subsequently destroyed by Israel’s September 2007 “Operation Orchard,” a permissible operation of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law.

Iran, as a mentor to barbarous jihadist forces, represents the juridical incarnation of anti-reason. A state of Palestine would merely add power to these dissembling and law-violating forces. Considered together as “synergistic,” Iran-Palestine could present Israel with an unstoppable and irremediable threat, one wherein the “whole” of impacted human sufferings would exceed the sum of its murderous “parts.”

To deal with force-multiplying jihadist foes, enemies that relentlessly seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential strategy should be based on deeper analytic understandings of adversarial irrationalities. Moreover, in carrying out its necessary military operations against Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah, Houthi, etc., Jerusalem ought never to forget that its core adversary is the terror-mentoring state of Iran. In this connection, keeping the Islamic Republic operationally non-nuclear should represent Israel’s most urgent policy obligation. In any upcoming conflict with Iran, Jerusalem will need to consider and possibly reimagine apt forms of intra-war preemption.

Because international law is not a suicide pact, it makes explicit provisions for “anticipatory self-defense.” In the coming months, it is altogether plausible (perhaps even probable) that Jerusalem will exercise this provision. To do so, Israel, acting in opposition to what philosopher Karl Jaspers’ calls “whisperings of the irrational,” should be acting with “penetrating clear thought.”

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LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Born in Zürich at the end of World War II, he is the author of many books, monographs, and articles dealing with Israeli nuclear strategy. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he has lectured on this topic for over fifty years at leading universities and academic centers for strategic studies. Dr. Beres’ twelfth book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, was published by Rowman and Littlefield, in 2016 (2nd ed., 2018).  In December 2016, Professor Beres authored a monograph at Tel-Aviv University (with a special postscript by retired USA General Barry McCaffrey), Israel’s Nuclear Strategy and American National Security.   In 2003-2004, he was Chair of Israel’s “Project Daniel” (Iranian nuclear weapons/PM Ariel Sharon).