Special to Arutz Sheva
On occasion, at least, Jorge Luis Borges, the late Argentine writer and philosopher, identified himself as a Jew. Though lacking any decipherable basis in Jewish law, 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.”
Along with this welcome but improbable declaration was an evident paradox. For Jews, especially Israelis, one pertinent irony was especially revealing: Borges’ uncommon sentiment was captivating because it came from one of the modern world’s most insightful authors.
So what? Why should anyone care? Why bother to take account of such esoteric feelings and distant connections? What could intellectuals even know about such practical matters?
There is a plain and but compelling answer. Jews should pay close attention to Borges’ ethereal wisdom because its implications could produce tangible existential benefits for Israel. In essence, Borges’ thinking could help focus Jewish/Israeli security postures on core factors of transcending urgency.
What does this really 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. But because they have become expectations, he reasons, they can never actually happen.
Metaphorically, Israel is now 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 mere tinkering ‘round the edges of national security policy, Israel could meaningfully undertake the political and military steps needed for survival.
In Israel, many have long concluded that God’s “eternal promise" of permanence allows the Jewish State access to highest-possible spheres of national protection. Still, any such faith-based conclusion would misrepresent both Torah and Talmud. In essence, nothing in Judaism’s sacred texts could ever excuse a national security posture drawn from primary expectations of divine intervention. Even in Islam, the murderous Iranian regime and its obeisant terror surrogates consider that the first-line security responsibility is human.
There are pertinent nuances. On a secular political level, any “Borges-based” logic to encourage Israel's existential apprehensions could appear self-destructive. Isn’t human death fear always debilitating? Don’t a great many people take pills to assuage this crippling problem? Don’t Israel’s jihadist enemies (state and sub-state) base their defiling policies of war and terror on their presumed links to religious sacrifice? Aren’t “martyrdom operations” designed above all to confer immortality or “power over death?”
When expressed openly, existential dread is almost always a confession of human weakness. For Israel, confronted by enemies that are consumed by overwhelming death fears (jihadist suicide bombers “kill themselves” in order to avoid death), what possible advantages could there be to nurturing thoughts of collective disappearance?
Sometimes, truth may emerge only through irony and paradox. Imaginations of collective immortality, notions that Israel is necessarily forever, could discourage critical steps to collective self-preservation. Even in circles where there exists a manifest willingness to accept worst-case scenarios, most Israelis would instinctually resist intimations of personal and national annihilation. Ignoring Borges’ counter-intuitive reasoning, the likely result would be ever-greater levels of Jewish national transience.
In the fashion of its enemies, Israel imagines for itself, scripturally, strategically, or both, a life everlasting. Unlike these barbarous enemies, however, Israel does not see itself achieving immortality, individually or collectively, via ritualistic murders (“sacrifices”) 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 be unprecedented in its destructiveness. More plausibly than ever before, such a sui generis conflict could quickly become extinctive.
There is more. Any asymmetry of purpose and expectation between Israel and its implacable jihadi 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 could display expectations for “national immortality” by agreeing to faux “cease fires” or contrived “peace agreements.” With state and sub-state enemies who still calculate only a zero-sum conflict with Israel, any such display could be 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 thereby “stay alive.” For most Israelis, this advice will seem arcane and meaningless, but in such complex security matters, policy ought never 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 compromise will likely favor the former. Unless this asymmetry is replaced by far-reaching and deliberate Israeli imaginations of approaching disappearance, Jewish believers in “peace” could be forced once again to flee the Promised Land. Exeunt omnes.
Above all, Israel does not need American-style "positive thinking." It does not need Trump-style “common sense.” It needs disciplined and dialectical thinkers, literate strategists who could fully understand the latent benefits of “thinking the worst.”
Though counter-intuitive, it would be redemptive for Israel to nurture overlooked survival benefits of “negative thinking.” Even in this palpable eleventh -hour, the People of Israel could ward off perpetually relentless enemies. Contrary to false exclamations of heroism, the Islamist enemy does not “love death.” Rather, he or she approaches death with much greater personal cowardice than does humankind in general. The jihadist criminal fights feverishly against “The Jew” not because he (or she) is an honorable warrior, but because he (or she) is a wretched kind of adversary. Seeking “martyrdom” above everything else, this terrorist rapes and slaughters not for any defensible reasons of “self-determination” (i.e., Palestinian statehood), but simply not to die.
For Israel, any coinciding appearance of Iranian nuclearization, Palestinian statehood and regional war would come precariously close to existential hazards. Only by facing up to these intimations of final disaster could the People of Israel suitably identify tangible limits to unreciprocated risk-taking. For Israel, this counsel will be difficult to follow, but Argentine writer Borges’ ironic lesson about imagination and mortality couldn’t possibly be more relevant.
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 book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy He is a seven-times 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.