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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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Wikipedia’s Serious Problem: Bias Against Israel
An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg
The report that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are labeling the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an unreliable source of information on certain topics — including antisemitism related to Israel and Zionism — is a much more serious problem than an attack on a particular institution. Instead, it speaks to how much the bias against Israel and the indifference to antisemitism has spread to other organizations and informational platforms in this country.
There are those in the Jewish community who go so far as to claim that any criticism of Israel is really a cover for antisemitism. This is absurd. Israel is a country like any other, and its policies are subject to criticism, and even condemnation, as we see taking place within the country itself. Serious people, including those at ADL, reject outright the idea that Israel is beyond criticism, and that when criticism of Israel appears, it is a manifestation of antisemitism.
On the other hand, equally absurd — but much more dangerous because it is accepted in certain mainstream institutions — is the notion that any form of criticism of Israel can never be classified as antisemitism. This is a dangerous and misinformed idea, which underlies the spread of hate that we have witnessed since October 7. The most extreme manifestation of this was the rationalization or outright denial of the barbaric Hamas massacre of October 7. This attack — the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — was supposedly framed in terms of legitimate resistance to Israeli policies. In other words, nothing Israel could do to defend itself is defensible.
While the distortion embodied in these justifications for the murder of 1,200 Israelis, the rape of scores of women, the taking of more than 200 hostages is so obvious, it wasn’t the most perilous form. Even a person with hostile views toward the Jewish State could see through the immorality of justifying one of the worst acts of terrorism since 9/11.
Far more dangerous, because of its respectability, is the concept that no criticism of Israel can ever be antisemitism. This is often expressed with phrases like, “we don’t hate Jews, we hate Zionism.” And those sources — such as the ADL — which identify areas where hostility toward Israel can be a form of antisemitism and a generator of antisemitic incidents, are treated as biased and unreliable by Wikipedia and other groups and publications.
In fact, the manifestations of anti-Israel activity and the explosion of anti-Jewish behavior in a multitude of areas of society cannot be separated from classical antisemitism.
Jews were demonized for centuries — from being accused as “Christ killers,” to charges of blood libels and murders of children for ritual purposes, to sinister conspiracy theories as embodied in the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion document, which accuses Jewish leaders of plotting to take over the world.
All of this deeply embedded hatred culminated in the Holocaust, the Nazis’ systematic murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe.
After the horrors of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people, outright Jew-hatred was stigmatized — but millennia of prejudice against the Jewish people did not suddenly disappear. Over time, it transformed itself into something more legitimate: hatred of the only Jewish state in the world.
To those who cared, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was obvious that delegitimizing the Jewish State was merely a post-Holocaust form of antisemitism.
While these ideas existed for decades, it was October 7 that gave them new life. Beyond the rationalization of the Hamas terrorism itself, the anti-Israel protests on campuses were characterized by classic demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish State and its Jewish supporters.
Denial of the fundamental right of the Jewish state to exist — as embodied in the popular protest phrase, “From the river to the sea” — is along the historic lines of delegitimizing Jews through conspiracy theories.
Demonization of the Jewish State through denying what Hamas did, or justifying or labeling Israel’s struggle to defend itself after the worst day since the Holocaust as genocide — or accusing Israel of deliberately targeting children, in the spirit of blood libel charges — are only some of the ways in which expressions have not been mere criticism of Israel.
And the effect of all this — the attacks on Jews on campuses and elsewhere — was highly predictable. Hate speech, whether from the right, the left, or Islamist, inevitably leads to hate incidents.
In deeming ADL reporting as “unreliable,” this subset of Wikipedia’s editors has ignored all these forms of antisemitism that have emerged over the last eight months. For us, we will continue to do our work, always recognizing the distinction between free speech and criticism of Israeli policies and the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state, which fits into the pattern of historic antisemitism.
It is important that leaders in society make clear that they know what’s going on here — that it’s exactly this kind of thinking that has produced the opportunity for antisemitism to openly raise its ugly head in a way that we haven’t seen for decades. If people don’t confront the reality, this hatred — legitimized by mainstream sources — will spread and create even greater dangers for American Jews and American society.
The first step in standing up against this spreading support for hate is to express support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism, which articulates when legitimate criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism.
Ken Jacobson is Associate National Director of ADL.
The post Wikipedia’s Serious Problem: Bias Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Members of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party Say Jews Cannot Live in Israel
People hold Fatah flags during a protest in support of the people of Gaza, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, in Hebron, in the West Bank, Oct. 27, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
Whoever thinks the current war is an isolated conflict in the Gaza Strip — think again. The war is being cheered by members of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ political party, Fatah, as leading to a “return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa.”
In other words, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
One Fatah member stated recently what Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented for decades — that the conflict with Israel is not over land, but much more. It is “existential, not just a conflict over borders.”
Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muhammad Al-Lahham: “This is my opinion as [a member of] Fatah: That my conflict against this occupation [i.e., Israel] is an existential conflict, not just a conflict over borders. It’s either me or him on this land.”
[Al-Arabiya TV (Saudi Arabia), Facebook page, June 15, 2024]
Another top member and official of Fatah, Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan, said that Palestinians dying in the war in Gaza serve as “fuel” for the Palestinian “return,” and taking over of all of Israel. As he put it, Israel is “transient”:
Fatah Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan: “We say to the entire world that this blood that is being shed will be the fuel for our return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa, and certainly the Israeli occupation is transient and indeed the State of Palestine will be established, whether the occupation [i.e., Israel] and this world want it or not. All this national and mass activity emphasizes that we are returning, whether the occupation wants it or not.”
[Official PA TV, May 15, 2024]
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education showed a map and worded it as explicitly as possible on its Facebook page: “Palestine — the entire land is ours, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River”
Facebook, PA Ministry of Education, Nov. 16, 2021
This echoes many similar statements before it by other top Fatah and PA officials, such as Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani, who said that all the “transients” who came to “Palestine” must return “to where they came from,” and that only the Palestinians will have “sovereignty” over the land:
Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani: “There will be no sovereignty over this land except for the Palestinians … even if there is a foreign and transient case as the transients who came in the history of Palestine and returned to where they came from… [The Israelis] must understand that Palestine between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the [Jordan] River – every Palestinian man and woman has a right to it, and we will pursue them to take this right … Every year a generation arises among us that says: My home is in Jaffa, my home is in Tantura, my home is in the Upper Galilee, in Al-Bassa, in Lod, my home is in Ramle, Umm Al-Rashrash [i.e., Eilat; all the places are in Israel], and everywhere.”
[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Special Coverage, May 29, 2022]
The idea of Israel as a colonial “implant” and “a temporary ruler” is expressed in the following video, which was broadcast by official PA TV hundreds of times for almost a decade. It shows the rise and defeat of different rulers in “Palestine” over time. It ends with Israel’s defeat and the arrival of a “new” Muslim conqueror, Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders, thus representing the coming Muslim savior who will “liberate Palestine” from Jewish-Israeli rule:
The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.
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Did Jamaal Bowman Primary Bring AOC & Nick Fuentes Together?
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2024. Photo: Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes recently found common ground with progressive New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), taunting her with their political and ideological “similarities.” And the Internet caught fire.
What started as Ocasio-Cortez’s distaste for “big money” election spending ended with an exchange that Fuentes created to match her with anti-Israel rhetoric.
While it is evident that both Fuentes and Ocasio-Cortez are clearly anti-Israel, one accepted definition of antisemitism would also indicate that their rhetoric and their actions in turn make them both antisemitic.
AOC is more America First than 99% of Republicans. https://t.co/VDgdMZr4N6
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) June 19, 2024
No matter how hard she tries, AOC cannot separate herself from being associated with Jew-haters. Her standpoint appears to be mainly made of ignorance, angelic naïveté, and her alliance with two of the most antisemitic Congresswomen, Ilan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
Now, Fuentes has managed to rile her up in one tweet and expose their similarities. Fuentes, of course, is an open antisemite and white supremacist.
You are a white supremacist and I want nothing to do with you nor the world you imagine. I believe in a multiracial democracy, one of economic rights, civil liberties, and that affirms the working class and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.
These are not small differences.…
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 20, 2024
But that is exactly the point, polar-opposites of the spectrum are supposedly adversaries in their values. Yet extremes on either side are like a horseshoe spectrum — they meet at the bottom where the ends almost touch.
As for the “most expensive primary” that AOC criticized, Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) suffered a resounding defeat. He also did so in a way that singled out the Jewish community. And despite critics’ claims, the results also proved what HonestReporting wrote: this primary race was about more than “the Benjamins.”
A beloved county-executive and more moderate Democrat, George Latimer won 58.6% of the vote, and his voters were motivated by many issues. However, The New York Times put out a disturbing headline, later changing it amid criticism.
Actually, @nytimes, there was far more to it than “the Benjamins,” as we made clear the day before Bowman’s defeat. https://t.co/rhyGHVDv94 https://t.co/sTdLl8aWNT
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 26, 2024
Hmmm seems @nytimes thought better of their headline placing the blame for Bowman’s loss on the Jews, oops I mean “pro-Israel money.” https://t.co/k5PvLFrvwi pic.twitter.com/DB4sc2YVGy
— Dr. Laura Shaw Frank (@shawfrank) June 26, 2024
Of course, the Jewish people will be blamed for this “upset.” And not just by AOC.
Many allies of Fuentes and KKK leader David Duke also blamed the result on Jews. One former UFC fighter took to X to blame “Israel” for meddling in elections. He made the mistake of retweeting a post referencing Jewish people.
Once again, we often see that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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