PROFESSOR LOUIS RENE BERES: ISRAEL’S SURVIVAL
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/louis-rene-beres/israels-survival/2012/01/04/
Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” It is a mantra I have used often here in The Jewish Press in reference to Israel’s persistent security dilemma.At this latest time of testing for Israel, this mantra – an ancient Latin adage – may once again become the Jewish state’s most “reasonable” exclamation.
Ironic, perhaps, but why not? When, after all, have Israel’s critical victories ever been explicable in ordinary military or political terms? When have we ever been asked to believe, convincingly, that an utterly beleaguered country, half the size of Lake Michigan, would somehow be able to survive by combining advanced technologies, coherent military planning, and manifestly clever strategic operations?
At its core, Israel’s “being” is really about the incontestable meanings of “aliveness.” We Jews, both in our prayers, and in our sacred rituals, have always understood the difference between life and death, between the “blessing” and the “curse.” Now, in essence, all Jewish survival, individually and collectively, recognizably or obscured, is inextricably bound up with survival of the Jewish state. Reciprocally, the macro concern of Israel’s physical survival is now always a question about the individual Jew writ large.
From the beginning, and even long before modern statehood in 1948, Israel’s Jews have faced war, terror, and extinction. Now, Israel faces catastrophic destruction from two principal and mutually reinforcing sources: (1) the already-constituted state of Iran; and (2) the still-aspiring state of “Palestine.” Together, largely in certain ambiguous and even unimagined synergies, the interactive effects of these two primary threat sources portend a compelling reason for apprehension, and for appropriately counter-veiling remedies.
The situation is made all the more worrisome by the Palestinian Authority’s machinations at the United Nations, and also by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s acceptance of a Palestinian state that has been “demilitarized.” The Palestinian side (Hamas, Fatah, it makes little real difference) seeks only a One-State Solution. Moreover, a demilitarized Palestine could never actually be implemented. Perplexing as it may appear, any post-independence abrogation of earlier pre-state agreements to demilitarize by a now-sovereign Palestinian state could be entirely permissible under authoritative international law.
Iran is a frontline Islamic state, with a near-term potential to inflict nuclear harms upon Israel. The “international community” has effectively done nothing to stop Iranian nuclearization. Indisputably, its so-called “economic sanctions” have represented little more than a pestering fly on a stubborn elephant’s back.
What shall Israel do? Significantly, if President Obama’s expressed wish for “a world free of nuclear weapons” were ever realized, Israel wouldn’t stand a chance. Fortunately, this American presidential preference is not only foolish, it’s unrealistic. For the foreseeable future, at least, Israel will likely retain the core deterrence benefit of its “bomb in the basement.” The extended-term viability of this security benefit, however, may nonetheless vary substantially, according to a number of important factors.
One such factor concerns Jerusalem’s willingness to make limited disclosures of the country’s usable and penetration-capable nuclear forces, and also the extent to which the Israeli government and military might choose to reveal certain elements of Israel’s nuclear targeting doctrine. From the standpoint of successful deterrence, it will make a decidedly big difference if Israel’s nuclear forces are determinably counter value (targeted on enemy cities), or counterforce (targeted on enemy weapons, and related infrastructures).
“For what can be done against force, without force?” inquired Cicero more than 2,000 years ago. As Israelis have understood from the start, the use of force in world politics is never inherently evil. On the contrary, in preventing nuclear and terrorist aggressions, force is almost always required, and indispensable.
All states have a fundamental right of self-defense. This peremptory authority is made explicit in both codified and customary international law. It can be found, in part, at Article 51 of the UN Charter, and also in multiple scholarly clarifications of anticipatory self-defense.
Let us be clear. Israel has every legal right to forcibly confront the expected harms of both Iranian nuclear missile strikes, and Palestinian terror.
Albert Camus would have us all be “neither victims nor executioners,” living not in a world in which killing has disappeared (“we are not so crazy as that”), but one wherein killing has become illegitimate. This is a fine expectation, yet the celebrated French philosopher could never have anticipated another evil force for which extermination of the Jews was its literally declared object.
Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Not even in a still-crazy world living under the shadow of Holocaust could Camus have agreed to consider such an “absurd” possibility.
Israel lacks the quaint luxury of French philosophy. Were the Jewish state to follow the genteel reasoning of Camus, the result could be another boundless enlargement of Jewish suffering. Before and during the Holocaust, at least for those who still had an opportunity to flee, Jews were ordered: “Get out of Europe; go to Palestine.” When they complied (those who could), the next order was: “Get out of Palestine.”
Credo quia absurdum.
Cicero understood. Any failure to use force against a murderous evil imprints an indelible stain upon all that is good. By declining the right to act as a lawful executioner in its struggle with annihilatory war and terror, Israel would be forced by the contorted reasoning of Camus to embrace disappearance.
Why was Camus, who was thinking only in the broadest generic terms, so badly mistaken?
The answer lies in the philosopher’s unsupportable presumption of a natural reciprocity among both individual human beings and states in the matter of killing. We are asked to believe, by Camus, that as greater numbers of people agree not to become executioners, still greater numbers will follow upon the same brotherly course. In time, this delusionary argument proceeds, the number of those who refuse to accept killing will become so great that there will be fewer and fewer victims.
This resumed reciprocity simply does not exist. It can never exist, especially in the jihad-centered Middle East. Here, the unhidden Islamist desire to kill Jews remains wholly unimpressed by good intentions, or by Israel’s hugely disproportionate contributions to science, industry, medicine and learning. In this region there are no identifiable Iranian or Palestinian plans for rational coexistence. Instead, their only decipherable “remedies” are for an all-too- familiar Final Solution.
In matters of national self-defense and counter-terrorism, Jewish executioners require an honored place in the government and army of Israel. Without them, evil would triumph again and again. For Iran and “Palestine,” murdered Jews are not so much a means to an end, as they are a fervently prayed-for end in themselves. In this unheroic Islamist world, where sacrificial killing of Jews by war and terror is presumed to be an unassailable religious mandate, any Israeli unwillingness to use all necessary defensive force could invite individual and collective Jewish death.
Cicero would have understood. Legally and morally, killing is sometimes a sacred duty. Faced with undisguised sources of genuine evil, all civilized states will sometimes have to rely upon the executioner. It follows that to deny the Israeli executioner his proper place at this eleventh-hour of danger would make an unforgivable mockery of “Never Again.”
Louis René Beres, strategic and military affairs columnist for The Jewish Press, is professor of political science at Purdue University. Educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), he lectures and publishes widely on international relations and international law and is the author of ten major books in the field. In Israel, Professor Beres was chair of Project Daniel.
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