“It is through death that there is time.” — Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
At its core, a potentially catastrophic war between Israel and Iran will have little to do with sovereignty, national security or even self-determination. Though veiled from the ordinary assessments of politicians and pundits, animating causes will stem instead from certain primal human needs to overcome mortality. In essence, visible struggles between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Jewish state are mere reflections. What we ordinarily accept here as tangible conflict is just a shadow.
These are all bewilderingly complicated matters, unprecedented prospects that require deeply imaginative thinking. To begin, Israeli planners should inquire: What are the reflected images, the truly motivating human needs? More precisely, if Iran and its surrogate jihadists seek nothing less than “power over death,” what can Israel do? This query is made especially daunting because the presumed jihadist path to immortality is explicitly linked to “terror sacrifice” and “martyrdom.” For Israel, the true existential threat is an adversary who identifies violence against individual Jews and the Jewish state as “sacred.”
To further distinguish Middle Eastern reality from mere shadows of reality, three basic concepts should be examined together: death, time and immortality. What can these intersecting concepts teach about the imperiled Israeli future? To answer thoughtfully, capable thinkers and scholars should begin disciplined inquiries at the level of an individual of the microcosm. Though an invisible property, power over death represents Iran’s ultimate reward for faith-based compliance with religious injunction, both as the recipient beneficiary and (reciprocally) as the bestowing benefactor.
But first, an antecedent question should be posed: How can any one individual or single state gain “power over death,” and what can such a presumed gain have to do with Israel’s fate?
On occasion, the search for “power over death” can demand a faith-confirming end to an individual jihadist’s life on earth. Though revered by Iranian-backed terror proxies as “martyrdom,” virtually all leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) strive desperately to avoid personal death. To wit, these open, unheroic leaders are more inclined to endure Israeli military retaliations in Qatari or Turkish five-star hotels than in airless tunnels beneath Gaza, Jenin or Beirut.
Nonetheless, Iran and its surrogates have no problem with “allowing” the “martyrdom” of others. Accordingly, many thousands of would-be Islamist terrorists oblige the rape, torture and murder of designated “unbelievers” as a firm religious imperative. On Oct. 7, Hamas perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females, then burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.” For these terrorist “battles,” Hamas leaders in absentia sent money to their families, also promising them all (families included) personal immortality or “power over death.”
There is more. In his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Such widely believed views link loyalty to the state with the promise of “power over death.” In world politics, this is always a monumental promise, but one recognizable only in the eternal shadows of death and time.
Prima facie, there can be no greater promise.
Though an incomparable promise, personal immortality must always represent an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This owes both to its expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and to the fact that the search can foster war, terrorism and (bearing witness to incessant Iranian calls for Israel’s annihilation) genocide. Here, the plausible Israeli task should not be to remove adversarial hopes for personal immortality but to “de-link” such a futile search from conspicuously barbarous human behaviors.
In Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952), Karl Jaspers comments: “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery—not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational … .” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those that offer to confer some otherwise inexplicable “power over death.” Significantly, it is somewhere within the twisted criteria of such a “selection” (a term earlier made infamous at Auschwitz) that rapidly force-multiplying violence can be spawned. This is because any promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of certain specifically despised “others.”
To deal satisfactorily with immediate and long-term security threats from Iran (both direct and surrogate-declared threats), Israeli policymakers will first have to understand the most elemental sources of regional war, terror and (potentially) genocide. These sources, which generally evade serious analytic scrutiny, are rooted in stunningly complex intersections of death, time and immortality. In the final analysis, it is at the conceptual or theoretic level that Israeli scholars and policymakers should fashion their reactions to Iranian aggressions and jihadist terror.
The “clock time” it will take Iran to become operationally nuclear could prove less important to its national war-planning decisions than another form of chronology. This is the time its leaders would associate with variously compelling assurances of life everlasting. “It is through death,” explains the philosopher, “that there is time.”