Reason and mystery in Israel’s defense posture

Israel’s jihadist enemies draw palpable power and purpose from a literally primal loathing of reason and rationality.

Louis Rene Beres| Sept 10, 2024

The scene where a missile fired from Lebanon hit a home in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Sept. 4, 2024. Photo by Ayal Margolin/Flash90.

There is something inside us that yearns not for reason, but for mystery … for whisperings of the irrational.”

— Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)

In complex matters of national defense, truth is sometimes counterintuitive. While for Israel, the most tangible source of power is its military, this source should never be considered in isolation.Because jihadist adversaries often regard personal death avoidance as more rewarding than anything else, their highest form of power is never just a matter of military assets, strategy or tactics. Rather, it is a matter of “power over death.”

For Israeli strategists, there can be no more urgent matter for systematic analysis. There will be associated ironies. By definition, the promise of immortality must be drawn from religious faith rather than science. Nonetheless, the philosopher’s “whisperings of the irrational” have never impaired this promise as a key factor in Israeli diplomacy or deterrence. Portentously, for assorted Islamist aggressors and terrorists, siding with anti-reason has routinely been celebrated.

Pertinent survival imperatives are not ambiguous. Israel’s jihadist enemies draw palpable power and purpose from a primal loathing of reason and rationality. If this unpredictable power should ever be joined with weapons of mass destruction, most ominously nuclear weapons, Israel could have to face a uniquely bitter triumph of anti-reason. In any such confrontation, the illogical but compelling promise of “power over death” could easily prove determinative.

For Jerusalem to adequately safeguard its national survival, a more detailed and nuanced understanding of defense is needed. Any further triumphs of delusion and anti-reason by the enemy could substantially enlarge coinciding threats from Iran, Hezbollah, Fatah and Hamas, among others. More precisely, these “victories” would be accomplished via war, terrorism and/or genocide. Accordingly, the expected human costs on all sides would be unacceptable.

On this matter of world-historical urgency, Israeli scholars and policy-makers should think creatively beyond any intuitive parameters of weapons, strategy and tactics. Their guiding question ought to be expressed as follows: How can Israel best convince Iran and its relevant proxies that the faith-based murder of “unbelievers” could never offer the perpetrators “power over death?”

Though all Iranian surrogates regard war, terror and genocide against Israel as ennobling expressions of “religious sacrifice,” they will need to acknowledge that such thinking is destined to fail. Still, securing enemy acknowledgment could prove excruciatingly difficult because of Islamist “whisperings of the irrational.”

What should Israel do as it finds itself confronted with religion-driven enemies who are captivated by doctrinal “whisperings” and seek immortality by way of “martyrdom?” Before answering, three logically prior questions should be raised:

• What sort of religious faith can ecstatically encourage the rape, torture and murder of criminally abducted hostages, some under three years of age?

• Can any decent and thinking human being wittingly accept that such codified “crimes against humanity” are actually intended to ensure Palestinian statehood?

• Were the post-Oct. 7 Hamas rapes of Israeli children, male and female, a rational and reason-based political tactic to gain Palestinian “liberation?”

In law, there is a simple and incontestable answer to all these questions.

In all law, rights can never stem from wrongs. Ex injuria jus non oritur.

For Israel’s enemies, irrationality does not signify weakness. Though it is a lascivious faith, jihadism is still capable of inflicting overwhelming human harm. To prevent such harm, Israel’s decision-makers ought never to forget that the true object of Islamist terror sacrifice is never “The Israeli.” Always, it is “The Jew.” The difference couldn’t possibly be more important.

On particulars, Israel’s most immediate policy concern is the war with Hezbollah. Here and elsewhere, dynamics of anti-reason will continue to hold a place in Islamist policies. In his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank explained these dynamics at a general and timeless level: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other. Through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”

In such existential matters for Israel, there are variously coinciding matters of law and justice. Under authoritative jurisprudence, Hezbollah and other jihadist perpetrators must be distinguished from counterterrorist adversaries by their willful embrace of mens rea or “criminal intent.” Though Israel correctly regards the harms it is forced to inflict upon noncombatant populations as unavoidable costs of counter-terrorism—costs mandated by lawless Palestinian tactics of “human shields” or “perfidy”—Iran and its sub-state proxies target Israeli civilians with unmistakably criminal intent.

On this increasingly imperiled planet, Israel coexists with other states in an international “state of nature.” Despite being subject to wholly irrational promises, Islamist states and their proxies uniformly accept the proposition that “sacrificing” specific “others” (most plainly, Jews) offers “medicine” against their own deaths. Prima facie, this dreadful presumption reflects a grim and steadily growing “triumph” of anti-reason.

For the foreseeable future, such triumph, though intolerable, becomes more and more probable. For Iran and its obeisant proxies, attempts to avoid personal death by killing designated “others” (“unbelievers” and “apostates”) will remain futile but consequential. The legacy of Westphalia, the 1648 treaty creating modern international law, codifies reason and rejects anti-reason. But let us finally be candid about such codification: Almost no one pays any attention.

There is background. Scholars and policy-makers can discover potentially murderous endorsements of anti-reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and other classical thinkers. There have also been voices of a very different sort. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he remarks prophetically in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.”

The 19th-century philosopher could have been writing about present-day Iran or Iran’s ally North Korea. Regarding Pyongyang, an already-nuclear North Korea could come to the aid of a still pre-nuclear Iran. Years back, lest Israeli analysts forget or disregard, it was North Korea that built a nuclear reactor for another Iranian ally, Syria. This reactor was subsequently destroyed by Israel’s September 2007 “Operation Orchard,” an operation of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law.

As the foremost state mentor to jihadist forces, Iran represents the juridical incarnation of anti-reason. A state of Palestine would add tangible power to these already-dissembling forces. Considered together, as “synergistic”—as an interaction in which the whole is actually greater than the sum of its parts—Iran-Palestine could present Israel with an irremediable hazard.

To deal successfully with primal jihadist foes, enemies who seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential strategy should be based on a deeper understanding of the “whisperings of the irrational.” Though Israel should never submit to siren calls of anti-reason, its own rationality-based posture of security and defense ought never to be projected unthinkingly on its adversaries. To be sure, Iran and its proxies are apt to act rationally in most military decision-making processes, but even a rare or occasional embrace of anti-reason could prove intolerable for the Jewish state.

In part, Israel’s only defense lies in operationally deeper understandings of such a predatory embrace.