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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.

The post It’s All About ‘Time’: Israel Cannot Survive If It Does Not Address Iranian Nuclear Weapons first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel to Send Delegation to Qatar for Gaza Ceasefire Talks

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, Sept. 2, 2024. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS

Israel has decided to send a delegation to Qatar for talks on a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, an Israeli official said, reviving hopes of a breakthrough in negotiations to end the almost 21-month war.

Palestinian group Hamas said on Friday it had responded to a US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit,” a few days after US President Donald Trump said Israel had agreed “to the necessary conditions to finalize” a 60-day truce.

The Israeli negotiation delegation will fly to Qatar on Sunday, the Israeli official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters.

But in a sign of the potential challenges still facing the two sides, a Palestinian official from a militant group allied with Hamas said concerns remained over humanitarian aid, passage through the Rafah crossing in southern Israel to Egypt and clarity over a timetable for Israeli troop withdrawals.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, has yet to comment on Trump’s announcement, and in their public statements Hamas and Israel remain far apart.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said Hamas must be disarmed, a position the terrorist group, which is thought to be holding 20 living hostages, has so far refused to discuss.

Israeli media said on Friday that Israel had received and was reviewing Hamas’ response to the ceasefire proposal.

The post Israel to Send Delegation to Qatar for Gaza Ceasefire Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Tucker Carlson Says to Air Interview with President of Iran

Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024 during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect

US conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson said in an online post on Saturday that he had conducted an interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which would air in the next day or two.

Carlson said the interview was conducted remotely through a translator, and would be published as soon as it was edited, which “should be in a day or two.”

Carlson said he had stuck to simple questions in the interview, such as, “What is your goal? Do you seek war with the United States? Do you seek war with Israel?”

“There are all kinds of questions that I didn’t ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could get an not get an honest answer, such as, ‘was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the US government a week and a half ago?’” he said.

Carlson also said he had made a third request in the past several months to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will be visiting Washington next week for talks with US President Donald Trump.

Trump said on Friday he would discuss Iran with Netanyahu at the White House on Monday.

Trump said he believed Tehran’s nuclear program had been set back permanently by recent US strikes that followed Israel’s attacks on the country last month, although Iran could restart it at a different location.

Trump also said Iran had not agreed to inspections of its nuclear program or to give up enriching uranium. He said he would not allow Tehran to resume its nuclear program, adding that Iran did want to meet with him.

Pezeshkian said last month Iran does not intend to develop nuclear weapons but will pursue its right to nuclear energy and research.

The post Tucker Carlson Says to Air Interview with President of Iran first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Hostage Families Reject Partial Gaza Seal, Demand Release of All Hostages

Demonstrators hold signs and pictures of hostages, as relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas protest demanding the release of all hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itai Ron

i24 NewsAs Israeli leaders weigh the contours of a possible partial ceasefire deal with Hamas, the families of the 50 hostages still held in Gaza issued an impassioned public statement this weekend, condemning any agreement that would return only some of the abductees.

In a powerful message released Saturday, the Families Forum for the Return of Hostages denounced what they call the “beating system” and “cruel selection process,” which, they say, has left families trapped in unbearable uncertainty for 638 days—not knowing whether to hope for reunion or prepare for mourning.

The group warned that a phased or selective deal—rumored to be under discussion—would deepen their suffering and perpetuate injustice. Among the 50 hostages, 22 are believed to be alive, and 28 are presumed dead.

“Every family deserves answers and closure,” the Forum said. “Whether it is a return to embrace or a grave to mourn over—each is sacred.”

They accused the Israeli government of allowing political considerations to prevent a full agreement that could have brought all hostages—living and fallen—home long ago. “It is forbidden to conform to the dictates of Schindler-style lists,” the statement read, invoking a painful historical parallel.

“All of the abductees could have returned for rehabilitation or burial months ago, had the government chosen to act with courage.”

The call for a comprehensive deal comes just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares for high-stakes talks in Washington and as indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas are expected to resume in Doha within the next 24 hours, according to regional media reports.

Hamas, for its part, issued a statement Friday confirming its readiness to begin immediate negotiations on the implementation of a ceasefire and hostage release framework.

The Forum emphasized that every day in captivity poses a mortal risk to the living hostages, and for the deceased, a danger of being lost forever. “The horror of selection does not spare any of us,” the statement said. “Enough with the separation and categories that deepen the pain of the families.”

In a planned public address near Begin Gate in Tel Aviv, families are gathering Saturday evening to demand that the Israeli government accept a full-release deal—what they describe as the only “moral and Zionist” path forward.

“We will return. We will avenge,” the Forum concluded. “This is the time to complete the mission.”

As of now, the Israeli government has not formally responded to Hamas’s latest statement.

The post Hostage Families Reject Partial Gaza Seal, Demand Release of All Hostages first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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