“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 matters of national security, anti-reason can be as determinative as reason. For Israel, though its most conspicuous sources of power remain military hardware and leadership, these factors should never be considered in isolation.
Because jihadist adversaries may regard “martyrdom” as the most plainly rewarding objective, their highest aspirational forms of power may not be military. For them, as any promise of “power over death” is necessarily based on the “mystery” of what happens afterward, considerations of anti-reason would warrant especially serious attention.
There are many pertinent nuances. By definition, any promise of immortality must be drawn from religious faith, not science. For assorted Islamist aggressors and terrorists, siding with anti-reason has remained unhidden and celebrated. Nonetheless, “whisperings of the irrational” have never figured importantly as a factor in Israeli diplomacy or deterrence.
In the Middle East, core survival imperatives are unambiguous. Israel’s jihadist enemies draw palpable incentive and purpose from an ostentatiously primal loathing of reason. If at some point this unpredictable incentive should be joined with weapons of mass destruction, including radiological and EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) weapons, Israel could have to face a convulsively bitter storm of anti-reason.
For Israel to adequately safeguard its national survival options, more detailed and subtle understandings of national security will be needed. Prima facie, any future triumphs of anti-reason by Israel’s enemies could enlarge mutually-reinforcing perils from Iran, Hezbollah, Fatah, Hamas, and the Houthis, among others. These enemy threats would be accomplished via war, terrorism and/or genocide. Ironically, the expected human costs could prove “unacceptable” on all sides.
Israel needs new tactics
On such matters of world-historical urgency, Israeli scholars and policy-makers should think creatively beyond the intuitive parameters of weapons, strategy, and tactics. Plausibly, 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 perpetrators “power over death?”
Because Iranian surrogates regard war, terror, and genocide against Israel as ennobling expressions of faith, they will need to be reminded by Israel that such “sacrificial” thinking is destined to fail. Still, rendering such reminders sufficiently persuasive could prove excruciatingly difficult for devotees of anti-reason.
What about tangible policy imperatives? What should Israel do as it finds itself confronted with religion-driven enemies who are captivated by seductive “whisperings” and who seek immortality by way of “martyrdom?” Three sequential and logically prior questions should come immediately to mind:
• What sort of “religious faith” can ecstatically encourage the rape, torture and murder of criminally abducted hostages?• Can any decent and thinking human being wittingly accept that such lascivious “crimes against humanity” are intended to ensure Palestinian statehood?• Were the October 7, 2023, Hamas rapes of Israeli children, male and female, a rational and reason-based political tactic to gain Palestinian “liberation?”
There is a simple and incontestable answer to all these questions.In law – all law – “rights can never stem from wrongs”: Ex injuria jus non oritur. Also significant is that Islamist crimes are not just mala prohibita (“evil as prohibited”) but also mala in se (“evil in themselves”).
For Israel’s Islamist enemies, irrationality does not signify weakness. Though it is a primitive faith, jihadism is still capable of inflicting advanced human harm. To prevent such harms, Israel’s decision makers ought never to forget that the true object of Islamist terror-sacrifice is never “The Israeli.” It is always “The Jew.” This difference couldn’t possibly be more important.
Israel should focus on newest jihadists
On derivative particulars, Israel’s most immediate policy concern should center on the newest (post-Syrian collapse) jihadists. Here and elsewhere, dynamics of anti-reason will continue to hold a conspicuous pride of place in Islamist policies.
In his Will Therapy & 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.”
There are variously coinciding matters of law and justice. Under authoritative jurisprudence, jihadist perpetrators must be distinguished from their counter-terrorist adversaries by considerations of mens rea or “criminal intent.” Though Israel correctly regards the harm 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 demonstrated criminal intent.
Israel coexists with other states in an international “state of nature.” Despite being subject to wholly irrational promises, Islamist states and their proxies accept the proposition that “sacrificing” specific “others” (most plainly, Jews) offers “medicine” against their own deaths. Above all, this dreadful presumption reflects a grim and growing “triumph” of adversarial anti-reason.
For the foreseeable future, such triumph, though intolerable, will become more and more probable. For Iran and its obeisant proxies, attempts to avoid personal death by killing certain 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 almost no one pays any attention.
Anti-reason early writings
There is background. Scholars and policy-makers can discover potentially murderous endorsements of anti-reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke, and assorted 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.” He remarks prophetically in Thus spoke Zarathustra that it is “for the superfluous that the state was invented.”
The 19th-century philosopher could have been writing about present-day Iran or its ally, North Korea. Regarding Pyongyang, an already nuclear North Korea could at some time come to the aid of a still pre-nuclear Iran. Years back, lest Israeli analysts forget, 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 authoritative international law.
Iran, as foremost state mentor to jihadist forces, 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 greater than the sum of its “parts” – Iran-Palestine could at some time present Israel with an irremediable existential hazard.
To deal successfully with primal jihadist foes, enemies that seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential strategy should be based on deeper understandings of enemy anti-reason. Though Israel should never itself submit to such understandings, its own reason-based posture on national security ought never to be projected on its adversaries. 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 and fatal.
For Israel, “whisperings of the irrational” should never be underestimated.
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).
