Though there are many reasons why Israel’s enemies would never honor a cease fire agreement for Gaza, one reason is primal, overriding and immutable. Because Israel is a Jewish state, any concessionary commitments by Jerusalem would automatically be deemed invalid by these enemies. For Israel, ipso facto, the only “remedy” for this pre-determined enemy orientation would be to disappear.
Philosophically, it’s not complicated. In essence, these bitter conclusions do not require the multi-layered insights and expertise of authoritative legal scholars. For Iran and its proxies, Israel can never represent more than the individual Jew writ large.
From the standpoint of expected reciprocities, it matters not a bit to Iran, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc., if Israel agrees to humanitarian interruptions of belligerency or to conflict-terminating pacts.
For such inherently recalcitrant foes, Muslims are obligated to “fight the Jews, and kill them…”[1] For these self-declared opponents of international law, a Jewish state in the Dar al Islam (the world of Islam) represents an intolerable abomination. For these deceivers, acts of Israeli good-will, however well-intentioned, are always immaterial.
In principle, at least, the grievously lawless enemy postures are fixed and timeless. Per such faith-based postures, anti-Zionism has never been anything more than a transparent form of anti-Judaism. Before Israel could expect tangible relief from jihadist war and terror, it would first have to acknowledge these force-multiplying sources of adversarial loathing.
These sources, prima facie, have nothing to do with Israel being an “aggressor” or “occupier.” By definition, Israel’s signature on cease-fire documents or on “follow on” agreements concerning Palestinian statehood would mean nothing to Jerusalem’s jihadist adversaries, Shiite or Sunni. Nothing at all.
There are variously relevant details. In the Islamic Middle East, doctrinal anti-Semites have steadfastly remained faithful to their most lascivious hatreds. This is because the anti-Semite, individually and collectively, responds not to any genuine qualities of “The Jew” or Jewish State. He responds only to his own personal fears and anxieties.
More generically, as Jean-Paul Sartre explains in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948): “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” And further on: “The anti-Semite is a man who is afraid, not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world – of everything except the Jews.”
For Israelis, the French philosopher’s deeper understandings should not be permitted to fall on deaf ears. Regarding continuous denunciations of Israel’s defense policies, both by conspicuous enemies and self-declared neutrals, truth cannot simply be cast aside for the presumed sake of expedience. To be sure, Israel’s counter-terrorist operations have produced significant civilian casualties in Gaza, but these harms have always been unintentional. In law, they have been the unavoidable result of enemy resorts to “perfidy” or “human shields.”
In stark contrast, the corrosive harms inflicted on innocent Israeli citizens, especially the brutalized and sexually violated October 7 hostages, are the intended result of jihadist criminality. Such overt “criminal intent” is called mens rea.
Iran-backed terror-crimes have nothing to do with Palestinian sovereignty or statehood. For the many wrongdoers, what is actually being sought by way of such crimes are the murderous ecstasies of human barbarism.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists gang-raped and tortured male Israelis as well as females, infants and young children as well as adults. As documented by assorted videos, the perpetrators were excited by tangible loathing, especially by the fact that their self-applauded crimes could be committed without ordinary civilizational restraints. Above all else, as “martyrs,” the killers had expected their egregious crimes to spawn “power over death.”
Hamas and related jihadist groups seek to inflict death upon “The Jew” and the “Jewish State” because they obsessively fear “the terrors of the grave.” Unsurprisingly, incomparable cowardice is discoverable in the manipulative behaviors of terrorist leaders like Yahya Sinwar, who cling with desperation to defiling terrestrial lives while encouraging the “martyrdom” of ordinary Palestinian Arabs.
For Sinwar, it’s simple. The deaths and sufferings of Gaza civilians represent “necessary sacrifices.” Ironically, forcing Israeli bombs to create “martyrs” heaps calumny on “The Jew” and gratitude from the manipulated Arabs. Ingeniously, for Yahya Sinwar, it is a perverse behavior that rewards doubly
What is Israel to do? Shall it disregard all reason and accept the unfounded enemy promises of a “cease-fire?” At a minimum, Israelis must finally understand that past is prologue and that high-sounding adversarial assurances are just the latest Islamist correlates of carefully planned extinctions. In these plans, which include effectively one-sided cease-fires, war and terror are the supporting tactics of an incremental genocide. In response, Israel has only one basic obligation: To proceed against its refractory enemies (state and sub-state) with judicious commitments to national power. In turn, these commitments should be based on history, intellect and reason
When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration with its elaborate praise of Athenian civilization, his perspective was largely military. Recorded by Thucydides, an historian whose main interest was to study the growth and use of power for military objectives, the speeches of Pericles express confidence in an ultimate victory for Athens, but also grave concern for self-imposed setbacks along the way:
“What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies,” says Pericles, “is our own mistakes.” Though Pericles exaggerated the separateness of enemy strategies and Athenian mistakes (they were actually interrelated), there is an important lesson for present-day Israel: In observing enemy preparations for war, do not forget that the effectiveness of these preparations must always depend upon Israel’s identifiable responses.
In all world politics, but especially in the Middle East, we are present at the gradual unveiling of a secret, one in which the core truth of what is taking place is left unsaid.
For the immediate future, Iran will accelerate its preparations for chemical/biological/nuclear war against the Jewish State. Unaffected by any parallel public commitments to “ceasefires,” these preparations (which might also include electromagnetic pulse weapons or EMP) will proceed on their own track, culminating, if unobstructed, in existential aggressions against a country less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.
Moreover, Israel should never close its eyes to the potentially synergistic dangers of Palestinian statehood and war with Iran. To remind, when a strategic military interaction is “synergistic,” the injurious “whole” is greater than the sum of its “parts.” Always, in these interactions, “geometry” should yield to “physics.”
In the final analysis, Israel should acknowledge that a larger and protracted war with Iran is all but inevitable and that this conflict will need to be waged while Iran is still “pre-nuclear.” Regarding prospective cease-fires, present or future, the single greatest danger to Israel will lie in cumulatively overwhelming terrorist harms that could help “birth” a nuclear Iran.
Paradoxically, the ultimate survival task for Israel is not avoiding war with Iran as such, but ensuring that any such engagement is undertaken before that primal enemy becomes operationally nuclear. This is the case whether or not Iran is presumed to be a rational foe.