“If all time is eternally present, All time is unredeemable.” -T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Whatever its strategic and tactical responses to Hamas terrorism, Israel will need to understand jihadi meanings of time. Though generally overlooked, these vital meanings will impact short and long-term Israeli security policies. This is especially the case after US President Donald Trump’s premature declaration of “peace” in the Middle East, a simplistic declaration not based on reason or tangible evidence.
What pertinent facts should now be evaluated in Jerusalem? Ironically, after Trump’s declaration of victory, Israel confronts a growing number of interconnected enemies. To proceed, Shiite Hezbollah, linked to a still-nuclearizing Iran, is hastily rearming. Further to various power changes in Lebanon and Syria, the Jewish State’s northern border is facing new forms of insecurity and instability. Simultaneously, Palestinian Islamic Jihad is forging new alignments with Hamas while Iran-backed forces in Iraq are resurrecting insidious forms of anti-Israel terror. Most worrisome of all, Donald Trump’s alleged “peace settlement,” is strengthening Turkey and Qatar.
For Israel, all these complex problems are interconnected. Whatever the converging particularities, Jerusalem will need to calculate its survival options “in time.” This means much more than usual defense-community preoccupations with “clock time” - for example, reasonable concerns about time-remaining to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons. In essence, this means more deliberate understandings of “jihadi time” (aka “sacred time”) and its relationship to “clock time” (aka “profane time”).
In tying together assorted threat particulars, policy makers in Jerusalem will need to more intentionally distinguish their own traditional ideas of time from the nontraditional conceptualizations of state and sub-state foes. Though Israel lives according to clock time, its jihadi adversaries regard such mechanistic chronology as theological profanation. The differences here are more than literary or philosophical. Looking ahead, they could have major policy implications for preventing war and terror.
For Israel’s jihadi enemies, “real time” is discoverable only within the palpably ecstatic moments of “martyrdom.” Moreover, because assurances of personal immortality can be extended only in real time, only this subjective conceptualization can be considered “sacred.”
At first, all this will sound excruciatingly theoretic. Nonetheless, it remains crucial to supporting Israel’s survival. All jihadi notions of “sacred time” actively encourage “martyrdom operations.” Until now, and also for the foreseeable future, this linkage suggests steadily escalating violence against Israel. “In time,” it could enlarge variously unacceptable risks of a nuclear war. Even before Israel had to face operational nuclear adversaries, it could become embroiled (suddenly or incrementally) in an “asymmetrical nuclear war.”[1]
In candor, these are challenging intellectual issues, not mundane political matters. For needed systematic analyses, there will present multiple nuances to multiplying scenarios. At some worst-case stage, a state enemy of Israel (most plausibly Iran) could effectively become a jihadi terrorist writ large.
If macrocosm followed microcosm, a suicide bomber could become a “suicide state.” For Israel, no such force magnification should ever be considered bearable, especially where the state aggressor was already nuclear. Never to be overlooked in these unprecedented or sui generis matters is that Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan. Accordingly, Iran describes Israel as a “one-bomb state” - i.e., a state subject to relatively easy and instantaneous “removal.”
For Jerusalem, policy-relevant issues will need to be framed in 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, Qatar and certain other places) define authentic victory as “power over death.” For these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” or shahid represents “power over time.”
Admittedly, these are bewildering ideas. Still, Israel needs to think concretely about how to undermine such intangible elements of adversarial power. 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.”[2] The reciprocal here is similarly unassailable: It is through time that there is death.
For Israel, such difficult matters contain dense and perplexing ironies. s of “time-as-lived.” Facing multiple jihadi enemies, such understandings will require prior acknowledgement that “survival time” must be explained in terms of “subjective duration.”
Because “clocks slay time” - an oft-quoted observation by American writer William Faulkner - narrowly objective chronologies would prove injurious for the Jewish State. But what would constitute a suitably personalized and policy-centered theory of time for Jerusalem? It’s a demanding but fully reasonable question. It deserves a thoughtful answer.
To continue, history will deserve pride of place. Significantly, the notion of time as “subjective duration” or “felt time” has its discernible origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as linear progression, the early Hebrews generally approached chronology as a qualitative experience. Among other things, this view identified time as logically inseparable from personally infused content.
In terms of prospective nuclear threats from Iran or other places, Israeli planners should consider chronology not only at usual operational levels, but also at the level of individual enemy decision-makers. What do authoritative leaders in Tehran think about time in shaping their military nuclear plans? For Israel’s prime minister and for capable scholars[3], 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 vitally important, but not because of territoriality as such. Instead, the relevance of particular geographic spaces stemmed from unique events that had presumptively 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. To wit, serious questions are again being raised about the wisdom of PM Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza back in 2005.[4]
Certain past Israeli surrenders, especially if considered “synergistically,”[5] provided “extra time” for Israel's enemies to wait 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/or 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 greater reliance on the passive dynamics of military deterrence and military defense[6] than on active strategies of nuclear war fighting.[7]
In the final analysis, a worst case for Israel would be to confront an already-nuclear and seemingly irrational Iran. Such an adversary could reasonably be described as a “suicide bomber in macrocosm.” Naturally, there could present the 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 should note after October 7, 2023, this is also a lascivious way to overcome “profane time.”
Israel faces one overarching question: How can such perplexing correlations of death and time be suitably countered? Inter alia, 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...."
Recalling the poet T.S. Eliot, “…all time is eternally present.” An immediate goal for Israel’s reason-backed policy planners should be a fuller understanding of the nation’s enemies “in time.” Though generally overlooked, even by Jerusalem’s dedicated strategic thinkers, such understanding would be indispensable to effective counter-terrorism and nuclear war avoidance. For the continuously-beleaguered Jewish State, a core conclusion should rest on the following neglected insight:
“All time is unredeemable.”
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. The author of many major books and articles dealing with war, terrorism and international law, he first published on time-centered elements of national security decision-making more than fifty years ago. (See Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-Making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry; Fall 1974.) Dr. Beres, who was Chair of Project Daniel (Israel, PM Sharon, 2003-2004), has lectured widely at Israeli military and intelligence venues, including the IDF National Security College. His 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
Sources:
[1] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at BESA (Israel): https://besacenter.org/?s=beres&lang=en
[2] See his “Time Considered on the Basis of Death” (1976).
[3] “Scholars build the structure of peace in the world,” Babylonian Talmud; Order Zera’im, Tractate Berakoth, IX
[4] This writer (Professor Beres) was Chair of PM Sharon’s “Project Daniel (2003-2004).
[5] On synergies, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/ See also, by Professor Beres, at Modern War Institute, West Point: https://mwi.usma.edu/threat-convergence-adversarial-whole-greater-sum-parts/
[6] See Professor Louis René Beres and General (USAF/dec.) John T. Chain, "Could Israel Safely Deter a Nuclear Iran"? The Atlantic, 2012; Professor Beres and General Chain, "Israel and Iran at the Eleventh Hour," Oxford University Press (OUP Blog, 2012); Louis René Beres and Admiral (USN/ret.) Leon "Bud" Edney, "Facing a Nuclear Iran, Israel Must Re-Think its Nuclear Ambiguity," US News & World Report, 2013; and Louis René Beres and Admiral Edney, "Reconsidering Israel's Nuclear Posture," The Jerusalem Post, 2013. General Chain was Commander-in-Chief, US Strategic Air Command (CINSAC). Admiral Edney was NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic (SACLANT).
[7] Nuclear war fighting should never represent an acceptable strategic option for Israel. Always, Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons and doctrine should be oriented toward deterrence, not actual combat engagements. This conclusion was central to the Final Report of Project Daniel: Israel's Strategic Future, ACPR Policy Paper No. 155, ACPR, Israel, May 2004, 64 pp. See also: Louis René Beres, "Facing Iran's Ongoing Nuclearization: A Retrospective on Project Daniel," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vo. 22, Issue 3, June 2009, pp. 491-514; and Louis René Beres, "Israel's Uncertain Strategic Future,” Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College, Vol. XXXVII, No.1., Spring 2007, pp, 37-54.