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It’s All About ‘Time’: Israel Cannot Survive If It Does Not Address Iranian Nuclear Weapons
Israel’s military displays what they say is an Iranian ballistic missile which they retrieved from the Dead Sea after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, at Julis military base, in southern Israel, April 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
In essence, time represents the most critical determinant of Israel’s survival as a state. This is true not just in relation to operational requirements of counterterrorism and nuclear war avoidance, but also because Israel’s policies reflect the accumulated learning of past experience.
Such experience, as we may glean from Samuel Beckett’s analysis of Marcel Proust, is never really “passed.” It remains “irremediably a part of us, heavy and dangerous.”
What can such a philosophical observation mean for Israel, a country smaller than America’s Lake Michigan, one forced to fight a Gaza war and protect its citizens against Hezbollah and Iranian air attacks at the same time?
These are not abstract queries. Rather, they point toward variously tangible and potentially existential perils. Accordingly, a corresponding question should surface: To what extent could a greater policy awareness of time generate needed security benefits for the Jewish State?
In any coherent reply, meaningful answers will need to be framed in legal as well as operational terms. Though generally unrecognized, Israel’s principal terrorist adversaries — Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah — define ultimate victory from the manifestly intangible standpoint of power over death. Derivatively, for all these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” represents power over time. “It is through death,” we gather from philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “that there is time.”
Although Israel’s defense and security policies ought always to be science-based, such policies would still benefit from certain “subjective” understandings of time.
For Israel’s national security planners, “real time” ought never to be interpreted solely in terms of clock measurement. But what would actually constitute a suitably subjective and policy-centered theory of time?
Whether explicit or implicit, Israeli security analyses should contain certain theory-based elements of chronology. Israel’s many-sided struggle against war and terror will need to be conducted with more intellectually determined and conspicuously nuanced concepts of time. Seemingly “impractical,” such “felt time” or “inner time” conceptualizations could sometimes reveal far more about Israel’s core survival challenges than could the “objectively” numbered intervals etched onto clocks.
Interestingly, the notion of “felt time” or “time-as-lived” has its origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as simple linear progression, the early Hebrews approached chronology as a qualitative experience. Once dismissed as something that could submit only to quantitative measures, time began to be understood by these seminal Jewish thinkers as a subjective quality, one inherently inseparable from its personally infused content.
On its face, such classical Hebrew logic could accept no other point of view. For Israel’s present-day defense planning, moreover, it’s a perspective worthy of prompt and policy-centered resurrections.
What then would be the tangible source needed for analysis in Jerusalem? In reply, there would have to take place a far-reaching Israel defense community commitment to intellect, learning and “mind.” It was Israel’s extraordinary understandings of military technology that safeguarded the country from Iranian missile aggression, but even these impressive understandings would prove insufficient in the longer-term.
Unless Israel can understand that a nuclear Iran should be prevented at almost all conceivable costs, Israel will sometime be defeated by time.
For present-day Israel, the space-time relationship also reveals several less-philosophical security implications. Any considered territorial surrenders by Israel (Judea/Samaria or “West Bank”) would reduce the amount of “objective time” that Israel has to resist war and terrorism. Today, quite reasonably, relevant questions are being raised about the wisdom of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005. Some past Israeli surrenders, especially when considered “synergistically,” provided “extra time” for Israel’s enemies to wait patiently for optimal attack opportunities.
In the future, similar territorial concessions could produce existential costs.
For Israel, faced with recurrent war and terror on multiple fronts, the strategic importance of time can be expressed not only in terms of its relationship to space, but also as a storehouse of memory. By expressly recalling the historic vulnerabilities of Jewish life, Israel’s current leaders could begin to step back sensibly from a seemingly endless pattern of lethal equivocations. Ultimately, at least in principle, such policy movements could enhance “timely” prospects for a durable peace.
Eventually, a subjective metaphysics of time, a reality based not on equally numbered chronological moments but on deeply-felt representations of time as lived, could impact the ways in which Israel chooses to confront its state and sub-state foes.
If it could be determined that Iran and/or particular terrorist groups now accept a shorter time horizon in their search for “victory” over Israel. If it would seem that a presumed enemy time horizon was calculably longer, Jerusalem’s response could still be more or less incremental. For Israel, this would mean relying more on the relatively passive dynamics of military deterrence and military defense than on any active strategies of nuclear war fighting.
Of special interest to Israel’s prime minister and general staff should be the hidden time horizons of a jihadist suicide bomber. Although a counter-intuitive sort of understanding, this martyrdom-focused adversary is overwhelmingly afraid of death.
In terms of present-day investigations of time and Israel’s national security decision-making, “martyrdom” is generally accepted by hard-core Muslim believers as the most honorable and heroic way to soar above mortal limits imposed by clocks. Looked at from a dispassionate analytic perspective, however, it is actually invoked to sanitize barbarism and justify mass murder.
A next question arises: As a strategy or tactic for Israel, how can such perplexing correlations of death and time be suitably countered?
One way would require the realization that an aspiring suicide bomber sees himself or herself as a religious sacrificer. This would signify a jihadist adversary’s hope to escape from time that lacks meaning, an irrational hope to move beyond “profane time” to “sacred time.”
The martyrdom-seeking suicide bomber seeks to transport himself/herself into a rarefied world of “immortals.” For this terrorist, from “time to time,” the temptation to “sacrifice” despised “infidels” upon the altar of Jihad can become annihilationist and all-consuming. Now, among Israelis, this murderous temptation by overlapping enemies is easily recognized. Of course, the prospective dangers to Israel of the Iranian macrocosm would be vastly more catastrophic especially if Iran is allowed to proceed with its development of nuclear weapons and infrastructures.
Summing up, what should Israel do with such informed understandings of its adversaries’ concept of time?
Jerusalem’s immediate policy response should be to convince both prospective suicide bombers and Iranian leaders that their intended “sacrifices” could never elevate them or their societies above the fixed mortal limits of time.
Immediately, Israeli policy-makers will need to recognize certain dense problems of chronology as policy-relevant quandaries. They will also need to acknowledge to themselves that any plausible search for durable peace plans must be informed by intellectual understanding and by reasons.
Above all, Israel will need to be reminded that deeply serious national security planning is always much more than a technical, technological, tactical or operational task. Ultimately, it is a matter of surviving “in time.”
The author is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University. Educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), he is the author of twelve major books dealing with international relations, military strategy and world affairs. Dr. Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland on August 31, 1945, and lectures and publishes widely on issues of terrorism, counter-terrorism, nuclear strategy and nuclear war. Professor Beres’ latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016; 2nd ed. 2018). A version of this article was originally published by Israel National News.
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Israel Says Missile Launched by Yemen’s Houthis ‘Most Likely’ Intercepted

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The Israeli army said on Saturday that a missile fired from Yemen towards Israeli territory had been “most likely successfully intercepted,” while Yemen’s Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the launch.
Israel has threatened Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement – which has been attacking Israel in what it says is solidarity with Gaza – with a naval and air blockade if its attacks on Israel persist.
The Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group was responsible for Saturday’s attack, adding that it fired a missile towards the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, the Houthis, who control most of Yemen, have been firing at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade.
Most of the dozens of missiles and drones they have launched have been intercepted or fallen short. Israel has carried out a series of retaliatory strikes.
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Iran Holds Funeral for Commanders and Scientists Killed in War with Israel

People attend the funeral procession of Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Large crowds of mourners dressed in black lined streets in Iran’s capital Tehran as the country held a funeral on Saturday for top military commanders, nuclear scientists and some of the civilians killed during this month’s aerial war with Israel.
At least 16 scientists and 10 senior commanders were among those mourned at the funeral, according to state media, including armed forces chief Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Revolutionary Guards commander General Hossein Salami, and Guards Aerospace Force chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
Their coffins were driven into Tehran’s Azadi Square adorned with their photos and national flags, as crowds waved flags and some reached out to touch the caskets and throw rose petals onto them. State-run Press TV showed an image of ballistic missiles on display.
Mass prayers were later held in the square.
State TV said the funeral, dubbed the “procession of the Martyrs of Power,” was held for a total of 60 people killed in the war, including four women and four children.
In attendance were President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior figures including Ali Shamkhani, who was seriously wounded during the conflict and is an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.
“Today, Iranians, through heroic resistance against two regimes armed with nuclear weapons, protected their honor and dignity, and look to the future prouder, more dignified, and more resolute than ever,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also attended the funeral, said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate statement from Khamenei, who has not appeared publicly since the conflict began. In past funerals, he led prayers over the coffins of senior commanders ahead of public ceremonies broadcast on state television.
Israel launched the air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
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Israel, the only Middle Eastern country widely believed to have nuclear weapons, said it aimed to prevent Tehran from developing its own nuclear weapons.
Iran denies having a nuclear weapons program. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said it has “no credible indication” of an active, coordinated weapons program in Iran.
Bagheri, Salami and Hajizadeh were killed on June 13, the first day of the war. Bagheri was being buried at the Behesht Zahra cemetery outside Tehran mid-afternoon on Saturday. Salami and Hajizadeh were due to be buried on Sunday.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would consider bombing Iran again, while Khamenei, who has appeared in two pre-recorded video messages since the start of the war, has said Iran would respond to any future US attack by striking US military bases in the Middle East.
A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that Israel had delivered a “major blow” to Iran’s nuclear project. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that Israel and the US “failed to achieve their stated objectives” in the war.
According to Iranian health ministry figures, 610 people were killed on the Iranian side in the war before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday. More than 4,700 were injured.
Activist news agency HRANA put the number of killed at 974, including 387 civilians.
Israel’s health ministry said 28 were killed in Israel and 3,238 injured.
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Pro-Palestinian Rapper Leads ‘Death to the IDF’ Chant at English Music festival

Revellers dance as Avril Lavigne performs on the Other Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset, Britain, June 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
i24 News – Chants of “death to the IDF” were heard during the English Glastonbury music festival on Saturday ahead of the appearance of the pro-Palestinian Irish rappers Kneecap.
One half of punk duo based Bob Vylan (who both use aliases to protect their privacy) shouted out during a section of their show “Death to the IDF” – the Israeli military. Videos posted on X (formerly Twitter) show the crowd responding to and repeating the cheer.
This comes after officials had petitioned the music festival to drop the band. The rap duo also expressed support for the following act, Kneecap, who the BCC refused to show live after one of its members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – better known by stage name Mo Chara – was charged with a terror offense.
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