Saturday, April 11, 2009

'Are You Meshuga?' Jewish Survival In A Crazy World (A Column in Two Parts)

Louis René Beres

Date: Wednesday, April 01 2009

Credo quia absurdum. "I believe because it is absurd."

Here is a brief story to suitably "set our stage." During World War I, a Jew loses his way along the Austro-Hungarian frontier. Wandering through the woods late at night, he is abruptly stopped in his tracks by the screaming challenge of a nervous border-guard: "Halt, or I'll shoot." The Jew blinks uncomfortably into the beam of the searchlight and retorts with obvious annoyance: "What's the matter with you? Are you meshuga? Can't you see that this is a flesh-and-blood human being?" In principle, of course, the Jew's behavior here is entirely sensible. Yet, in the disturbingly "real" world, it is also plainly crazy. In the best of all possible worlds, perhaps, no human being could ever imagine shooting another, or even making the weapons that are needed to inflict such terrible harms. But this is not yet the best of all possible worlds. And in this distressingly "real" world, we must all still calculate according to what is, and not to what might have been, or what might even someday come to pass.

Complex questions arise. How, then, shall we Jews survive in such a world, both as individuals and as citizens or supporters of the always existentially-imperiled Jewish State? Still wishing, somehow, that the non-Jewish world will finally and fully acknowledge his or her common humanity, the individual Jew has hoped for millennia that a more empathetic pattern of interpersonal interaction would ultimately emerge. Similarly, since 1948, the State of Israel has tried, again and again and again, to impress its relentlessly hostile Arab and Iranian neighbors with the promisingly cosmopolitan vision of a shared humanity. To no avail.

Sadly, anti-Semitism is now feverishly resurgent throughout the real world, and hatred of Israel—of the individual Jew in macrocosm—is altogether virulent, widespread and (considering the spread of various weapons of mass destruction) both ominous and eerily reminiscent.

Now, of course, the principal dangers are spawned by assorted elements of Islam. In Islamic parlance, as dictated by the Shari'a, the world remains divided in two: The World of Islam (dar-al-Islam) and the World of War (dar al-Harb). Within the World of Islam, Muslims rule and the law of Islam prevails. In the World of War, which comprises the rest of the world, constant struggle against the unbeliever is morally, legally and religiously obligatory.

From the standpoint of Israel's Islamic enemies, no political compromise is ever possible. Absolutely no conclusion to the struggle between "worlds" can be acceptable short of a final and total military victory. Islamic law permits a state of war to be interrupted when an armistice or treaty of limited duration would be expedient. But the state of belligerency can never be terminated permanently by any peace that is not founded upon a final defeat of the always-despised enemy.

Jihad calls upon all those who have accepted Allah's message and Allah's word to strive (jahada) to convert or to subjugate those who have resisted conversion. In reference to Israel, this presumably sacred obligation is not bound by limits of either space or time. Indeed, this obligation is mandated to continue until the entire world has embraced Islam, or has at least until it has submitted to the power of Islamic states.

For Islam, the unsubjugated unbeliever—especially the Jew—is by definition, the enemy. A part of the dar al-Harb, the World of War, he is differentiated sharply from the dhimmi, the compliant unbeliever who agrees to submit to Islamic rule. As for a Jewish State, and one that even has the audacity to rule over Muslims while it "occupies" [what Muslims claim as] "Muslim" lands, this is absolutely nothing less than the very incarnation of evil—hence an intolerable source of contamination, and a codified inversion of divine will. Such a state is seen fit only for "liquidation" (significantly, a term that literally remains in widespread use with particular and special regard to Israel).

When Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spoke together with Hitler on Berlin Radio in 1942, he cried out voluptuously: "Kill the Jews—kill them with your hands, kill them with your teeth—this is well-pleasing to Allah." Today the grotesque Palestinian call for annihilation of Israel still remains at many websites and publications, and the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) still calls for the "realization of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, killing them.'"

How, then, shall we Jews survive in such a distorted and meshuga world, both as individuals, and as the always-fragile Jewish State? In our collective form, shall we truly "Seek peace, and pursue it," when our enemies' brand of "sanity" lies relentlessly in genocide and war? Or should we just reluctantly resign ourselves to ceaseless conflict as the unavoidable expression of sanity in an undeniably insane world?

"Seek peace, and pursue it." A clear Jewish imperative. At the same time, to seek peace where it is evidently unattainable—as it is today, with the Palestinians who "love death” while harboring their undiminished hatred of Jews—could be literally fatal to Israel. Recalling the unforgivable Oslo and Road Map Agreements (the latter still dear to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton), shall it now be Israel's position to accept a "peace" that places it in mortal danger, and then still hope for a miraculous rescue?

Here we should remember the potent words of Rabbi Yanai: "A man should never put himself in a place of danger and say that a miracle will save him, lest there be no miracle, and if there be a miracle, his being thus saved will diminish his share in the world to come...."(Talmud; Sota 32a and Codes; Yoreh De'ah 116) These particular words apply, strictly speaking, only to "a man," but it would be hard to argue persuasively that they should not now apply even more importantly to the Jewish State. We Jews must assuredly show forbearance in searching for peace—if necessary, even long and arduous and unreciprocated forbearance—but certainly not infinite forbearance.

It is not just our enemies who show us no mercy, and who "love death" who make us unsafe. The triumph of the absurd (the world of Chelm or the world of Kafka?) can be found also in “sober” actions of the United Nations. Consider, just for example, that back on January 11, 2005, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (appointed to his position after making possible the 1994 genocide in Rwanda) established a formal registry to record Palestinian claims of damage blamed upon Israel's security fence. This registry was mandated by the UN General Assembly in a resolution issued by emergency special session. Payments were to be made by "Israel's existing compensation mechanisms."

So, in our meshuga world, Israel builds a security fence to protect its citizens from wanton murder, and the UN chooses to condemn not the murderers, but the security fence. Where was the UN call for a registry of Jewish claims arising from Palestinian barbarism? This important question had been raised initially by ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, and by Stephen Flatow, the father of Alisa Flatow, a 20-year old American citizen and Brandeis University student who was murdered in Israel by a suicide bomber on April 9, 1995.

Now Israel has a new/old prime minister. Soon, Mr. Netanyahu will have to make some especially important decisions. Above all, these crucial decisions will concern both ongoing Iranian nuclearization (a genocidal threat that has been effectively ignored by the UN), and creation of a Palestinian state. Confronted by an alarming awareness of enemy plans, what will Prime Minister Netanyahu choose to define as appropriately “sane” national behavior?

Sooner or later, barring pertinent preemptions, certain Arab states and/or Iran will likely acquire nuclear weapons. Should this be allowed to happen, these enemy states—possibly together with certain of their sub-state proxies—could fall upon Israel in an utterly apocalyptic frenzy of destructiveness. It follows that Israel must now do everything in its power to prevent Arab/Iranian nuclearization.

A Hasidic tale instructs us that we shall only be able to determine the hour of dawn, when the night ends and the day begins, when we can look into the face of another human being and recognize in him a brother, a real brother. Until that moment, night and darkness shall remain with us. Understood in terms of the State of Israel, this tale should remind us that in the best of all possible worlds, we humans, all of us, will finally be able to go beyond the most primordial forms of tribalism, and acknowledge, triumphantly, our basic Oneness: "The dust from which the first man was made was gathered from all the corners of the world." (Sanhedrin 38b)

For the moment, such an acknowledgment would be both premature and suicidal. Our enemies simply don't share a generous vision of cosmopolitan coexistence, and we cannot afford to be more "humane" about the "Road Map" at the predictable cost of collective disintegration. Instead, for now, Israel must harden its resolve and its capacity to preemptively remove certain Arab/Iranian weapons of mass destruction.

Following recommendations of Project Daniel, Israel should also act promptly to codify a formal strategy of anticipatory self-defense in its national strategic doctrine. And if preemption should fail, for one reason or another-operationally, or simply by decisional default—Israeli deterrence of existential attack should include explicit and credible threats of nuclear retaliation against multiple high-value enemy targets—that is, identifiable major cities in the Arab/Islamic world.

We learn from Rabbi Kook that "the loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in all. And when the thought of unity grows stronger, the light of loving and forgiveness appears." Yet, Rabbi Kook—who had even explored such cosmopolitan notions in Buddhism and other religions—was keenly aware of their "real world" limitations. Perhaps, in the future, all of humanity will finally witness the "light of loving and forgiveness" and begin to understand that war and terror are "meshuga." Here, witnessing the hour of a true dawn, each individual will be able to look into the eyes of another and affirm in him or her the real brother or sister. Until such time, however, we Jews must continue to act realistically and courageously, even if this should mean a seemingly endless dependence upon military power and vigorous self-defense. Such dependence would be entirely consistent with the international law of self-defense, with our own Torah-based obligations on self-defense at Exodus 22:1 and—when faced with a choice between life and death, "the blessing and the curse," our immutable imperative to "choose life." (Deuteronomy 30:11-20.)

Copyright © the Jewish Press, April 3, 2009. All rights reserved

LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is author of many books and articles dealing with Israeli security matters and international law. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for THE JEWISH PRESS, and was Chair of Project Daniel.

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