28 November 2006
After the
Falling Rockets from Lebanon
Interrelated
Commentaries on Israel's Performance and Survival
Published as ACPR Policy
Paper No. 166, 2007.
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Foreword
The recent war in Lebanon was
an event that has already left significant marks, and it is
certainly bound to have a continued impact on developments in
Israel, the Middle East region and beyond. For Israel, this was a
fight against Iran by proxy. Hizbullah and its allies, both inside
Lebanon and in the broader Middle East, have claimed a “divine
victory” in its confrontation with Israel. Although the facts are
somewhat different – in concrete terms neither side has really been
victorious and the overall perception was very damaging to Israel in
more than one respect. While Israel certainly created greater damage
to Hizbullah than vice versa, the well-oiled propaganda apparatus
run by Hizbullah, aided by the less-than-perfect PR effort on the
Israeli side, produced distinctly negative consequences. Not only
may Israel’s own deterrent capability have been damaged, at least
temporarily, but so too, indirectly, has that of the United States
vis-à-vis Hizbullah’s patron, Iran. Both of these matters
will thus have to be decisively and urgently dealt with.
In the Arab world, perceptions
are often stronger than facts. Even though the Israeli air force had
great success in totally eliminating Hizbullah’s long-range missiles
and missile launchers, and in spite of the fact that there wasn’t a
single actual combat in which Israeli soldiers didn’t have the upper
hand, the image created in the minds of many people was totally
different. In addition to a more general problem, how modern armies
should deal with militarized terrorist groups, the war has given
rise to serious questions with regards to the present Israeli
leadership and the command structure in the IDF. It is too early, of
course, to predict what the ramifications of this will be. There is
no doubt, however, that both Israel’s friends and enemies will be
watching.
While the recent fighting in
Lebanon is fresh in our memory, more important are the overall
implications for Israel’s future in the confrontation with its
enemies. These implications are enlarged by the fact that, like it
or not, Israel also finds itself in the eye of the gathering storm
between the Free World and Islamic “Jihadism”.
Professor Beres’s policy paper
addresses all these issues – and more! All of it is important.
Consider, for example, this crucial observation:
In calculations of strategic deterrence, Israel’s
planner must always recall that what matters is whether a
prospective attacker perceives secure Israeli retaliatory
forces. Where a prospective attacker perceives vulnerable
retaliatory forces, it might judge the first-strike option against
Israel to be entirely cost-effective. This means, inter alia, that
Israel’s intelligence estimates must always keep close watch over
enemy perceptions...
One can only hope that this
analysis by Professor Beres will be diligently studied by Israel’s
strategic planners.
Ambassador Zalman Shoval
|
Chapter I: Law, Strategy, Reason and Death
A
major issue in the last Lebanon War was the alleged “excessiveness” of
Israel’s use of armed force. What can we learn about these allegations from
the standpoint of international law? Humanitarian international law continues
to correctly require that every use of force by an army or insurgent group
meet the test of “proportionality”. Going back to the basic legal principle
(St. Petersburg Declaration, 1868) that “the means that can be used to injure
an enemy are not unlimited,” proportionality stipulates (among other things)
that every exercise of armed force be limited to the minimum application
needed for operational success. Indeed, this ancient principle of customary
international law applies to all judgments of military advantage and to all
planned reprisals.
But properly legal determinations of proportionality can never be made or
judged in a vacuum. Rather, these decisions must always take into account the
extent to which an adversary has committed prior or ongoing violations of the
law of war. In the case of both the Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Fatah
terrorists in Gaza and the Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon, there is
today ample and essentially incontestable evidence that these belligerents
are/were manifestly guilty of “perfidy”.
Deception can be legally acceptable in armed conflict, but the Hague
Regulations clearly disallow the placement of military assets or military
personnel in heavily populated civilian areas. Further prohibition of perfidy
can be found in Protocol I of 1977, additional to the Geneva Conventions of
1949. It is widely recognized that these rules are also binding on the basis
of customary international law.
Perfidy represents an especially serious violation of the law of war, one even
identified as a “grave breach” in Article 147 of Geneva Convention No. IV. The
critical legal effect of perfidy committed by Palestinian or Hizbullah
terrorists – especially their widespread resort to “human shields” – is to
immunize Israel from any responsibility for inadvertent counter-terrorist
harms done to Arab civilians. Even if Hamas and Islamic Jihad
and Fatah and Hizbullah did not deliberately engage in perfidy,
any terrorist-created link between civilians and insurgent warfare would
always give Israel full and unassailable legal justification for its defensive
military actions. This is not to suggest that Israel would have carte blanche
in its applications of armed force, but that the reasonableness of these
applications would have to be appraised in the context of enemy perfidy.
To be sure, viewed against the background of extensive and unapologetic
terrorist perfidy in both Gaza and Lebanon, Israel was certainly not guilty of
“disproportionality”. Let critics of Israel recall that all combatants,
including all insurgents in Gaza and Lebanon, are bound to comply with the
international law of war. This requirement derives not only from what is
known in jurisprudence as the “Martens Clause”, which makes its first
appearance in the Preamble to the 1899 Hague Convention No. II on land
warfare, but also from Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of
August 12, 1949. It is found also in the two protocols to these Conventions.
It is easy for those who are altogether unfamiliar with international law to
lash out unfairly at Israel with charges of “disproportionality”. Yet, legal
scholars must always understand the vital significance of context.
Authoritative judgments under international law are not made in isolation from
other pertinent factors. In this connection, it is apparent that any seemingly
disproportionate use of force by the Israel Defense Forces in the Lebanon War
of 2006 was actually the outcome of antecedent perfidy by its criminal enemies
in both Gaza and Lebanon (terrorism is a codified crime under international
law). Were it not for these egregious violations of the law of war by
terrorist adversaries, Israel would not have been obliged to wage war in a
fashion that inevitably creates civilian casualties.
Equally untenable is the charge that Israel was committing “aggression” in
Lebanon. At Lebanon’s insistence, not Israel’s, a formal state of war has
continued to exist between the two countries since the beginning; that is,
since the Jewish state originally came into existence in May 1948. Only an
armistice agreement exists between Israel and Lebanon. Signed on March 23,
1949, this is not a war-terminating agreement, but merely a pledge (still not
honored by Lebanon) to cease hostilities temporarily in an ongoing conflict.
Legally, it is simply not possible for Israel to commit aggression against
Lebanon, as the latter already considers itself in a formal condition of
belligerency.
International law is not a suicide pact. Faced with enemies on several fronts
who still make no secret of their genocidal intentions, Israel always displays
remarkable respect for the law of armed conflict. In distinctly marked
contrast to the conscious indiscriminate conduct of its terrorist adversaries in both
Gaza and Lebanon, Jerusalem always adheres scrupulously to the law of war of
international law. It follows that all intimations and accusations of Israeli
“disproportionality” in counter-terrorist warfare are unfounded.
*.*.*
Those who place hope in outside protection for Israel, primarily from the
United States, assume – more or less – a continuation of traditional
international relations. Yet, it is altogether likely that we now live in an
era of total fragmentation and disunity, a worldwide anarchy that will give
new meaning to “Westphalian” international relations and reinforce, rather
than reduce, the self-help imperative. Hence, if this presumption of further
global disintegration is to be taken seriously by Israeli planners, they will
have to accept, however reluctantly, the obligation to face overriding
dangers alone. After Israel’s Lebanon War of summer 2006, one should be
reminded of “The Second Coming”, the poem by the great Irish poet William
Butler Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
*.*.*
Following the Israeli war against Hizbullah in 2006, steady Iranian
nuclearization is now correctly at the forefront of Israeli public attention.
Exceptionally small, Israel fully understands that the Iranian president’s
incessant bluster about wiping the Jewish state “off the map” is far more than
mere posturing. It is, rather, an unambiguous declaration of criminal intent
to commit genocide.
Genocide, like terrorism, is a codified crime under international law. To
survive into the future, Israel’s leaders and allies now recognize that Iran’s
explicitly exterminatory intent is being augmented by a developing capacity.
Left to his own devices, free of any preemptive interference with the Islamic
Republic’s planned atomic arsenal of bombs and missiles (an interference that
would certainly be a proper expression of “anticipatory self defense”), Iran’s
president might not be deterred by any threats of Israeli and/or American
retaliation. This possible failure of nuclear deterrence could be the result
of a presumed lack of threat credibility or even of a willful Iranian
indifference to existential harms. Iran, after all, could conceivably become
the individual “suicide”1 bomber in
macrocosm, a nuclear-armed state willing to “die” as a collective “martyr”. To
be sure, such a prospect is not very likely, but – at the same time – it is by
no means unimaginable.
How should Israel respond to such a dire set of circumstances? One important
part of the answer has to do with core questions of Tel Aviv’s targeting
doctrine. More precisely, Israel’s security from future Iranian
mass-destruction attacks will depend considerably upon the Defense Ministry’s
determined targets and on the precise extent to which these targets have been
openly identified. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not enough that
Israel simply has “The Bomb”. Instead, the adequacy of Israel’s nuclear
deterrence and preemption policies will inevitably depend largely upon the
presumed destructiveness of these nuclear weapons and on where, exactly, these
weapons are authoritatively thought to be directed.
A nuclear war in the Middle East is not out of the question. Indeed, there are
a number of different scenarios that could result in an Israeli use of nuclear
weapons. Israel will need to choose prudently between what are called “assured
destruction” strategies and “nuclear war-fighting” strategies. Assured
destruction strategies are also sometimes termed “counter-value” strategies or
“mutual assured destruction” (MAD). These are strategies of
deterrence/preemption in which a country primarily targets its strategic
weapons on the other side’s civilian populations and/or on its supporting
civilian infrastructures. Nuclear war-fighting strategies, on the other hand,
are called “counterforce” strategies. These are systems of
deterrence/preemption wherein a country primarily targets its strategic
nuclear weapons on the other side’s major weapon systems and on its supporting
military infrastructures.
For nuclear weapons countries in general, and for Israel in particular, there
are very serious survival implications for choosing one strategy over the
other. It is also possible that a country would opt for some sort of “mixed”
(counter-value/counter-force) strategy. In the case of Israel, however, any
policy that might actually encourage nuclear war-fighting – any counterforce
nuclear doctrines – should be rejected out-of-hand.
Human psychology has much to do with current world politics. Whichever
deterrence/preemption strategy Israel might choose, what ultimately really
matters is what an enemy country perceives. In strategic matters, the
only pertinent reality is perceived reality. Nothing else matters.
In choosing between the two basic strategic alternatives, Israel should opt
for nuclear deterrence/preemption based upon assured destruction. This
seemingly insensitive recommendation will surely elicit opposition in certain
publics, but, in fact, it is substantially more humane. Further, a
counter-value targeting doctrine would appear to create an enlarged risk of
“losing” any nuclear war that might still arise. This is because
counter-value-targeted nuclear weapons would not destroy military targets.
Yet, a counterforce targeting doctrine would be less persuasive as a nuclear
deterrent, especially to societies where leaders would willingly sacrifice
entire armies and military infrastructures as “martyrs”. And if Israel were to
opt for nuclear deterrence/preemption based upon identified and projected
counterforce capabilities, its Arab/Islamic enemies could feel especially
threatened. For many reasons, this condition could then actually heighten the
prospect of WMD aggression against Israel and of a subsequent nuclear
exchange.
Israel’s decisions on counter-value versus counterforce doctrines should
depend, in part, on prior investigations of: (1) enemy country inclinations to
strike first; and (2) enemy country inclinations to strike all-at-once or in
stages. Should Israeli strategic planners assume that certain enemy countries
that are in process of “going nuclear” are apt to strike first and to strike
in an unlimited fashion (that is, to fire all of their nuclear weapons right
away), Israeli counterforce-targeted warheads – used in retaliation – would
likely hit only empty silos/launchers. In such circumstances, Israel’s only
rational application of counterforce doctrine would be to strike first itself.
If, for whatever reason, Israel were to reject still available preemption
options, there would be no reason to opt for a counterforce strategy. From the
standpoint of persuasive intra-war deterrence, a counter-value strategy would
prove vastly more appropriate.
Should Israeli planners assume that the enemy countries “going nuclear” are
apt to strike first and to strike in a limited fashion – holding some
significant measure of nuclear firepower in reserve for follow-on strikes –
Israeli counterforce-targeted warheads could have some damage-limiting
benefits. Here, counterforce operations could appear to serve both an Israeli
non-nuclear preemption, or, should Israel decide not to preempt, an Israeli
retaliatory strike. However, the underlying assumption here about enemy
behavior is implausible.
Should an Israeli first-strike be intentionally limited, perhaps because it
would be coupled with an assurance of no further destruction in exchange for
an end to hostilities, counterforce operations could seemingly serve an
Israeli counter-retaliatory strike. This is because Israel’s attempt at
intra-war deterrence could fail, occasioning the need for follow-on strikes to
produce badly needed damage-limitation. Nonetheless, the overall argument for
Israeli counterforce options is founded upon a complex illusion. The
prospective benefits to Israel of maintaining any counterforce targeting
options are greatly outweighed by the prospective costs.
It is plain that regional nuclear war is a distinct possibility for Israel,
and that adequate preparations now need to be made to prevent such a war.
These preparations will require, immediately, a clear awareness of how a
nuclear war might start in the Middle East, and an informed identification of
the best strategic doctrine currently available to Israel. To protect itself
against a nuclearizing Iran, Israel’s very best course may still be to seize
the conventional preemption option as soon as possible. Simultaneously, Israel
should reject even any hint of counterforce targeting doctrine, and focus
instead upon massive counter-value reprisals.
International law is not a suicide pact. Every state has the established right
to defend itself and its people against aggression, especially where these
attacks would involve mass-destruction weapons. Israel, now facing a
verifiably clear and undisguised risk of genocidal war from Iran, would
assuredly never consider the first use of nuclear weapons. But should Iranian
atomic genocide ever be unleashed against Israel’s cities, the Islamic
Republic’s leaders should understand fully and in advance that Israel would
respond with considerably more than parallel destructiveness.
*
* *
All world politics, and all global strategy, move in the midst of death. To
truly understand calculations of war, deterrence and defense, Israeli planners
need to understand (1) enemy orientations to death, both individual and
collective; and (2) Israeli orientations to death, both individual and
collective. This is especially obvious in the course of recent Islamic
aggressions toward Israel from Hizbullah in Lebanon and from Hamas
and Islamic Jihad in Judea/Samaria/Gaza.
* *
*
Heinrich von Treitschke, in his published lectures on politics, approvingly
cites Fichte: “Individual man sees in his country the realization of
his earthly immortality.” Such “seeing” among Israel’s current Islamic enemies
is a source of particular, even existential, danger. The danger is
exacerbated by lack of symmetry with “individual man” in Israel, who generally
sees such “realization” much less in his own country.
*
* *
It is easy to feel sorry for the Palestinians in Gaza. Televised and print
images of their apparently unrelieved misery would appear to suggest Israeli
cruelty in the use of armed force. Exactly the opposite is true. By
deliberately placing elderly women and young children in areas from which
lethal rockets are launched into Israeli homes and schools, it is only the
Palestinian leaders who openly violate the law of war. Their insidious
practice of “human shields” – the same practice recently witnessed in
Hizbullah-controlled areas of Lebanon – is far more than an expression of
cowardice. It also represents a specific crime under international law. This
crime, as we already know, is called “perfidy”.
Several Palestinian terror groups including both Hamas and the
“moderate” Palestinian Authority are now actively planning for mega-terror
attacks upon Israel. These unprecedented attacks, probably in close
cooperation with elements of al-Qai`dah, would use chemical and/or
biological weapons of mass destruction. Over time, if Iran should begin to
transfer portions of its growing inventory of nuclear materials to terror
groups, Israel could also face Palestinian-directed nuclear terrorism. Thanks
to former Prime Minister Sharon’s policy of “disengagement”, these insidious
preparations are already underway in Gaza.
What government on earth could be expected to sit back passively and render
its population vulnerable to unprecedented levels of instantaneous
mass-slaughter? Would we, in the United States, sit quietly by as rockets
rained down upon American cities from terrorist sanctuaries somewhere on our
northern or southern borders? Would we allow such carnage to continue with
impunity? Would capitulation and surrender be the proper or excusable reaction
of a sovereign state sworn to protect its populations?
Quite remarkably, although always unrecognized and unacknowledged, Israel has
been willing to keep its essential counterterrorism operations in Gaza
consistent with the established standards of humanitarian international law.
Palestinian violence, however, is persistently in violation of all civilized
rules and principles of engagement. And all this after Israel very painfully
“disengaged” from Gaza on the presumption that the Palestinians – finally –
would put an end to their relentless barrage of terror.
Terrorism is more than just bad behavior. Terrorism, we have noted, is a
distinct and codified crime under international law. When terrorists represent
populations that enthusiastically support such attacks, which is certainly
well-documented among the Palestinian community, and where these terrorists
also find easy refuge among hospitable populations, full responsibility for
ensuing counterterrorist harms lies exclusively with the criminals. Understood
in terms of still-ongoing Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense, this
means that the Palestinian side alone must now bear legal responsibility for
Arab civilian casualties in Gaza.
International law is not a suicide pact. Rather, it correctly offers an
authoritative body of rules and procedures that always permits states to
express their “inherent right of self-defense”. When terrorist organizations
openly celebrate the explosive “martyrdom” of Palestinian children, and when
Palestinian leaders unashamedly seek religious redemption through the
mass-murder of Jewish children, the terrorists have absolutely no legal right
to demand sanctuary. Anywhere. Under international law they are hostes
humani generis, “Common enemies of humankind”. Such murderers must be
punished severely wherever they are found. For their arrest and prosecution,
jurisdiction is incontestably “universal”.
Palestinian terrorism, even during its occasional “slow” periods, has become
all-too familiar. Using bombs filled with nails, razor blades and screws
dipped in rat poison, the killers proceed to maim and burn Israeli civilians
with only cheers and blessings from the leading Islamic clergy. As for those
“commanders” who control the suicide-bombers’ mayhem, they cower in their
towns and cities, always taking care to find personal safety amidst
densely-packed Arab populations. Special IDF counterterrorism and commando
units then attempt to identify and target only the terrorist leaders and to
minimize collateral harms. Sometimes, however, such harms simply can’t be
avoided, even by the IDF, which follows its code of “Purity of Arms” far more
stringently than any other nation’s army.
International law is not a suicide pact. All combatants, including Palestinian
terrorists, are bound by the Law of War. This requirement is found in Article
3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and at the two
protocols to these Conventions. Protocol I applies humanitarian international
law to all conflicts fought for “self-determination”, the stated objective of
all Palestinian fighters. A product of the Diplomatic Conference on the
Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in
Armed Conflicts (1977), this Protocol brings all irregular forces within the
full scope of international law. In this connection, the terms “fighter” and
“irregular” are generous in describing Palestinian terrorists, fanatical
criminals who normally target only civilians and whose characteristic mode of
“battle” is not military engagement, but primal religious sacrifice.
Israel has both the right and the obligation under international law to
protect its citizens from criminal acts of terrorism. Should it ever decide to
yield to Palestinian perfidy in its indispensable war against escalating
terror violence, Israel would surrender this important right and undermine
this fundamental obligation. The clear effect of such capitulation would be to
make potential victims of us all.
*
* *
In 1936, on the occasion of a speech by the nationalist general Millan Astray
at the University of Salamanca in Spain, the hall thundered with the general’s
favorite motto: Viva La Muerte! “Long live death.” When the
speech was over, Miguel de Unamuno, rector of the University, rose and said:
“Just now I heard a necrophilious and senseless cry...this outlandish paradox
is repellent to me.” Yet, this very same repellent cry is, today, the lurid
rallying cry of Islamic “suicide” terrorists. Again and again, we hear from
Hizbullah, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad and al-Qai`dah
and also Fatah, “We love death.”
Why do we put the word “suicide” in quotation marks? Islamic “lovers of death”
certainly do not commit suicide in any ordinary fashion. As they believe that
acts of “martyrdom” always assure a blissful immortality, their “suicide”
makes a mockery of any morbid affection. As they commit “suicide” only to
assure eternal life, their pretended heroism is never more than a furiously
voluptuous act of cowardice.
There are subtle complications. The self-proclaimed Islamic “lover of death”
also fears continuation of his life on earth. This life is almost always
devoid of any felt opportunity to do something rewarding and almost always
prohibits, inhibits and disdains the most compelling needs of his inborn human
sexuality. Thwarting both meaning and eros, elements of Islamic society
continue to prod thousands of young males to “martyr” themselves in the
killing of “infidels”. The explosive link between suicide terror violence and
repressed male sexuality is still widely unrecognized. On female suicide
bombers, the jury is still out.
September 11 had nothing really to do with
politics. These terror attacks were not produced by Islamic anger about
certain allegedly objectionable features of American foreign policy. Such
feeble explanations were merely the predictable ventings of certain misguided
academics and journalists. What animated September 11
was the tangibly ecstatic promise of personal salvation through distinctly
“sacred” acts of killing.
The “suicide” killing of American men, women and children on that day stemmed
from the very same sentiments that continue to produce “suicide” killings of
Israeli noncombatants. Consider the ominously characteristic statement by one
Jamal Abdel Hamid Yussef, explaining operations of the Izz-a-Din al-Qassam
Brigades (military wing of Hamas in Gaza): “Our suicide operations are
a message...that our people love death. Our goal is to die for the sake of
God, and if we live we want to humiliate Jews and trample on their necks.”
Hamas, which was loudly overjoyed at the murders of September 11,
promises all Islamic “suicides” nothing less than Freedom from Death.
By “dying” in the divinely-mandated act of killing “Jews” or “Americans” (it
makes no difference that these are not mutually exclusive categories; Islamic
terrorists are interested in blood sacrifice, not formal logic), the “suicide”
terrorist believes that he conquers death. In his clerically-promised eternal
life, there will be rivers of honey and seventy-two virgins. None of this is
mere metaphor. These are the literal and very palpable rewards for “dying” in
a mandated and glorious fight against the most despised enemies of The One
True Faith.
With Allah on his or her side, the Islamic “suicide” terrorist sees absolutely
nothing suicidal about his willful murder of Jews, or Americans. For him or
for her, a plain coward immobilized by fear of both death and life, “suicide”
is just a momentary inconvenience on the fiery trajectory into heaven. Now the
insufferable death fear of ego is lessened by sacrifice of the infidel.
It is expressly through the burning and maiming of defenseless men, women and
children that the terrorist seeks to buy himself free from personal death.
We are left to deal with an apparent paradox. What shall we do about a
“suicide” that does not intend to end the murderer’s own life, but to extend
it forever? For Israel, for America, there is now little point to deterring
the determined murderers with threats of death. Such threats, after all, would
be received not only without apprehension, but also with a delirious cry of
joy and a collective moan of fulfillment.
To deter the Islamic “suicide” terrorists, Israel and America must now offer
the aspiring mass-murderers a tangible threat of real suicide. Violence
and the sacred are presently inseparable for the Islamic “suicide” terrorist.
But Israel and America should immediately think in terms of “desacrilizing”
his/her grotesque inversion of holiness.
Now it must be our prompt task to convince the would-be mass-terrorist that
divine reward will never follow his sacrificial logic, and that murders in the
name of Allah will lead not to paradise, but to the grave.
*
* *
There is great danger for Israel in presuming too much Reason in enemy
decision-making and world affairs. Today the use of violence within and
between states is often self-propelled and self-rewarding, effectively
supplanting Clausewsitz with De Sade. The argument has been made most
convincingly by Milan Kundera, in his book, The Art of the Novel.
Describing a sheer force of violence that wills to assert itself as force, he
talks about this force as “naked, as naked as in Kafka’s novels... The
aggressivity of force is thoroughly disinterested; unmotivated; it wills only
its own will; it is pure irrationality.” If Kundera is correct, what is Israel
to do about its enemies? What shall it assume about enemy decision-making
processes? Should not Israeli planners throw out the handbooks of political
scientists and strategic theorists in favor of Kafka and Kundera? And what,
exactly, can they learn from the “fiction” writers?
*
* *
The great Romanian (French) playwright, Eugene Ionesco, died in April 1994.
In his only novel, The Hermit, Ionesco claims: “People kill and are
killed in order to prove to themselves that life exists.” Although a broad
philosophical reflection, rather than an immediately useful strategic maxim,
it says much about the endlessly murderous intentions of Israel’s Islamic
enemies and, by extension, about Israel’s prospective responses.
*
* *
Chapter II: Jewish
Pain, Suffering, and Life
We Jews have experienced so much pain in our long and arduous history that the
pain of Arab/Islamic terrorism seems to be just another episode of
indescribable suffering. To an extent, this is certainly true. For the moment,
we must endure, and – in the end – we shall prevail. So it has been before; so
it will be again.
It is also true that, whatever its particular source, our pain is
incommunicable. This fact is deeply rooted in the confining space of each
individual human body. Very simply, no human language can ever really describe
pain, an observation that has distinctly special and important implications
for control of violence in the world. But with specific respect to
Arab/Islamic terror-violence, this observation has the decidedly regrettable
effect of reducing current Israeli suffering to an altogether anesthetized
inventory of “casualties”.
Israel’s excruciating pain at the bloodied hands of Arab/Islamic terrorists
remains subject to the very stark limitations of grammar and syntax. Of
course, everyone who is human has suffered physical pain, and everyone who has
suffered knows that bodily anguish not only defies language, but that it is
also language-destroying. In the case of relentless Arab/Islamic terror
against Israelis, this inexpressibility of pain now stands in the way of
acknowledging such terror as pure barbarism. Shielded by the inherent
limitations of language, suicide-bombers are now able to present themselves
before the tribunal of world public opinion as honorable armed combatants. In
fact, however, these murderers are anything but soldiers or “freedom
fighters”. Rather, they are fearful and gratuitously destructive criminals,
killers who combine a rare species of cowardice with a perverse commitment to
inflict great harm solely for harm’s sake.
Significantly, there is, from the Arab/Islamic terrorist point of view, no
reasonable hope of transforming Israeli pain into purposeful Arab/Islamic
power. On the contrary, the Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Fatah/Hizbullah
(it makes no difference) resort to carnage and mayhem may inevitably stiffen
even the most “liberation” minded hearts. So why do these terrorists continue
to enthusiastically inflict pain upon innocents, tearing up unprotected Jewish
bodies with exploding razor blades and ball bearings and without foreseeable
pragmatic benefit? Have these terrorists now abandoned the usual political
playbook of policy advantage?
One partial answer to this question is that Arab/Islamic terrorists, in
exactly the same fashion as their intended audiences, are imprisoned by the
remorseless shortfalls of human language. The pain experienced by one human
body can never genuinely be shared with another, even if these bodies are
closely related by blood and even if the physical distance between them is
short. Although widely unacknowledged, the split between one’s own body and
the body of another is always absolute. For reasons that likely have more to
do with Darwinian logic than the vagaries of compassion, the “membranes”
between bodies are always stubbornly impermeable. This split, therefore,
allows even the most heinous harms to “others” to be viewed “objectively”.
Sometimes these harms can even be accepted as a distinctly pardonable form of
“national liberation”.
For Arab/Islamic terrorists and their supporters, the violent death meted out
to Israelis is always only an abstraction. As “infidels”, we hear again and
again, their Jewish victims lack “sanctity”. For the terrorists, murdering
these Jewish victims is not just a minor matter. It is always “the will of
Allah”. It is, for them, always a matter for loud family celebration.
Physical pain within the human body not only destroys ordinary language, it
can actually bring about a visceral reversion to pre-language human sounds –
that is, to those primal moans and cries and whispers that are anterior to
learned speech. While the many Jewish victims of enemy terror writhe
agonizingly from the burns and the nails and the screws dipped ever so
lovingly into rat poison, neither the world publics who bear silent witness,
nor the screaming murderers themselves can ever begin to experience the
meaning of what is being suffered. This incapacity is, to be sure, not an
excuse for the bystanders or for the perpetrators, but it does help to explain
why even callous killing and mutilation by terrorists can sometimes be
construed as rebellion. Moreover, the incommunicability of physical pain
further amplifies Israeli injuries from terrorism by insistently reminding the
victims that their suffering is not only intense, but that it is also
understated. For the Jewish victims there is never an anesthesia strong enough
for the pain, but for the observers and for the perpetrators the victims’ pain
is always anesthetized.
For all who shall learn about the latest Palestinian or Hizbullah
attack upon a nursery school, a kindergarten van, a city bus, an ice-cream
parlor, a pizza shop or a falafel stand, the suffering intentionally ignited
upon Jewish civilians will never be truly felt. And even then, this suffering
will flicker for only a moment before it disappears. Although it will be years
before the “merely wounded” are ever again able to move their own violated
bodies beyond immeasurable boundaries of torment, newspaper readers and
television viewers will pause only for a second before progressing to less
disturbing forms of discourse.
By its very nature, physical pain has no decipherable voice, no touchable
referent. When, at last, it finds some dimming sound at all, the listener no
longer wants to be bothered. This human listener, mortal and fragile, wishes,
pathetically but understandably, to deny his or her own flesh and blood
vulnerabilities.
All things move in the midst of death, and the denial of death is surely
humankind’s basic preoccupation. As a result, the pain of others is
necessarily kept at a safe distance and the horror of that pain is
purposefully blunted by language. Arab/Islamic terrorists, therefore, are
always much, much worse than they might appear (they are certainly not
“freedom fighters”), and their crimes are not always recognized as
unforgivable and repellent. This problem of justice can never really be
“solved”, but the sources of any possible improvement lie nonetheless in
suffering, blood, and the inevitably common agony of extinction.
From the standpoint of Israel’s ongoing struggle for survival in an
authentically genocidal region, the country’s leaders must soon come to admit
that the time for pretend “peace processes” is over, that any political “road
map” is an invented cartography of Jewish annihilation, that Israeli pain is
infinitely more important than any diplomatic logic, that a deliberately
targeted child’s cry of despair is always more important than even the most
subtle strategic calculations, and that freely-flowing human tears have far,
far deeper meaning than learned smiles.
*
* *
To understand and predict global
responses to Israeli actions in world affairs, Israeli planners must never
forget that their country is always the Jew in macrocosm. For the world,
macrocosm and microcosm are indistinguishable and indissoluble. Hence, for
Israeli planners to expect global responses to Israeli actions to be detached
from millennia of prejudicial hatreds is foolish in the extreme. Israel is not
just another state, one among many others. It is unique, sui generis,
not in the sense that it is believed to warrant greater justice (a
post-Holocaust conclusion one might expect in a world dominated by Reason) but
in the sense that it allegedly deserves less, always less, than every other
state. An exploded bus of Israeli women and children will elicit little
compassion or even concern from the “international community”. A building of
Lebanese civilians blown up mistakenly by the IDF in an act of essential
self-defense will occasion worldwide grief. Even a mountain of Jewish corpses
is always judged to be smaller and more bearable than any other group’s
assemblage of dead persons. Israel and justice cannot be uttered in the same
breath for the same reason that Jews and justice cannot be uttered in the same
breath. Israel, the Jew in macrocosm, will long continue to be despised in the
Arab/Islamic world. Israel will long be kept distanced from justice. Israeli
decision-makers must therefore plan accordingly.
*
* *
We must confront the growing threat of mega-terror. To a large extent, this
existential threat to Israel is made worse by the always-deliberate insertion
of terrorist personnel and assets in the midst of civilian populations. Known
to general publics as “human shields”, this practice is also explicitly
identified and criminalized under international law as “perfidy”.
Terrorism is itself a codified crime under international law. It follows that
perfidious deception by Arab/Islamic terrorists adds a distinctly second layer
of illegality to the first. After all, the Hamas, Islamic Jihad,
Fatah and Hizbullah insurgencies are illegal in themselves.
Certain forms of deception are permitted to states under the laws of war, but
the use of human shields is always illegal to all combatants. During the
recent Lebanon war, Hizbullah – assisted by Syria and Iran –
intentionally placed most of its arms and fighters squarely in the areas of
Arab civilian populations. In the future, perfidious violations of the laws of
war by any of the ongoing regional insurgencies could involve the placement of
chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons and infrastructures in various
Arab/Islamic towns and cities, giving rise to very dramatic escalations of
violence. To be sure, such prohibited placement is already well underway in
Iran with respect to all three categories of planned mega-terror.
Sooner or later, certain of Israel’s Arab/Islamic enemies, under cover of
perfidy (the United Nations, after all, recently chose to condemn Israeli
self-defense, not Hizbullah war crimes) will begin to magnify their
terror operations. Inevitably, these enemies will strive to exploit more fully
the methods of WMD terror-violence. Presently, at least, there is little to
suggest that they won’t succeed.
There are, says Albert Camus, “crimes of passion and crimes of logic”. But the
precise boundary between these crimes is often unclear, vague, porous, not
easily defined. Understood in terms of the ever-expanding mega-terrorist
threat to Israel, the pertinent crimes display both passion and logic. While
the level of passion has certainly increased, there has been no corresponding
diminution of logic. On the contrary, the constantly growing terrorist passion
– some would call it a heightened and murderous religious fervor – has been
congruent with tactical logic. This passion has been enhancing Israeli fears
and (until now) hastening Israeli territorial capitulations.
Over time, the terrorist slaughterers will decide that they must do “more” in
order to achieve their goals. Here, logic will spawn new passions which, in
turn, will reinforce logic. Combining careful cost-benefit calculations with
virulent Arab/Islamic religious frenzy, the terrorists will reason that
“ordinary” suicide bombings have become old-fashioned and that maintaining
“adequate” Israeli fear (the sort of fear that would impel more territorial
surrenders) calls for new and substantially higher forms of destructiveness.
Unless Israeli authorities have anticipated such escalations of violence
(clearly, they have) and are prepared to dominate the resultant
escalatory process (this, however, is somewhat less clear), the number of new
Israeli victims could become inconceivably large.
Significantly, the danger of unconventional terrorism could become great even
in the absence of logic. Indeed, this danger might even be greater if
terrorist enemies and their allies become more and more oriented to crimes of
passion. Animated only by the call of Jihad and operating far
beyond the rules of rationality in weighing decisional alternatives, the
terrorists might then opt for chemical, biological or even nuclear destruction
– and apart from any considered calculations of geopolitical advantage. Here,
violence would be celebrated for its own sake – for the sheer voluptuous joy
of murdering and dismembering Jews – and a numbing Arab/Islamic irrationality
would immobilize all Israeli hopes for terrorist restraint. As for compelling
Israeli deterrence of terrorist attack, it would become fruitless by
definition.
The “blood-dimmed tide is loosed”, says the poet Yeats, “and everywhere the
ceremony of innocence is drowned.” From the start, all anti-Israel terrorists,
especially Fatah, have accepted the idea of violence as
purposeful because of its “healing” effect upon the perpetrator.
Galvanized by what they have long described as a “battle of vengeance”, these
terrorists have seen in their attacks not merely the obvious logic of
influencing the victims, but also the Fanonian logic of “purifying” the
perpetrators.
“Violence,” says Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, “is a
purifying force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from
despair and inaction. It makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
This idea has long been at the heart of Fatah doctrine, and is now very
much in fashion among all other Palestinian and Hizbullah insurgents.
An early Fatah pamphlet, “The Revolution and Violence, the Road to
Victory”, informed the reader that slaughter serves not only to eliminate the
opposition but also to transform the “revolutionary”. It is, says the
pamphlet, “a healing medicine for all our people’s diseases”. How much more
healing, we must ask, and how much better for the terrorist’s self-respect, if
rockets and bombs kill thousands or even tens of thousands of Israelis rather
than “mere” dozens? Let us recall, if there are any doubts, the huge crowds of
Palestinians cheering on rooftops during Saddam’s 1991 Scud attacks on Tel
Aviv and Haifa. Their cheers openly urged the Iraqi mass killing of Israeli
civilians.
Terror has an appreciable impact beyond incidence. It also has a distinct
“quality”, a potentially decisive combination of venue and lethality that
cannot be ignored and that must be countered. Linked to a particular species
of fear, this quality of terror must represent an absolutely crucial
variable in any society’s war against terrorism. Reciprocally, it must elicit
an appropriate quality of counter-terrorism.
Let us imagine, in this connection, the qualitative difference, for Israel,
between bus or market suicide-bombings and the murder of masses of Tel
Avivians or Jerusalemites, either by “small” nuclear explosions or by
radiological contamination. The difference would be considerable. Although it
is certainly possible that a terrorist resort to such higher-order destruction
would prove to be counter-productive, this does not necessarily suggest a
corresponding terrorist reluctance to undertake such an escalation. After all,
if they are “logical” the terrorists might not foresee such
counter-productiveness and if they are “passionate” they might not care.
Writing about that species of fear that arises from tragedy, Aristotle
emphasized that such fear “demands a person who suffers undeservedly” and that
it must be felt by “one of ourselves”. This fear, or terror, has little or
nothing to do with our private concern for an impending misfortune to others,
but rather from our perceived resemblance to the victim. We feel terror on our
own behalf; we fear that we may become the objects of commiseration.
Terror, in short, is fear referred back to ourselves. Naturally, therefore,
the quality of this terror is at its highest point when this fear is
especially acute and where suffering acutely is especially likely. And what
could possibly create more acute fear of probable victimization than the
threat of chemical, biological or nuclear terrorism?
Israel, of course, must take special heed. Facing certain terrible crimes of
logic, it can communicate to its terrorist foes that Jerusalem is
prepared to dominate escalation, and that terrorist excursions into
higher-order destructiveness would elicit anything but capitulation.
Facing certain terrible crimes of passion, it can only confront the enemy in
advance. Insofar as an increasingly impassioned enemy armed with
unconventional weapons might not be susceptible to deterrent threats, the only
reasonable course would lie in some greatly expanded forms of preemption.
Although this seems obvious enough, it is, presently, implausible that Israeli
officials would authorize such wider efforts at anticipatory self-defense.
With further regard to Israel and considerations of justice (again, a
paradoxical conjunction of terms), it must be recalled that histories of
victimization have never conferred survival upon a people or a state, least of
all upon the Jewish people. Such recollection stands in marked contrast to the
oft-stated wish that terrible suffering, as in the matter of the Holocaust,
cannot possibly be in vain. Eugene Ionesco, for example, offers the following
passage from Andre Gide’s Journal, dated January 29, 1932: “The idea
that so much suffering can be in vain is intolerable to me, it kept me awake
all night...” As a “good Westerner”, continues Ionesco, “Andre Gide couldn’t
help but think that suffering was the price of happiness, that suffering has
to be rewarded.” Yet, Israeli planners must not forget that the world hardly
ever pities those who suffer; all the more those who suffer greatly. Often,
suffering creates scorn. So it is today with Jewish suffering, the
Holocaust and the State of Israel.
*
* *
Israeli planners are not philosophers. But they should recall Horace’s recipe:
“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi”
– if you want me to weep, you must first grieve yourself. Before Israel can
expect concern from the world, for its past and for its future, its own
population must “first grieve” itself; must care, deeply and profoundly and
publicly, for its own history and its own essential continuity; for
surviving at all costs. Paradoxically, earlier government policies of
sequential concessions and territorial “compromise” displayed the very
opposite of such needed “grief”, suggesting an unwarranted degree of
“understanding” and inflated national self-confidence. Further, post-Zionist
private sentiments, now still present throughout Israel, also reject essential
forms of “grief”.
*
* *
The Memorial Wall (the Wall of Holocaust and Heroism) at Yad Vashem has four
sections, ranging from the Shoah to Re-Birth. Magnificently designed by
Naftali Bezem, it takes us movingly from an inferno in which the Holy is
utterly profaned to the divine sanctuary of new Jewish generations. But these
generations, symbolized by the countenance of a lion, must still shed endless
tears.
For all of the lion’s greatness and strength, he can never be permitted to
forget. Always, always...he must weep for the past. Implicit in this seemingly
paradoxical imagery is the indelible imprint of Jewish uniqueness. Indeed,
without this incontestable uniqueness there can be no redemption, not for the
Jews and – therefore – not for the wider world. In going up to The Land,
Bezem’s new Jew acknowledges that Israel can never be regarded as merely one
among the nations, but rather as a singularly special nation for all time.
Jewish uniqueness is both an individual and collective obligation. The latter
is not possible without the former. Facing the world without a deeply felt
sense of uniqueness, the Jewish state – the individual Jew in macrocosm – can
never muster the spiritual and reverential strength it will need to survive.
We must never forget that Israel has a very special place in the world, and
that denying this special place does unpardonable violence to the sacred.
Here, the wisdom of Martin Buber is instructive: “There is no re-establishing
of Israel, there is no security for it save one: it must assume the burden of
its uniqueness...” Yet, today, Israel is obsessed with a very contrary and
dangerous ethos. Today, virtually all of Israel wants only to be like everyone
else; above all, it wants to “fit in” the world. If Israel is “successful” in
this wrongful ambition, the resultant triumph of secular uniformity, of
utterly inappropriate goals and values, will only hasten Israel’s demise.
Israel, of course, faces many threats, some of them authentically existential.
These threats, primarily the growing risks of unconventional terrorism and
unconventional war, understandably preoccupy the concerns of Israel’s
political leaders and military planners. But there are also less obvious and
less palpable threats that, in certain respects, are every bit as ominous and
are actually interrelated. None is more serious than the accelerating national
retreat from Israeli Jewish uniqueness, a retreat animated by steadfast
imitation of popular culture in the United States. For far too many Israelis,
the currently optimal Jewish state is one looking like Los Angeles.
For many states on this imperiled planet, imitation is not a conscious choice.
For a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with unyielding economic
and systemic constraints, these states are simply consigned to mimicry by dire
circumstances far beyond their control. Here there is little for us to comment
upon or to criticize.
Israel, however, is another matter entirely. What distinguishes Israel from
these other imitative states is that it has too often chosen
mediocrity, all too often actually preferring an incremental pattern of social
and political imitation to even a hint of leadership by Jewish example. To be
sure, in high-tech industries, in science, in medicine, in education, Israel
is (hardly a surprise) always at the top. Yet, in most of its political and
diplomatic arrangements, Israel has fallen very short. And of what use will be
its vast array of intellectual accomplishments if it should simultaneously
lose its Jewish soul as well as its Jewish land?
The consequences of an imitative Jewish state are already plain to see. For
Israel, mimicry has led directly to the Oslo and Road Map process of national
suicide, including the unforgivable “disengagement” from Gaza. And,
reciprocally, the Oslo/Road Map Process has led directly to a loss of Jewish
meaning and loss of Jewish national will. Now accepting a “post-Zionist”
discourse that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations of
Israelis (e.g., on January 14, 1999, Shimon Peres congratulated the PLO on its
“long struggle for national liberation”), today’s Israeli citizens are largely
unwilling to acknowledge that they inhabit the most endangered state in
the Middle East and that they represent the most endangered Jewish
community on the face of the Earth.
To a significant extent, the prior Governments’ “New Middle East” is the
apt metaphor for Israel’s self-inflicted liabilities. Celebrating an Israel
that steadfastly refuses to distance itself from the alluring American sea of
materialism and imitativeness, this fashionably au courant image
displays sharp discontinuity with millennia of meaningful Jewish history, a
history overstocked not only with martyrs, but also with those Jews who were
able to recognize Jewish national conformance and assimilation as a slow form
of Jewish death. For Israel, the “New Middle East” now offers not only
intolerable risks of war and terrorism, but also the even more insidious risks
of death by intentional religious underachievement and willful
cultural mediocrity.
On a planet where evil often remains “banal”, the effective origins of
terrorism, war and genocide lie not in particularly monstrous individuals, but
rather in societies that positively despise the individual. In such societies,
the mob is everything and a dreary secular sameness is the hallmark of
national “progress”. Surrounded by exactly such societies, all of which “fit
in” by keeping Israel “out”, the State of Israel – prodded by Washington – has
often decided not to reject this terrible and terrifying mob, but to join it,
to honor it, even to take an absolute delight in its conscious suppression of
individual Jewish promise in favor of a presumed belonging and public
acceptance. For Israel, however, it is not only good to be “a light unto the
nations”, it is an altogether timeless and sacred duty.
In Naftali Bezem’s art, a ladder is the apt representation of Aliya, of the
Jew going up to The Land. Of course it also arouses associations with Jacob’s
dream and with Kabbalist degrees of ascension. By these associations, the
meaning of Aliya is extended meaningfully to illustrate Jewish fullness and
perfection, conditions that can never be separated from an unhindered
awareness of Jewish uniqueness.
*
* *
Chapter III: Logic,
Persuasion, American Guarantees and
Preemption
Regarding judgments of rationality and deterrence, Israeli planners must never
fail to put themselves into the shoes of enemy decision-makers. What will
impact these decision-makers, and therefore Israel’s safety, will not be
Israeli perceptions or even some “objectively correct” set of facts, but only
what they perceive as real. Hence, what may well appear prudent and
rational in Tel Aviv could be taken as cowardly and irrational in Teheran or
Damascus. I have in mind, for example, differential views on Israel’s decision
not to retaliate for 39 Iraqi Scud missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War.
What will be the long-term effects of this decision on Israel’s overall
deterrence posture? This is an important question, one that needs to be asked
again and again and again. Surely it didn’t help in Lebanon, where in the
summer of 2006 Hizbullah had been emboldened.
*
* *
Israeli planners focus, of course, on enemy capabilities and intentions. But
do they focus on each variable as separate and discrete, or rather as
interdependent and synergistic? As one can affect the other, only the latter
orientation is correct and productive.
*
* *
Most Palestinian communities across the world were jubilant on September 11,
2001. More recently, these same communities expressed outrage at the
successful American assassination of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
For them, the murderous mastermind of al-Qai`dah in Iraq had been a
great hero. Dead, he was now a “martyr”.
But the Palestinian link to al-Qai`dah has become much more than mere
sympathy and friendship. Extending beyond a common visceral hatred of the
United States, it also concerns networks of tactical cooperation. Today there
are several shadowy alignments that involve information sharing, weaponry,
safe houses, and scientific expertise. The purpose of these alignments is
terror attacks against both Israel and the United States. These planned
operations could certainly include chemical, biological or even nuclear
technologies.
None of this should be a surprise. Immediately after September 11,
not only Hamas approached al-Qai`dah, but so did Arafat’s own
forces. In fact, Fatah, first formed as Arafat’s movement within the
PLO, had openly embraced “martyrdom operations” against Israeli women and
children. Although Palestinian terrorists hardly needed al-Qai`dah to
prod them to further acts of unspeakable cruelty, the example of September 11
seemed to offer them both great comfort and new resolve. For its part, al-Qai`dah
has been more than pleased that its Palestinian collaborators cite frequently
to the sacred Hadith: “Oh Allah, annihilate the Jews and their
supporters...”
The idea of killing for the sake of Islam is glorified both by the principal
Palestinian terror groups and by al-Qai`dah. In addition to the usual
sanctifications of “suicide bombing”, both also approve of religion-based
killing within the Islamic community. Both term Muslims who allegedly
collaborate with the United States as murtaddun (apostates) and both
prescribe the sentence of murtadd harbi; (to wit, the “ally with
Satan”) a Fatwa, (a death-sentence). The pertinent Qur`anic
verse is this: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His
Prophet and strive to make mischief in the land, is only this – that they
should be murdered or crucified, or their hands and feet should be cut off on
opposing sides...” There is no difference here between man and woman: “It is
permissible to shed the blood of a woman who is a heretic (Harbiyya),
even if her fighting is limited to singing.”
Al-Qai`dah’s hatred of the United States has little to do with American
support for Israel. If Israel ceased to exist, its contempt for this country
would continue unabated. This is because of the unforgivable “sin” of American
ties to “apostates and criminals” who rule in such Islamic countries as Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, the Emirates and Pakistan.
On December 2, 2002, al-Qai`dah first announced the establishment of
the “Islamic al-Qa`idah Organization in Palestine”. The announcement
declared “a vow of allegiance to the Emir of the Mujahideen, the leader
Osama bin Laden, by means of whom Allah strengthened the Nation of Islam.”
Calling for an end to regimes that “serve only the murderous Jews and the
Great Satan”, the announcement ends with a plea to our
brothers in Islam in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to attack the American
interests and the heretical institutions of apostasy... Death to the Jews and
Zionism; death to America; strength to Allah, Allah is great, and victory to
Islam.
Al-Qai`dah now operates secretly in Judea and Samaria and openly in
Gaza at the express invitation of both Fatah and Hamas. Years
back, Yasir Arafat first imported Hizbullah fighters to assist with
terror attacks against Israel. Today, Osama bin Laden’s Islamic fighters are
part of the deadly terrorist mix. Arafat had first gathered together a diverse
collection of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hizbullah, Popular
Front-General Command, various Iraqi military intelligence units (Palestinian
terrorists had always been extremely close to Saddam Hussein, even sending
Palestine Liberation Army units to help torture Kuwaitis in 1991), the
pro-Iraqi Arab Liberation Front, and, since April 2002, al-Qai`dah.
This same crosscut of Islamic terrorist groups presently exists in the United
States – although here (let us take comfort) they function “only” as sleeper
cells.
It is important in any war to distinguish friend from foe. Coordinated
mega-terror strikes against Israel and America are currently being planned by
joint Palestinian/al-Qai`dah teams. It follows that both Israel and the
United States should immediately cease any and all assistance to the Hamas-controlled
Palestinian Authority. Above all, it is time for Washington to stop sending
American tax dollars to support arch-enemies of the United States.
*
* *
Israel is unable to ensure its security, even its survival, through reliance
on ballistic missile defense and US guarantees. Rather, barring radical
transformation of enemy regimes, Jerusalem could have no existential choice
but to preemptively destroy certain enemy unconventional weapons and
supporting infrastructures in a timely manner. Although the currently
fashionable idea of a “multilayered defense” has its attractions (above all,
it puts off the preemption imperative by highlighting far more palatable
tactical options), in the end it could mean too little. It follows that
Israeli planners should look closely and immediately at the following threat
dimensions: (1) expected probability of enemy first-strikes over time; (2)
expected disutility of enemy first-strikes over time (itself dependent,
inter alia, on nature of enemy weaponry, projected enemy targeting
doctrines, and multiplication/dispersion/hardening of Israeli unconventional
forces); (3) expected collaborative prospects between enemy states (and
possibly between enemy state and non-state actors); (4) expected
schedules of enemy unconventional weapons deployments; (5) expected efficiency
of enemy active defenses over time; (6) expected efficiency of Israeli active
defenses over time; (7) expected efficiency of Israeli hard-target
counterforce operations over time; and (8) expected world community reactions
to Israeli preemptions. It goes without saying that Israel’s commitment to the
so-called “Peace Process” has greatly impaired its essential preemption
option, and that such commitment is even more injurious to Israeli survival
than is commonly understood.
*
* *
The dangers to Israel of a Palestinian state must be understood within the
general context of concern for Israeli nuclear strategy and regional nuclear
war. Should the “Peace Process” or “Road Map” produce a state of Palestine,
which is now rather plausible, Israel’s substantial loss of strategic depth
will be recognized by enemy states, especially by Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and
Syria, as a significant liability for Jerusalem. Such recognition, in turn,
will heat up enemy state intentions against Israel, occasioning an accelerated
search for capabilities and, consequently, a heightened risk of war initiated
from Teheran or Baghdad or Cairo or Damascus. Israeli planners, of course,
might foresee such enemy calculations and seek to compensate for the loss of
territories in a number of different ways. For example, Jerusalem could decide
to take its bomb out of the “basement” (as a deterrence-enhancing measure)
and/or it could accept a heightened willingness to launch preemptive strikes
against enemy hard targets. Made aware of such Israeli intentions, intentions
that would accrue from Israel’s new vulnerabilities, enemy states could
respond in a more or less parallel fashion, preparing more openly for
nuclearization and/or for first-strike attacks against the Jewish state.
*
* *
The phrase, “Death to Israel”, like the phrase “Death to the Jews”, is a
phrase that is always uttered in chorus. A hater of Israel, like a hater of
individual Jews, is always attached to a crowd or to a mob. In such hatreds,
one cannot be alone. It is this communal tradition of hatred, more than
anything else, which draws adherents – both among the nations and among
peoples within nations. There is little point in seeking to transform this
tradition, which is deeply embedded in a generically human desperation to
belong. Instead, those who are responsible for Israeli safety and security
from enemy attacks should now focus exclusively on what can be changed.
*
* *
Israeli planners must protect Israel’s nuclear forces by some combination of
multiplication/dispersion/hardening. Enemy planners, observing such measures,
might perceive preparations for an Israeli first-strike. Such erroneous
perceptions are all the more likely, should Israel simultaneously seek further
force protection via appropriate forms of active and passive defenses.
Ironically, in seeking to stabilize deterrence by signaling enemy states that
its own nuclear forces are secure from enemy first strikes – i.e., that these
are exclusively second-strike forces with “assured destruction” capability –
Jerusalem could create the impression that it is preparing to strike first.
Here, Israel’s attempts to convince enemy states that it is not preparing for
preemption could backfire, generating new incentives to these enemy states to
“preempt” themselves. The alternative, for Israel, would be to deliberately
disguise efforts at nuclear force protection from enemy states, but such
subterfuge would also carry considerable risk. After all, should Israel’s
enemies calculate that Jerusalem’s nuclear forces are insufficiently protected
from first-strike attacks, they would want to exploit current but potentially
transient Israeli weakness. Moreover, because insufficient force protection by
Jerusalem could encourage Israeli first-strikes, Israel’s enemies would have
compelling reasons to launch prompt “preemptive” attacks.
*
* *
Regarding the legal right to preemption, Israel’s planners may wish to recall
the authoritative jurisprudential argument of Hugo Grotius in his
Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty:
Now,
as Cicero explains, this (justification for anticipatory self-defense) exists
whenever he who chooses to wait (for formal declarations of war) will be
obliged to pay an unjust penalty before he can exact a just penalty; and, in a
general sense, it exists whenever matters do not admit of delay. Thus it is
obvious that a just war can be waged in return, without recourse to judicial
procedure, against an opponent who has begun an unjust war; nor will any
declaration of that just war be required... For, as Aelian says, citing Plato
as his authority, any war undertaken for the necessary repulsion of injury, is
proclaimed not by a crier nor by a herald but by the voice of Nature herself.
*
* *
Israel’s military planners must consider important complex relationships
between C3I vulnerability and pre-delegations of launch authority. To reduce
the risks of “decapitation”, an objective as essential to Israeli nuclear
deterrence as protection of the weapons themselves, Jerusalem might consider
increasing the number of authoritative decision-makers who would have the
right to launch under certain carefully-defined residual contingencies. But
because the deterrence value of such an increase would require that
prospective enemies learn (however indirectly and incompletely) that Israel
had taken these decapitation-avoidance pre-delegations (after all, without
such learning, enemies would be more apt to calculate that first-strike
attacks are cost-effective), those enemies might feel increasingly compelled
to “preempt”. These preemption incentives would derive from new enemy state
fears of a fully intentional Israeli first-strike and/or new fears of
accidental, unauthorized or unintentional nuclear strikes from Israel. Aware
of these probable enemy reactions to its pre-delegations of launch authority,
pre-delegations which might or might not be complemented by launch-on-warning
measures, Israel, reciprocally, could feel compelled to actually strike first,
a preemption of preemptive attack that may or may not prove to be net gainful
and that may or may not have been avoided by antecedent resistance to
pre-delegations of launch authority. Significantly, this entire scenario could
be “played” in the other direction. Here, Iran or an Arab state enemy seeking
to reduce its decapitation risks would implement pre-delegations of launch
authority, thereby encouraging Israeli preemptions and, as a consequence,
Iranian and/or Arab state “preemptions of Israeli preemption”. If all of this
sounds dreadfully complicated, it is because this is a dreadfully complicated
business. Those who do not feel comfortable with dreadful complications should
not be in the strategic planning business. Israel does not need simplifiers.
It does not need more “experts”. It needs broadly educated planners who
are willing to fashion an indispensable strategic dialectic, a nuanced genre
that goes well beyond the purely journalistic/reportorial “expertise” of
certain academic strategists.
*
* *
The destructiveness of nuclear weapons continues to pose conceptual problems
for Israeli planners (military and civilian) and academic strategists. Fearful
of association with such terrible weapons, these planners and strategists too
often dance around the most urgent questions. As a result, nuclear war
involving Israel may become more likely and security benefits that might have
been identified in advance may be lost forever.
*
* *
Israel’s planners should be reminded of Miguel de Unamuno’s instructive remark
about Hegel:
Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real
rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to
believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason
builds upon irrationalities.
For Israel, faced with the prospect of unconventional aggression from enemy
states, it would be prudent to “build upon irrationalities”, i.e., upon the
expected irrationalities of an increasingly formidable enemy.
*
* *
In considering the operation of nuclear deterrence and associated matters of
nuclear strategy, including preemption, Israeli planners may recall that such
operation impacts and determines the adequacy of pertinent international law.
For example, the adequacy of international law in preventing nuclear war in
the Middle East will depend not only upon certain treaties (e.g., the
Nonproliferation Treaty), customs and general principles of jurisprudence, but
also upon the success or failure of particular country strategies in the
region. Hence, if Israel’s strategy should reduce the threat of nuclear war,
either because of successful forms of deterrence or because of essential
non-nuclear preemptive strikes, such strategy would have to be considered an
essential component of international law.
*
* *
Even if it could be assumed, by Israeli planners, that enemy state leaders
will always be rational, a problematic assumption, to be sure, this would say
nothing about the accuracy of information used in making rational
calculations. Rationality, we must recall, refers only to the intention
of maximizing specified values or preferences. It says nothing at all about
whether the information used is correct or incorrect. Hence, rational enemy
state leaders may make errors in calculation that lead to war against Israel.
*
* *
Where Israel should face enemy states bent upon a war of extermination (and
where have they faced a different enemy), the following jurisprudential
understanding should not be lost: War and genocide need not be mutually
exclusive. War might well be the means whereby genocide is undertaken. This
should be as obvious today as it was during and after the Holocaust. According
to Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention, which entered into force on
January 12, 1951, genocide includes any of several listed acts “committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group as such...” It follows that where Israel is identified as the
institutionalized expression of the Jewish people (an expression that includes
national, ethnical, racial and religious components) acts of war intended to
destroy the Jewish state could assuredly be genocidal. Here it should be
remembered that international law is not a suicide pact; nowhere is it written
that Israel must wait patiently for a second genocidal assault.
*
* *
Like it or not, Israeli planners must consider the prospect of Israeli
nuclear preemption against enemy hard targets. Ironically, this prospect
could be heightened to the extent that Israel puts off non-nuclear preemptions
against developing enemy nuclear assets. If it waits too long to exercise
conventional preemption options, Israel could face a choice between (1)
undertaking nuclear preemption and ensuring survival of the Third Temple
Commonwealth; or (2) resisting nuclear preemption and risking destruction of
the Third Temple Commonwealth. Israeli planners could accept the rationality
of Option 1 where: (a) Israel’s state enemy had acquired and deployed nuclear
and/or other unconventional weapons judged capable of destroying the Third
Temple Commonwealth; (b) Israel’s state enemies had made clear that their
intentions paralleled their capabilities; (c) Israel’s state enemies were
believed ready by Israeli decision-makers to begin a “countdown to launch;”
and (d) Jerusalem believed that Israeli non-nuclear preemptions could not
achieve the needed minimum level of damage-limitation, i.e., levels consistent
with preservation of the State.
*
* *
Chapter IV:
Language, Thinking, Dialectic and
Contemplation
I
am aware that the juxtaposition of Israel and Jewish extermination inherent in
references to “destruction of the Third Temple Commonwealth” is so dreadful
that it borders on sacrilege. Yet, it is a juxtaposition that should not be
ignored or disregarded. Should Israeli planners fail to take it seriously, the
concentration of millions of post-Holocaust Jews in an area smaller than a
large county in California could prove a blessing to those among
Israel’s enemies who would refashion genocide as war. But if we do take
seriously the connections between Zionist objectives and Jewish vulnerability
in the Third Commonwealth, we will have taken the first critical steps toward
ensuring Israeli security, toward making certain that Jewish liberation does
not become Jewish misfortune.
*
* *
Applied to Israel and the Middle East, the fashionable concepts of “security
regime” and “confidence building measures” are sheer nonsense, the deleterious
fabrications of academics dedicated to looking away from an uncomfortable
reality. Exploiting Israeli frustration and fatigue, such concepts appear
enormously tempting. They are, however, unforgivably dangerous, generating
faith in a “Peace Process” that has always pointed only to Israel’s
dismemberment and disappearance.
*
* *
There is a marked tendency in Israel to imitate American strategic thinking.
This is a serious mistake, as virtually all American academic strategists are
paid not to think and, above all, not to depart from prudent (and
therefore intellectually sterile) forms of prescription. To use the language
of Jose Ortega y Gasset, whose Revolt Of The Masses (1932) is one of
the most important books of our century, today’s Ph.D. “expert” in Washington
or Tel Aviv is too-often a “learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter,
as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the
ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own
special line.”
*
* *
For Israel, the future cannot be separated from the past. They are
indissolubly interconnected. To prepare for the future, Israel’s leaders must
look closely at the past, not only from 1948 onward, but for 5000
years. The point is more than the clichéd imperative to learn the “lessons of
history”. It is to understand that Jewish history is altogether sui
generis, that Israel’s history is an integral part of this Jewish
history, and that an erroneous “cosmopolitanism” (i.e., “Jews are just another
people in the worldwide community of humankind”) could be a particularly
serious mistake.
*
* *
Regarding the methods of Israeli strategic analysis, it is essential
that they be based upon an appropriate dialectic. Hence, analysts must
approach their problem as an interrelated series of thoughts, where each
thought or idea about, for example, enemy capabilities/intentions presents a
complication that moves inquiry onward to the next thought or idea. Contained
in this strategic dialectic is an obligation to continue thinking, an
obligation that can never be fulfilled entirely (because of what the
philosophers call the “infinite regress problem”), but that must still be
attempted as fully and as competently as possible. Without such a dialectic,
those who work on Israeli security matters will continue to focus only upon
discrete moments in time, on static phenomena (e.g., numbers of weapons; types
of weapons; leadership personalities, etc), rather than upon appropriately
dynamic and generic interactions (synergies).
*
* *
The term “dialectic” originates from the Greek expression for the art of
conversation. Today, a common meaning is that dialectic is a method of seeking
truth via correct reasoning. From the standpoint of our concerns, the
following operations may be identified as essential but non-exclusive
components of a strategic dialectic: (1) A method of refutation by examining
logical consequences; (2) A method of division or repeated logical analysis of
genera into species; (3) Logical reasoning using premises that are probable or
generally accepted; (4) Formal logic; and (5) The logical development of
thought through thesis and antithesis to a synthesis of these opposites.
*
* *
Dialectic likely originated in the 5th
century BCE, as Zeno, author of the famous Paradoxes, was recognized by
Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges
as the supreme form of philosophical/analytic method. In one of these
dialogues, Plato describes the dialectician as someone who knows how to ask
and to answer questions. This is what should now be transposed to the study of
Israeli security matters. We need, in these all-important matters, to know how
to ask and to answer questions. This knowledge must precede
compilations of facts, figures, and power “balances”.
*
* *
The advantages of a new Israeli strategic dialectic will depend, in part, upon
the coherence of the overall academic enterprise. Israel does not face a
random set of discrete and wholly separate military threats. Rather, there is
a general threat environment within which discrete threat components fit. The
task for Israeli academic strategists is not to figure out in advance each and
every specific threat component (this is a task of certain government
intelligence analysts), but to identify a strategy which will accommodate the
understanding of a broad variety of possible threats. This means, inter
alia, an obligation to fashion a strategic “master plan”, a body of
generalized and interrelated propositions from which specific policy options
can be derived. Such a plan would not contain all or even most of the
“answers”, but it would offer a comprehensive and informed framework within
which all of the important questions might be addressed. Significantly, such a
plan would never be “completed”. It would serve those who oversee Israel’s
security needs continually, incrementally and directly, as an ongoing and
expanding set of purposeful guidelines.
*
* *
“In the areas with which we are concerned,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “insight
only occurs as a lightning bolt. The text is the thunder-peal rolling long
behind.”
For us, such an “area” is Israeli strategic studies. It is an area that will
be ill-served by standard thinking and texts. It is an area that can only be
served productively by flashes of understanding that defy (and quite probably
contradict) mainstream assessments and analyses.
* * *
The current and ongoing disintegration of the world is creation in reverse.
For Israel, the Jewish state, there are therefore special lessons to be
learned from this disintegration. The geometry of chaos, in a strange and
paradoxical symmetry, reveals both sense and form. How shall they be
discovered? This is an important question, one that goes far beyond the
usual sorts of On War and Transformation of War queries. It must
not be ignored.
* * *
Israel, it seems, can contemplate the end of the Third Temple Commonwealth
every day, and yet persevere quite calmly in its most routine and mundane
affairs. This should not be the case if Israel could begin to contemplate the
moment of its collective disappearance. It follows that Israel must
begin immediately to replace reassuringly abstract conceptualizations of End
Times with unbearably concrete imaginings of catastrophe. Only then could the
leaders of Israel take the steps needed to survive well into the Third
Millennium.
*
* *
There exists, among Israel’s enemies, a voluptuousness all their own; the
voluptuousness of conflict against the Jewish state as such. It is in
Israel’s strategic interest not to lose sight of this voluptuousness. Israel’s
enemies, in good part, do not read Clausewitz. They are, in good measure,
animated by more primal needs and expectations.
*
* *
E.M. Cioran, the most dazzling and devastating French philosophical voice
since Paul Valery (and an original thinker in the tradition of Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein) writes of the Jews as a “People of Solitaries”, a
People, for all of its recognized lucidity, that
readily sacrifices to illusion: it hopes, it always hopes too much... With so
many enemies, any other people, in its place, would have laid down its arms;
but this nation, unsuited to the complacencies of despair, bypassing its
age-old fatigue and the conclusions imposed by its fate, lives in the delirium
of expectation, determined not to learn a lesson from its humiliations...
How true, how especially true is this observation of a “nation” for the
State of the Jews, the State of Israel.
*
* *
When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration and other speeches, with their
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 ultimate victory for Athens, but they also express grave
concern for self-imposed setbacks along the way: “What I fear more than the
strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes.” Although Pericles exaggerated
the separateness of enemy strategies and Athenian mistakes (they were, of
course, interrelated and even synergistic), there is an important lesson here
for Israel. In observing enemy preparations for war, do not forget that the
effectiveness of these preparations will always depend upon Israel’s
particular responses.
*
* *
Under contemporary international law, the right of self-defense is not
confined to post-attack circumstances. Rather, it extends, under carefully
defined conditions, to preemptive or “anticipatory” strikes. In this
connection, Israel’s leaders and planners should recall Pufendorf’s
authoritative argument in his On the Duty of Man and Citizen According To
Natural Law:
...where it is quite clear that the other is already planning an attack upon
me, even though he has not yet fully revealed his intentions, it will be
permitted at once to begin forcible self-defense, and to anticipate him who is
preparing mischief, provided there be no hope that, when admonished in a
friendly spirit, he may put off his hostile temper, or if such admonition be
likely to injure our cause. Hence, he is to be regarded as the aggressor, who
first conceived the wish to injure, and prepared himself to carry it out. But
the excuse of self-defense will be his, who by quickness shall overpower his
slower assailant. And for defense, it is not required that one receive the
first blow, or merely avoid and parry those aimed at him.
*
* *
A
passage in The Odyssey speaks of two gates, one of horn and one of
ivory. Through the ivory gate false dreams pass to humankind, and through the
gate of horn go only the true and prophetic dreams. At this moment, in its
always precarious history, Israel is sorely tempted by the ivory gate,
choosing to base preservation of the Third Temple Commonwealth upon fanciful
visions of a “Peace Process”, “confidence building measures” and “security
communities”. Israel would be far better off, however, to pass instead through
the gate of horn, preparing to use military force selectively and preemptively
in order to endure. This decision will likely occasion greater pain and
uncertainty in the short run, but it would base preservation of the Third
Temple Commonwealth upon altogether sober assessments of realpolitik
and would affirm, rather than reject, the essential obligations of
international law.
*
* *
According to al-Da`wa (The Mission), an Islamic
publication, the status of Israel is identical to the status of the individual
Jew. What is this status? “The race (sic) is corrupt at the root, full
of duplicity, and the Muslims have everything to lose in seeking to deal with
them; they must be exterminated.” Historically, the Islamic world’s
orientation to extermination of the Jews has not been limited to phrasemaking.
Even before Israel came into existence in May 1948, on November 28, 1941, the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin, met in Berlin with Adolph Hitler. The
declared subject of their meeting was nothing less than “the final solution of
the Jewish Question”. This meeting, which followed Haj Amin’s active
organization of Muslim SS troops in Bosnia, included the Mufti’s promise to
aid German victory in the war. Later, after Israel’s trial and punishment of
Adolph Eichmann in 1961, Iranian and Arab newspapers described the mass
murderer of Jews as a “martyr”, congratulating him posthumously for having
“conferred a real blessing on humanity” by liquidating six million
“sub-humans”.
*
* *
Regarding American orientations to genocide in the Middle East, Israel would
do well to recall Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations’ indifference to
extermination of the Kurds. Iraqi documents seized during the Kurdish uprising
in March and April 1991 detail mass slayings of civilians, including
videotapes of executions, beatings and torture. United States authorities, for
years, encouraged Kurdish revolt, and then betrayed this unfortunate people to
genocidal destruction. During the late 1980s, the US stood by silently as
Saddam Hussein’s regime systematically demolished Kurdish villages and towns,
and forcibly transferred a half million or more Kurds into specially-created
concentration camps. In March of 1991, after encouraging the Iraqi Kurds to
rise up against the Baghdad regime, the Bush administration did nothing to
prevent new crushing genocidal blows against the Kurds by the Iraqi army.
*
* *
From the standpoint of international law, we must distinguish preemptive
attacks from preventive ones. Preemption represents a strategy of
striking an enemy first, in the expectation that the only alternative is to be
struck first oneself. A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes
enemy forces are about to attack. A preventive attack, however, is
launched not out of concern for imminent hostilities, but for fear of a
longer-term deterioration in the pertinent military balance. Hence, in a
preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is
anticipated is very short, while in a preventive strike the interval is
considerably longer. A problem for Israel, in this regard, is not only the
practical difficulty in determining imminence, but also the fact that delaying
a defensive strike until imminence is plausible could be fatal.
* * *
In the strict jurisprudential sense, because a state of war exists between
Israel and Iran (at Iran’s particular insistence), the Jewish state does not
need to meet the requirements of anticipatory self-defense. Rather, as there
can be no authentic preemption in an ongoing belligerency, an Israeli “first
strike” against Iran would need only to fulfill the expectations of the laws
of war, i.e., the rules of discrimination, proportionality and military
necessity. A legal state of war can exist between two states irrespective of
the presence or absence of ongoing hostilities between national armed forces.
The principle affirming that the existence of a legal state of war depends
upon the intentions of one or more of the states involved, and not on
“objective” phenomena, is known variously as the “state of war doctrine”; “de
jure war”; “war in the legal sense” and “war in the sense of
international law”.
*
* *
Confronting what he calls “our century of fear”, Albert Camus would have us
all be “neither victims nor executioners”, living not in a world in which
killing has disappeared (“we are not so crazy as that!”), but one wherein
killing has become illegitimate. This is a fine expectation, to be sure, yet
unless it is fashioned with a promising view toward effective non-lethal
measures of preserving order and justice, the result will certainly be an
enlargement of pain and terror. Deprived of the capacity to act as lawful
executioners, states facing aggression would be forced by Camus’ reasoning to
become victims. Why is Camus so sorely mistaken? Where, exactly, has he gone
wrong? The answer, it would seem, lies in his presumption, however implicit,
of a natural reciprocity among human beings and states in the matter of
killing. More specifically, we are asked to believe that as greater numbers of
people agree not to be executioners, still greater numbers will follow upon
the same course. In time, the argument proceeds, the number of those who
refuse to sanction killing will become so great that there will be fewer and
fewer victims. The problem, of course, is that Camus’ presumed reciprocity
does not exist. The will to kill, as we have learned from so many for so long,
is unimpressed by particular commitments to “goodness”. It follows that
executioners may have their rightful place in world politics, and that without
them there would only be more victims.
*
* *
Chapter V:
Assassination*, Anarchy, Rules and Dogmas
In the realm of world politics, executioners sometimes function as assassins.
Although such functioning is almost always an instance of wrongful execution,
there are certain carefully circumscribed and residual cases where it may be
rightful, permissible, and even distinctly law enforcing. Understood in terms
of Israel’s security needs, this points to the option of assassination as a
form of anticipatory self-defense. In determining whether or not a particular
instance of assassination would qualify as such a form under international
law, the act: (1) must not be designed to achieve a prohibited objective, but
only to forestall destruction of Israel’s land and people; and (2) must meet
the legal test known to international lawyers as the Caroline – i.e.,
the danger that gives rise to the preemptive attack by Israel must be judged
“instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for
deliberation”. Thus, if the assassination is undertaken only to destroy the
potential threat of the enemy (as a preventive action), it would
not qualify as permissible under international law. If, however, the
assassination were undertaken in anticipation of immediate enemy aggression
(as a preemptive action), it could qualify as an instance of
anticipatory self-defense. There are several problems here. First, in the real
world, judgments concerning the immediacy of anticipated aggression are
exceedingly difficult to make. Second, even where such judgments are ventured,
it can never be altogether clear whether the degree of immediacy is sufficient
to invoke preemption rather than prevention. Third, in meeting the
afore-stated legal requirements of defensive intent (#1 above), Israel may
have to act preventively rather than preemptively (because waiting to allow a
threat to become more immediate could have decisively negative
strategic/tactical consequences. And fourth, the actual state-preserving
benefits that might accrue to Israel from assassination of enemy leaders are
apt to be contingent upon not waiting until the danger posed is
“instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for
deliberation”. Assessments of the lawfulness of assassination as anticipatory
self-defense must also include comparisons with alternative forms of
preemption. If, for example, the perceived alternative to assassination is
large-scale uses of force taking the form of defensive military strikes, a
utilitarian or “balance of harms” criterion could surely favor assassination.
Such a choice may well have to be made sometime soon in Jerusalem, especially
as the territories are transformed into a Palestinian state. Here, deprived of
strategic depth, Israel could calculate that it had only three real options:
(1) do nothing, rely entirely on deterrence, and hope that enemy states remain
dissuaded from striking first; (2) strike preemptively with military force
against selected hard targets in enemy states, and hope that substantial
reprisals are prevented by persuasive intra-war deterrence, i.e., by
compelling Israeli threats of unacceptably damaging counter-retaliation; or
(3) strike preemptively by assassination, and hope that this will reduce the
overall threat to Israel without escalating into full-fledged military
encounters. Although impossible to determine in the abstract, Option 3 might
well prove to be the most cost-effective one available to Israel in certain
circumstances.
| * |
Professor Beres has been arguing for the
legality of certain forms of assassination in major law journals for many
years. |
*
* *
Jurisprudentially, of course, it would be reasonable to examine assassination
as a possible form of ordinary self-defense, i.e., as a forceful
measure of self-help short of war that is undertaken after an armed
attack occurs. Tactically, however, there are at least two serious problems
with such an examination. First, in view of the ongoing proliferation of
extraordinarily destructive weapons technologies among Israel’s enemies in the
Middle East, waiting to resort to ordinary self-defense could be very
dangerous, if not altogether fatal. Second, assassination, while it may prove
helpful in preventing an attack upon Israel in the first place, is far less
likely to be useful in mitigating further harm once an attack has already been
launched.
* * *
Martin Van Creveld writes, in The Transformation of War, that as the
lines between political violence and criminal violence become blurred,
assassination of enemy leaders will become more fashionable:
Over
the last three centuries or so, attempts to assassinate or otherwise
incapacitate leaders were not regarded as part of the game of war. In the
future, there will be a tendency to regard such leaders as criminals who
richly deserve the worst fate that can be inflicted upon them.
From the standpoint of international law, a case in point is Saddam Hussein.
Based upon the peremptory principle of law known as Nullum crimen sine
poena, “No crime without a punishment,” leaving Saddam in power,
unpunished, was altogether unjust. At Nuremberg, the words used by the Court,
“So far from it being unjust to punish him, it would be unjust if his wrong
were allowed to go unpunished,” represented an authoritative reaffirmation of
this principle. The earliest statement of Nullum crimen sine poena
can be found in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1728-1686 BCE); the Laws
of Eshnunna (c. 2000 BCE); the even-earlier code of Ur-Nammu (c.
2100 BCE), and, most significantly for Israel, the Lex Talionis
or law of exact retaliation, presented in three separate passages of the
Torah. For ancient Hebrews, when a crime involved the shedding of blood, not
only punishment – but punishment involving a reciprocal bloodletting – was
required. Shedding of blood is an abomination that must be expiated, “for
blood pollutes the land, and no expiation can be made for the land, for the
blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of him who shed it.” (Num.
35:33)
*
* *
Israel, the Jew in macrocosm, has become uncomfortable with the use of power,
especially that form of power based upon armed force. In a world of growing
international anarchy, this development represents a serious liability. Left
unchecked, it could become fatal.
*
* *
The obligation to use armed force in a world of international anarchy
forms the central argument of Realpolitik from the Melian
Dialogues of Thucydides and Cicero to Machiavelli, Locke, Spykman and
Kissinger. “For what can be done against force without force?”, asks Cicero in
one of his Letters. Later, in our own century, Nicholas Spykman
replies: “In a world of international anarchy, foreign policy must aim above
all at the improvement or at least the preservation of the relative power
position of the state.” Such arguments are assuredly not incorrect, but it is
likely that, today, they have become markedly trivial. The anarchy we confront
in world politics today is vastly different from its predecessors; it is more
far-reaching, extending not only between states but within them. It is almost
primordial, the anarchy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; it is
sui generis. What does this suggest about Israel’s particular
security options? How should Israel’s leadership plan in the face of this new
kind of anarchy? How will Israel be affected by anarchy amidst its enemies?
And how will it be affected by anarchy amongst its “friends”?
*
* *
Van Creveld’s Transformation of War is right on the mark in
underscoring humankind’s seemingly irrational delight in the use of armed
force, an authentic joy in the spirit of war. This observation is an
indispensable corrective to the popular notion that everyone is always agreed
upon the undesirability and unattractiveness of war, a notion with origins in
the poetry of the Classical Age, the poetry of Pindar: “Sweet is war to him
who knows it not, but to those who have made trial of it, it is a thing of
fear.” Similar expressions are found in the less-than-exultant tone of the
herald’s tale of victory in the Agamemnon; the harsh words of Euripides
for that same victory in the Troades; the
poignant words of Pericles regarding those who had perished in Samos: “It was
as if the spring had been taken from the year.” Yet, even before Van Creveld,
Michael Howard pointed out:
In
Western Europe until the first part of the 17th
century, warfare was a way of life for considerable sections of society; its
termination was for them a catastrophe, and its prolongation, official or
unofficial, was the legitimate objective of every man of spirit.
In the 18th century, war was accepted by many
as an essential element of social life, one needed to combat what the
philosopher Kant called “mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing
self-interest”.
*
* *
There is a dramatic affinity between war and the personal fear of death.
Although it is unlikely that Israeli planners will read Lucretius’ great poem,
On the Nature of Things, the “message” of the Epicurean text has
serious implications for Israeli security. What the young Virgil, citing
Lucretius, called fear of “the doom against which no prayer avails” leads
humankind to destroy life. Because the individual fails to understand the
balance between destructive and creative forces, he/she is anxious about
personal dissolution. This individual, to use the mythical terms set forth by
Lucretius himself, will be on the side of Mars rather than Venus, reaching out
to the rest of the world aggressively rather than compassionately. Persons,
and therefore collectivities of persons known as States, have an incorrect
attitude toward death that turns them to the terrible pleasures of violence.
The very last scene of Lucretius’ poem is a bloody battle that would not have
occurred if individuals had understood death. Humankind surrenders to death
and dismemberment precisely because it fears death and dismemberment. How
characteristic and insightful, indeed prophetic, are these ancient
observations regarding current Islamic thought about war, terrorism and
“infidels”. Israel should take note.
*
* *
“Men as a rule willingly believe what they want to believe!” So says Caesar in
Chapter 18 of the Gallic War. For Israel, the impact of Caesar’s
insight became evident on October 6, 1973, with the start of the Yom Kippur
War. Until then, the country had been committed to something known generally
as “the concept”, the kontzeptziya, the contrived idea that the
Arabs were unwilling and incapable of renewing hostilities against the Jewish
state. Aman’s (military intelligence) overall assessment of enemy designs,
lasting until October 5, 1973, was that war was “highly improbable” or
“improbable”. It was this fundamentally incorrect assumption that created a
monumental intelligence blunder – the “mehdal” in post-war
Hebrew parlance. This is a blunder that could be repeated at far greater cost
in the future. Until quite recently, the principal source of such a
prospective blunder has been the sentiment that sustains the “Middle East
Peace Process”.
The stillborn Oslo Agreements are null and void according to international
law. All states are obligated by international law to seek out and prosecute
the perpetrators of crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against
humanity. The same obligation extends to crimes of terrorism. Derived from the
peremptory norm of Nullum crimen sine poena! (“No Crime without
a Punishment!”), this obligation was violated flagrantly by Israel’s “peace”
agreements with a terrorist organization. Indeed, recognizing that, according
to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, any
agreement “...is void, if at the time of its conclusion, it conflicts with a
peremptory norm of general international law,” the Oslo agreements, witnessed
officially by representatives of the United States, should be disregarded.
Conflicting with a peremptory or jus cogens norm, a norm that,
according to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention is “a norm accepted
and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm
from which no derogation is permitted...,” the agreements confer no
jurisprudential responsibilities of any kind.
*
* *
The Palestine Liberation Organization was treated as a terrorist group in the
Klinghoffer v. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) suit. Here, the
court determined, inter alia, that the federal court had
jurisdiction over the PLO. In this civil action, which alleged that “the owner
and charterer of the Achille Lauro, travel agencies and various other
entities” failed to thwart the attack, jurisdiction was proffered on the basis
of the Death on the High Seas Act (46 USC. App. Secs. 761-767; 1982),
diversity of citizenship and state law.
*
* *
It is generally (but erroneously) believed that the peace treaty in force
between Israel and Egypt constrains the latter from joining with other Arab
states against the former. But a Minute to Article VI, paragraph 5, of the
Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty provides that it is agreed by the parties that there
is no assertion that the Peace Treaty prevails over other treaties or
agreements, or that other treaties or agreements prevail over the Peace
Treaty. (See Treaty of Peace, March 26, 1979, Egypt-Israel, Minute to Art. VI
(5), 18 I.L.M., 362, 392.)
*
* *
In all world politics, but especially in the Middle East, we are present at
the gradual unveiling of a secret, but the nucleus of meaning, the essential
truth of what is taking place, is what is not said. For the immediate
future, the enemies of Israel will continue their preparations for
chemical/biological/nuclear war. Altogether unaffected by parallel public
commitments to “peace process”, “self-determination”, “regional coexistence”,
“security regimes” and “confidence building measures”, these preparations will
proceed on their own track, culminating, if unobstructed, in new and
substantially more portentous aggressions against Israel. It follows that
Israel must not close its eyes to such enemy preparations or to the associated
and synergistic dangers of a Palestinian state, one-sided denuclearization and
one-sided peace settlements.
*
* *
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Israel – intra-war threats
notwithstanding – decided not to respond with any retaliatory strikes to
Iraq’s 39 missile attacks. If Israel had decided to respond, presumably
against Baghdad’s pertinent military assets, this response could have been
characterized by Jerusalem as any one of the following: (1) reprisal; (2)
self-defense; or (3) anticipatory self-defense. Alternatively, Israel could
have argued persuasively that: (4) a condition of war had existed between the
Jewish state and Iraq since 1948 at Iraq’s insistence, and that Israel’s
latest military strikes were not measures of self-help short of war (i.e., not
instances of reprisal, self-defense or anticipatory self-defense) but rather
just one more legitimate use of force in an ongoing conflict. In the final
analysis, the lawfulness of Israel’s counterstrike and the reasonableness of
its characterization would have depended upon such facts as general moves
toward peace underway in the region, amount of time elapsed between Iraq’s
aggression and Israel’s response, and the level of continuing danger to Israel
from the Baghdad regime. If Jerusalem had opted for number 4, supra,
its military counterstrike would have been prima facie lawful so
long as it had fulfilled the settled peremptory criteria of the laws of war –
namely the expectations of discrimination, proportionality and military
necessity.
Uncomfortable truths travel with great difficulty. Among these truths, one of
the most distressing concerns the certain failure of the so-called
nonproliferation regime. Highlighted by the Nonproliferation Treaty, which
entered into force in 1970, this body of authoritative norms under
international law, is incapable of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons
throughout the world. This means that reliance upon such a body of rules,
however “prudent” and well-intentioned, will likely hasten rather than inhibit
the onset of nuclear war. What shall Israel do? When, at Arab insistence,
Jerusalem is asked yet again to join the NPT, as a non-nuclear member, how
should it respond? If it should resist, the global community of “civilized”
nations would surely be aroused, declaring that, once again, a recalcitrant
Israel had refused to follow the codified rules of international law. Should
it accede to the Treaty, it would trade-off critical safety in exchange for
presumptively favorable world public opinion. Of course, it could also do what
Iraq and other Islamic states have always done, i.e., sign the Treaty but act
as if no obligations whatever had been incurred – but such hypocrisy has never
been Israel’s style, nor should it be. It should also be recalled here that
Israel has never obstructed diplomatic remedies to regional security. In
addition to the agreements on Palestinian “autonomy”, note the following: In
January 1993, Israel became a charter signatory of the Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC), while Egypt, Syria and most other states in the area
rejected the Treaty. Israel ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1964. It
is a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and has
safeguards agreements for several minor facilities. It has consistently
supported the concept of a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for the Middle East (MENWFZ).
*
* *
In calculations of strategic deterrence, Israel’s planners must always recall
that what matters is whether a prospective attacker perceives secure
Israeli retaliatory forces. Where a prospective attacker perceives vulnerable
retaliatory forces, it might judge the first-strike option against Israel to
be entirely cost-effective. This means, inter alia, that
Israel’s intelligence estimates must always keep close watch on enemy
perceptions, and that when these estimates determine enemy perceptions of
Israeli retaliatory force vulnerability, Israel’s own preemption option may
become more compelling. It also follows, of course, that Israel must always do
whatever possible to encourage enemy perceptions of Israeli nuclear force
invulnerability, an imperative that could include not only enhanced active
defenses, but also, among other things, removing the bomb from the “basement”.
*
* *
No discussion of Israeli nuclear deterrence can be complete without careful
consideration of the disclosure issue. From the beginning, Israel’s bomb has
been secluded in the “basement”. For the future, however, it is by no means
certain that an undeclared nuclear deterrent will be capable of meeting
Jerusalem’s security goals or that it will even be equal in effectiveness to
an openly-declared nuclear deterrent. But why? At first glance, the issue
appears inconsequential. After all, everyone knows that Israel has the bomb.
What, then, would be the purpose of belaboring the obvious? Indeed, might not
such unnecessary saber-rattling even be unduly provocative, occasioning Arab
and/or Iranian first-strikes that might not otherwise have been contemplated?
To respond, we must recall that disclosure would not be intended to reveal the
obvious, i.e., that Israel has a bomb, but rather to heighten enemy
perceptions of Jerusalem’s capable nuclear forces and/or Jerusalem’s
willingness to use these forces in reprisal for certain first-strike attacks.
What, exactly, are the plausible connections between an openly-declared
nuclear weapons capacity and enemy perceptions of Israeli nuclear deterrence?
One such connection concerns the relation between disclosure and perceived
vulnerability of Israel’s nuclear forces to preemptive destruction. Another
such connection concerns the relation between disclosure and perceived
capacity of Jerusalem’s nuclear forces to penetrate the attacking state’s
active defenses. To the extent that removing the bomb from the basement, or
disclosure, would encourage enemy views of an Israeli nuclear force that is
sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks and/or is capable of
piercing enemy active defense systems, disclosure would represent a rational
and prudent option for Israel. Here, the operational benefits of disclosure
would accrue from deliberate flows of information about dispersion,
multiplication, hardening, speed and evasiveness of nuclear weapon systems and
about some other pertinent technical features of certain nuclear weapons. Most
importantly, such flows would serve to remove enemy doubts about Israel’s
nuclear force capabilities, doubts which, left unchallenged, could undermine
Israeli nuclear deterrence. Removing the bomb from Israel’s basement might
also heighten enemy perceptions of Jerusalem’s willingness to make good on its
nuclear retaliatory threats. For example, by releasing information about its
nuclear forces that identifies distinctly usable forces, Israel could remove
any doubts about Jerusalem’s nuclear resolve. Here, a prospective attacker,
newly aware that Israel could retaliate without generating intolerably high
levels of civilian harms (possibly because of enhanced radiation and/or
sub-kiloton weapons) would be more apt, because of Jerusalem’s disclosure, to
believe Israel’s nuclear threats.
*
* *
An interesting question arises: To what extent, if any, would Israel’s removal
of the bomb from the basement affect its inclination to abandon nuclear
deterrence in favor of prompt preemption? An antecedent question asks the
following: To what extent, if any, might transformation of the territories
into “Palestine” encourage such removal? For the moment, Israel, still
buffered somewhat from a hot eastern border, can possibly better afford to
keep its bomb in the basement. When, however, this territory becomes
Palestine, Israel will almost surely feel compelled to move from “deliberate
ambiguity” to disclosure, a shift that could substantially improve the Jewish
state’s nuclear deterrence posture, but could also enlarge the chances of a
nuclear war should this posture fail.
*
* *
Israel’s enemies might be judged irrational, but this does not necessarily
mean that they are “crazy”. Indeed, Israeli nuclear deterrence could be
immobilized by enemy behavior that is entirely rational, but reflective of
what would ordinarily be construed as a fanatical preference ordering. For
example, Iran could conceivably act upon a preference ordering that values the
destruction of the Jewish state and the fulfillment of presumed Islamic
expectations more highly than any other value or combination of values. Here
Iran would neither be irrational nor crazy.
*
* *
Truly, reading the accounts of genocide in Rwanda, one loses altogether the
distinction between sane and crazy. For the most part, the perpetrators of
this genocide, like virtually all genociders in history, were perfectly sane.
Perhaps this suggests that Israeli planners would do best to draw their
strategic theories and inferences from the genre of the absurd, from the
“preposterous” theater of Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet and Albee. Can
Israel endure in a sane world?
*
* *
Speaking of sanity, if President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have their
way, a twenty-third Arab state will soon begin to take shape. Whether or not
this state of Palestine would meet the settled expectations of international
law codified at the 1934 Montevideo Convention, it would surely and
substantially change the complex power relations of competition and conflict
in the Middle East. Indeed, from the standpoint of both the American-led War
on Terror and the existential requirements of Israeli security, the new
Palestinian state would be severely destabilizing.
Following recent problems in the campaign against Hizbullah, prudent
Israeli war planning must now look much more closely at the global and
regional “correlation of forces”. Drawn from the military lexicon of the
former Soviet Union, this concept is usefully applied as a particular measure
of armed forces, from the subunit level to major formations. It can also be
used to compare resources and capabilities on both the levels of operational
military strategy and of “grand strategy”. This meaning is closely related to
the concept of “force ratios” used more commonly in Western armies.
Today, with renewed American pressure to create a Palestinian state – pressure
wholly contrary to world peace and security – Israel must undertake
comprehensive assessments of enemy states with particular reference to the
resultant “correlation of forces”. Here, however diminished by its misguided
senior ally in Washington, it must quickly seek more than an “objective”
yardstick for measuring opposing forces. Although the IDF is assuredly
comparing all available data concerning both the quantitative and qualitative
characteristics of unit strength, including enemy personnel, weaponry and
equipment, its commanders will need to know far more in order to establish
meaningful Israeli force superiority on the future battlefield. This is
especially the case in matters of grand strategy, where opposing Arab/Islamic
forces (following American and Israeli unwillingness to undertake pertinent
preemptive attacks against Iran and North Korea) could soon be endowed with
weapons of mass destruction.
What, exactly, should be the IDF concept of “correlation of forces”?
First, it must take very careful account of enemy leaders’ intentions
as well as capabilities. Such an accounting is inherently more subjective than
assessments of personnel, weapons and basic logistical data. Such an accounting
must be subtle and nuanced, relying less on fancy scientific modeling than
upon carefully informed human profiles. In this connection, it will not do to
merely gather masses of relevant data from all of the usual intelligence
sources. It will also be important to put Israeli strategists “into the shoes”
of each enemy leader, determining precisely what Israel looks like to them.
Second, the IDF correlation of forces concept must take painstaking
account of enemy leaders’ rationality. An adversary that does not conform to
the rules of rational behavior in world politics might not be deterred by ANY
Israeli threats, military or otherwise. Here the logic of Israeli deterrence
would be immobilized and all bets would be off concerning expected enemy
reactions to Israeli policy. This point now pertains especially to growing
existential threats from Iran. There, if (as expected) the Islamic regime is
permitted to complete its still-planned nuclearization, Israel could find
itself face-to-face with a suicide bomber in macrocosm.
Third, IDF assessments must also consider the changing organization of
enemy state units; their training standards; their morale; their
reconnaissance capabilities; their battle experience; and their suitability
and adaptability to the next battlefield. These assessments are not
exceedingly difficult to make on an individual or piecemeal basis, but the
Ministry of Defense needs to conceptualize them together, in their entirety.
To get this more coherent picture will require a special creativity and
imagination, not merely the ordinary and tangible analytical skills valued by
modern armies.
Fourth, IDF assessments must consider with great care the capabilities
and intentions of Israel’s non-state enemies; that is, the entire
configuration of anti‑Israel terrorist and guerrilla groups. Following the
recent Lebanon conflict, such assessments must offer much more than a group by
group consideration. Rather, the groups must be considered synergistically, in
their holistic expression, and as they interrelate with one another
vis-à-vis Israel. Also, these groups need to be considered in their
interactive relationship with enemy states. This last point might best be
characterized as an IDF search for dominant synergies between state and
non-state adversaries.
Fifth, IDF assessments must take special note of the ongoing
metamorphosis of a non-state adversary (PLO) into a state adversary
(Palestine). With this transformation, Israel’s strategic depth will shrink to
less manageable levels, and a far-reaching enemy momentum to transform Israel
itself into part of the new Arab state will be energized. How shall Israel
“live” with Palestine? In one respect, the US-blessed institutionalization of
disparate enemies into a sovereign “Palestine” may even provide some small
geo-strategic benefit to Israel (now reprisal and retaliation will likely be
easier and more purposeful), yet there will also be a corresponding and truly
consequential loss of vital territories.
In the matter of synergies, the IDF must also consider and look for “force
multipliers”. A force multiplier is a collection of related characteristics,
other than weapons and force size that make a military organization more
effective in combat. A force multiplier may be generalship; tactical surprise;
tactical mobility; or command and control. The presence of a force multiplier
creates synergy. The unit will be more effective than the mere sum of
its weapons. IDF responsibility in this area concerns (1) recognizing enemy
force multipliers; (2) challenging and undermining enemy force multipliers;
and (3) developing and refining its own force multipliers. Regarding number
(3), this means a heavy IDF emphasis on air superiority; communications;
intelligence; and surprise. It may also mean a heightened awareness of
the benefits of sometimes appearing less than completely rational to one’s
enemies. This last point is uniquely important, as Israel’s field tactics and
associated order of battle have become devastatingly predictable.
Correlation of forces will largely determine the outcome of the next Middle
Eastern war. It is time, therefore, for Israel to go far beyond the usual
numerical assessments to much “softer” considerations, and to focus
determinedly upon the cumulative importance of unconventional weapons and
low-intensity warfare in the region. A key dilemma in this focus will be the
understanding that, in certain crucial circumstances, preemption is both
indispensable and unfeasible, and that any suitable expression of
“anticipatory self-defense” would now produce very large-scale civilian
casualties in the target country.
*
* *
I am thinking about the apparent contradiction between Herman Kahn and
Yehoshafat Harkabi. Kahn, in his Thinking about the Unthinkable in the
1980s, says:
It is unacceptable, in terms of national security, to make nonuse of nuclear
weapons the highest national priority to which all other considerations must
be subordinated. It is immoral from almost any point of view to refuse to
defend yourself and others from very grave and terrible threats...
Harkabi, in The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, draws this “operative guidance”
from the Bar Kokhba Rebellion:
In choosing a style of fighting, be wary of warfare in which the reaction
required of the enemy, from the enemy’s point of view, may lead to an action
detrimental for you. ...This is an important lesson in nuclear circumstances:
refrain from a provocation for which the adversary may have only one response,
nuclear war.
The contradiction arises because Kahn demands a willingness to maintain the
nuclear option while Harkabi sees just such willingness, inter alia,
as an invitation to disaster (as “unrealistic”). The contradiction would
disappear if it could be assumed that nuclear weapons use by Israel would not
provoke nuclear war, but this would happen only if Israel’s pertinent enemy
were non-nuclear or lacked second-strike capability. Also, Kahn speaks of
nuclear weapons in terms of “defense”, a reference that could make sense
within the context of certain ATBM systems, but that strays from the more
usual context of deterrence. Depending upon the breadth of Kahn’s meaning of
defense, the contradiction with Harkabi will be more or less substantial.
*
* *
Elsewhere Harkabi is virtually incoherent. At one point he argues as follows:
The
nuclear era thus generates terminal situations for decision making
(emphasis in original). But the mutuality of threat and of destiny moderates
the situation and perhaps will, over the course of years, prevent nuclear war.
Why “mutuality”? Whose “destiny”? What evidence for “moderation”? Such
anti-thought dramatizes the requirement for a new strategic dialectic.
* * *
Harkabi’s marked descent into incorrect reasoning continues. Consider the
following:
Nuclear war is absurd, for no national gain could offset the damage such a war
would cause. What is the point in attempting to keep a certain asset by
threatening to use nuclear weapons, if, as a result of their use, all assets
will be lost? The threat to launch a nuclear war is not reasonable, and, thus,
not credible. The threat is nevertheless effective because there inheres a
residue of doubt that, despite its irrationality, it may be carried out. These
contradictions become even more severe, for, even if nuclear war is absurd, it
is not absurd for the nuclear powers to plan for such warfare. That is, the
preparation of the means to realize the absurd is not absurd. These
difficulties lead to a situation where the great powers today are unsuccessful
in developing for themselves cohesive doctrines of nuclear strategy, for the
absurdity of nuclear war spills over into the extravagances of the strategy of
such warfare.
It is difficult to imagine a more incoherent elucidation of nuclear strategy
and nuclear war. Not only are the separate components of the “argument”
intrinsically (and prima facie) wrong, they invalidate one
another.
*
* *
I return, again and again, to Eugene Ionesco, the Rumanian-born playwright
whose journal, Present Past/Past Present: A Personal Memoir, bears
comparison with Pascal’s Pensees. In July 1967, he permitted himself
this important observation:
...in the end, very few people accord the state of Israel the right to exist.
This country bothers everybody: it bothers the Russians, it bothers the
Americans, it bothers the French...it bothers the Jews who must take a
stand...it bothers everybody because the existence of something strong,
powerful, unarguable always creates insoluble problems.
Shall Israel become less of a “bother”? I hope not.
*
* *
“We are often asked,” said the late Italian Jew and survivor Primo Levi in
The Drowned and the Saved, “as if our past conferred a prophetic ability
upon us, whether Auschwitz will return...” However we choose to answer so
terrible but unavoidable a question, our past seems to have conferred precious
little in the way of prophetic abilities. On the contrary, by persistently
deluding ourselves that not seeing is a way of not knowing, we have distanced
ourselves from the most indispensable forms of warning. Israel take notice.
*
* *
Israel is a macrocosm. Like the individual Jew surrounded by mobs of would-be
murderers, the Jewish state stands encircled among a crowd of other states
that cries fervently for its extinction. Where it stands stubbornly and
defiantly for survival, the Diaspora Jew will have a proud and unparalleled
incentive to endure. And wherever the Diaspora Jew chooses to endure, Israel
will be prodded to face its own precarious future with open eyes.
*
* *
Jews don’t like to be bearers of harm; until now, we have been victims rather
than executioners. But much as we should like to be “neither victims nor
executioners” (to borrow a phrase again from Albert Camus’ essay of the same
name), this is simply not possible. The will to commit the mass murder of Jews, as we
have learned from so many for so long, is unimpressed by persistent
expressions of Jewish goodness. It follows, regarding both Israel and the
Diaspora that Jewish “executioners” have their rightful place and that
without this place there would be not diminished pain, but only whole legions
of new Jewish and non-Jewish sufferers.
*
* *
Chapter VI: Myth,
Heroism and Unending Struggle
In ancient myth, the Greek gods condemn Sisyphus to roll a great rock to the
top of a mountain, whence the stone will inevitably fall back of its own
weight. By imposing this terrible judgment the gods had prescribed the
dreadful punishment of interminable labor. But they also revealed something
vastly more difficult to understand, namely, that even such useless labor need
not be altogether futile. Such labor, they knew, could also be heroic.
This is where Israel stands today, after the falling Hizbullah rockets
from Lebanon. For a combination of very complex reasons, Israel now faces the
monumental and prospectively endless task of pushing a massive weight up the
“mountain”. Always. For no ascertainable purpose. And, almost for certain, the
great rock will always roll right back down to its point of origin. There is,
it would appear, simply no real chance that it will remain perched, fixedly,
securely, at the summit.
For Israel, there is no clear and expected solution to its essential and
existential security problem. Rather, in the fashion of Sisyphus, the Jewish
state must now accept the inconceivably heavy burden of a possible suffering
without predictable end. There is, of course, always hope, but – for now at
least – the only choice seems to be to continue pushing upward with no
apparent relief or to sigh deeply, to lie prostate, to surrender and to die.
What sort of sorrowful imagery is this? Can anyone be shocked that, for the
always imperiled people of Israel, a Sisyphean fate must lie far beyond their
ordinary powers of imagination? Not surprisingly, the Israelis still search
for ordinary solutions. They look, commonly, into politics, into new leaders,
into concrete policies. They seek remedies, answers, peace settlements, “road
maps” – they examine the whole package of ordinary prospects that would
allegedly make Israel more “normal” and therefore more “safe”. But Israel is
not normal, nor can it (or should it) ever be normal. For
reasons that will be debated and argued for centuries, Israel is altogether
unique. To deny this uniqueness, and to try to figure out ways in which the
great tormenting stone might finally stay on the top of the mountain
forever, is to seek banal answers to extraordinary questions. Above all,
it is to misunderstand Israel’s very special and very sacred place in the
universe.
Appropriately, let us recall immediately that Sisyphus is a heroic and
tragic figure in Greek mythology. This is because he labored valiantly in
spite of the apparent futility of his efforts. Today, however, Israel’s
leadership is sometimes still acting in ways that are neither tragic nor
heroic. Increasingly unwilling to accept the almost certain future of
protracted war and terror, the prime minister of Israel may still embrace
various intended codifications of national suicide. Whether it is named Oslo
or the “Road Map” makes no difference. The diplomatic promise of peace with a
persistently genocidal adversary is a sordid and persistent delusion. To be
sure, protracted war and terror hardly seem a tolerable or enviable outcome,
but this fate – at least for the moment – remains better than the undiminished
Arab/Islamic plan for a relentlessly Final Solution. To be sure, protracted
war and terror are bad options, but they are certainly better than death, and
death is the only plausible promise of Oslo and the Road Map.
The futile search for ordinary solutions by the people of Israel must never be
dismissed with anger, disdain or self-righteousness. After all, one can hardly
blame them for denying such terrible and unjust portents. But Israel exists in
a world where the terms justice and Jews can never be uttered in the same
breath, and where navigating according to rules of logic and reasonableness
will always be fatal. It is a world wherein unreason trumps rationality and
where survival is sometimes dependent upon accepting and enduring what is
manifestly absurd.
Sisyphus understood that his rock would never stay put at the summit of
the mountain. He labored nonetheless. Like Sisyphus, Israel must soon learn to
understand that its own “rock” – the agonizingly heavy stone of national
security and international normalcy – may never stay put at the summit. Yet,
it must still continue to push, upwards; it must continue to struggle against
the ponderous weight – if for no other reason than to continue, to endure. For
Israel, true heroism – and perhaps even the true fulfillment of its unique
mission among the nations – now lies in recognizing something well beyond
normal understanding: Endless pain and insecurity are not necessarily
unbearable and must sometimes even be borne with complete faith and
equanimity. Failing such a tragic awareness, the government of Israel will
continue to grasp at illusory peace prospects and to welcome repeatedly false
dawns.
Of course, Israel is not Sisyphus, and there is no reason to believe
that Israel must necessarily endure without great personal and collective
satisfactions. Even fully aware that its titanic struggle toward the recurring
summits may lack a definable moment of “success” – that these summits may
never be truly “scaled” – the Jewish state could still learn that the struggle
itself carries manifold benefits. The struggle has its essential
accomplishments, its unheralded blessings, its more or less palpable rewards.
Now newly tolerant of ambiguity, and consciously surviving without any
“normal” hopes of completion and clarity, the people of Israel could achieve
both spiritual and security benefits in their personal and collective lives.
Most importantly, their now enlarged lucidity could immunize them from the
lethal lures of ordinary nations.
Israel’s feverish search for a solution has led it down a continuing
path of despair. Today, even after the falling Hizbullah rockets from
Lebanon, Israel’s leaders may still prepare to relinquish the country’s last
shreds of national dignity and national security. For Israel, basic truth
often emerges from paradox. To survive into the future, Israel’s only real
chance is to keep rolling the rock upwards. Unlike Sisyphus, Israel and its
people can still enjoy many satisfactions along the way, but – like Sisyphus –
all Israel must still recognize that its individual and collective Jewish life
may require a tragic and possibly unending struggle.
Endnotes
| 1 |
The people who choose the term “homicide
bomber” over “suicide bomber” make only a very obvious point at the
expense of “sacrificing” a much larger and much more subtle point (that
is, that the “suicide” is not only authentic murder, but that it is also
driven by the desperate need of the terrorist to avoid death.
Paradoxically, the so-called “martyr” kills himself to avoid dying
himself/herself.
|
| 2 |
In den Gebieten, mit denen wir es
zu tun haben, gibt es Erkenntnis nur blitzhaft. Der Text ist der
langnachrollende Donner, Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, N. I.I. |
|
