Unyielding reality: why an Islamic Middle East rejects Israel - opinion

‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and kill them….”Sahih Muslim, Book 41, cited at The Charter of Hamas (1988)

Israel is loathed by its jihadist enemies because it is a Jewish state, not because it is Zionist. For these enemies, both state and sub-state, Israel is never more than the individual Jew writ large. It matters not at all to Iran, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc., if Israel agrees to political compromises and territorial surrenders. For these recalcitrant foes, Muslims are still obligated to “fight the Jews, and kill them…” For them, a Jewish state in the Dar al Islam (the world of Islam) – any Jewish state – represents an inherently intolerable abomination.

In principle, at least, these enemy postures are immutable. To wit, for Israel’s interconnected and force-multiplying foes, anti-Zionism has never been more than a coded derivative of antisemitism. It follows that before Israel could ever experience any tangible relief from jihadist war and terror, it would first have to acknowledge the true sources of adversarial loathing. Significantly, these sources have absolutely nothing to do with being an “aggressor” or “occupier.”

In the Islamic Middle East, doctrinal antisemites have remained faithful to their most primal hatreds. Essentially, this is because the antisemite, individually and collectively, responds not to any authentic qualities of “The Jew” or the Jewish state, but to his own overwhelming fears and anxieties. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948): “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”

How does all this “fit” with current geopolitics in the Middle East, with Arab and Iranian promises that only unending Israeli surrenders will bring peace? What are the genuine concerns of Iranian terror-group antisemites, fears that give rise to perpetual hatred not just of the Jew in microcosm (the Jew as individual), but also the Jew in macrocosm (the sovereign State of Israel)?

“The antisemite,” says Sartre, “is a man who is afraid, not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world – of everything except the Jews.”

ISRAEL’S INDISPENSABLE counter-terrorist operations have produced significant civilian casualties in Gaza, but these harms are always unintentional, the unavoidable result of enemy resorts to “perfidy” or “human shields.” In contrast, the corrosive Arab harms inflicted upon innocent Israeli citizens, especially the brutalized and sexually violated October 7 hostages, are the intended result of willful jihadist criminality. In law, such criminal intent is correctly called mens rea.

Iran-backed terror-crimes have nothing to do with achieving Palestinian sovereignty or statehood. For the wrongdoers, what is actually being sought are the primal ecstasies of human barbarism. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists gang-raped and tortured male Israelis as well as females, infants and young children as well as adults. The perpetrators were excited by their monstrous crimes, and by the fact that these crimes could be committed without any civilizational restraints. Moreover, as self-declared “martyrs,” they expected their crimes to spawn paradisaical rewards of immortality.

In significant measure, Hamas and related jihadist groups seek to inflict death upon “The Jew” because they compulsively fear death. Extraordinary cowardice is readily discoverable in the cringing behaviors of terrorist leaders like Yahya Sinwar, who cling desperately to their own defiling lives while actively encouraging the “martyrdom” of ordinary Palestinians. For Sinwar, the deaths and sufferings of Gaza civilians represent “necessary sacrifices.”

What is Israel's next step forward?

What is Israel to do? To begin, Israelis must finally understand that past is prologue, that “Death to Israel” is simply a new phrase for ancient hatreds. Leaders of the Jewish state who are still hoping for successful geopolitical processes should not be deceived. Aware that Israel’s geopolitical future is linked to its Jewish historical past, these leaders should never expect safety from any “civilized” acceptance of diplomatic concessions or compromises, but from a judicious commitment to national power based on intellect, reason and “mind.”

WHEN PERICLES delivered his Funeral Oration and other speeches, with their elaborate praise of Athenian civilization, his perspective was largely military. Recorded by Thucydides, a historian whose main interest was to study the growth and use of power for military objectives, the speeches of Pericles express confidence in ultimate victory for Athens, but also express grave concern for self-imposed setbacks along the way: “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes.” 

Though Pericles exaggerated the separateness of enemy strategies and Athenian mistakes (they were interrelated and even synergistic), there is an important lesson for Israel: In observing enemy preparations for war, do not forget that the effectiveness of these preparations will always depend upon Israel’s responses.

In all world politics, but especially in the Middle East, we are present at the gradual unveiling of a secret, one in which the core truth of what is taking place is left unacknowledged. For the immediate future, Iran will accelerate its preparations for chemical/biological/nuclear war. Unaffected by any parallel public commitments to “ceasefires,” these preparations will proceed on their own murderous track, culminating, if left unobstructed, in more existential aggressions against Israel. It follows, inter alia, that Israel should not close its eyes to potentially synergistic dangers of Palestinian statehood and catastrophic regional war.

At this late stage, Israel ought urgently to acknowledge that a larger and protracted war with Iran is all but inevitable, and that this war should be waged while Iran is still “pre-nuclear.” The single greatest danger to Israel lies in a nuclear Iran, an unprecedented prospect that will not “go away” on its own. The real survival task for Israel, therefore, is not war avoidance with Iran, but its opposite. This is the case whether or not Iran is presumed a rational enemy, and only while Iran is not yet nuclear.

Now, Israel’s leaders should finally understand that the existential enemy is not anti-Zionism (that is deflecting Islamist rhetoric), but antisemitism. For Israel, the true enemy sentiment is always an underlying hatred of “The Jew.” Though this hatred makes no intellectual sense and is based entirely on crudely manipulated fears, it remains the authentic adversarial reality with which Israel must capably engage.

The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).