Israel, Iran and the Diversion of Death
by Louis Rene Beres

February 12th, 1998

Today, as both Israel and the United States evaluate unexpected gestures of possible rapprochement from Teheran, the following should be kept in mind: Iran may be a state like no other. Founded upon the particular Islamic promise of conquering death -- a promise bestowing the ultimate form of power upon those who "submit" -- it may ultimately do whatever it must to divert death in other directions. As an object for this existentially critical diversion, Israel, the Jewish State, is assuredly the perfect doctrinal choice.

Currently, military experts and strategists who study regional power balances from the Israeli perspective are generally not too worried about Iran. Even if the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear and other unconventional weapons, they reason, its belligerent intentions will likely be modified by altogether plausible fears of an unspeakably destructive Israeli retaliation. Yet, leaving aside the implicit assumption of Iranian rationality in such deterrence matters, an assumption which is more or less problematic, this reasoning focuses too exclusively on classical military factors.

For those who would protect Israel from Iran, it is now time to look elsewhere, beyond the standard variables of conflict and geopolitics to something far less tangible, but certainly no less important. To preserve Israel, friends of Israel must now seek to glimpse the innermost "soul" of Iran, to look beyond the dominant orthodoxies of popular strategic calculations and into that country's guiding spirit. Such spirit, no less significant because it defies precise measurement, lies at the authentic core of Iranian power. This spirit, therefore, is presently the key to understanding the Iranian threat to Israel.

In world politics, as in everything else, all things move in the midst of death, and it is death -- not singular political or military setbacks that is the prototype of all injustice.

Iran, as the very juridical expression of Islam, seeks above all else to avoid death. This powermaximizing objective, its leaders recognize, can be served by bringing death to others, but it can only be optimized by bringing death to Jews. Naturally, a state comprised of Jews, a self-declared Jewish State, represents unambiguously the supremely favorite object of Iranian masskilling.

In March 1992, following its bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Islamic Jihad, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, declared: "The war is open until Israel ceases to exist and until the last JEW in the world is eliminated....Israel is all evil and should be wiped out of existence." This view, which is also the view of the terror group's patron state, stems from alleged and irremediable historical misdeeds of Jews against Islam, the revival of blood libel by Muslims, Islamic denunciations of the Talmud and the carefully contrived demonic image of a ruthless Jewish State. Now promulgated daily by Iran, this hatred makes no distinctions between Jews and Israel. All are seen as part of a vast global conspiracy to create an insufferably alien presence in the heart of dar al-Islam, the Muslim world.

For Iran, Israel is a "cancer" not because of its particular policies on land, the Palestinians, etc., but because it is a Jewish State. Short of promising not to exist, there is nothing Israel can possibly do now to make peace with Iran. Israel's "crime" is simply that it refuses to disappear. For the leaders in Teheran, policy toward Israel must always be determined by Mohammed's linkage of salvation, that is, freedom from death, to war against the Jews: "The hour (salvation) will not come until you fight against the Jews; and the stone would say, `O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me: come and kill him.'"

In many ways, Iran is now the Hamas terrorist writ large, the individual murderer in macrocosm. Although military analysts are certainly correct in pointing out that Iran is the major sponsor of Hamas and related Islamic terrorist groups (e.g., Hezbullah), it is as a direct threat to Israel that its terrors are most ominous. And this direct threat, in turn, is the ironic consequent of a society so acutely and pervasively afraid of death, so intensely fearful of being erased, that it may be uniquely willing to "die" as a state.

How can this make sense? How can a state be willing to die in order to avoid death? The answer is that the death incurred by war with Israel would be only tentative, a temporary (possibly even purgatorial) inconvenience necessary to assure true immortality. To kill Jews and to be killed by Jews, simultaneously, is not, for the devout Iranian Muslim, a way of losing one's life, but rather the only sure way of preserving it meaningfully for all time.

These points should not be lost upon Israel's decision-makers. In dealing with the enormous threat from Iran, these leaders cannot afford to restrict themselves to orthodox military calculations.

Instead, they must now learn to look far beyond such calculations, into the prevailing soul and spirit of a country that "thinks" very differently from itself. Indeed, it has been Israel's unwillingness to look beyond the orthodox in its dealings with the PLO that has produced today's repeated terrorist atrocities.

In figuring out what might determine both Iranian intentions and capabilities (the two factors looked at ordinarily by military analysts), two complex ideas must be examined: First, there is the specific Islamic notion that links life everlasting, the overriding promise of immortality, to the killing of Jews and to simultaneous death at the hands of Jews. Second, there is the more generic (but by no means mutually exclusive) notion that death is essentially a zero-sum phenomenon, and that the more death that can be meted out to "others," the less likely it is that you, yourself, will die. Here, power is always a function of the capacity to bring mass mortality to these other human beings, and ultimate power is to remain the only one left standing.

The only one! Is this what Iran seeks for itself? If so, it must be understood fully by the State of Israel. Otherwise, Israel's strategists will seek to preserve their country on the basis of wholly erroneous assumptions. The only one! It is a goal so grotesque as to be unimaginable. Does Iran, as the individual Islamic terrorist in macrocosm, intend to survive all others, so that no others will survive it? Does Iran want to elude death at any price, so intently and intensely, that there must be no one, absolutely no one, who can threaten this objective? If Iran's urge for onlyness is real, it is a prime force to be taken seriously by Israel, a force to be both fathomed and countered.

In making their judgments, Israeli decision-makers should not be put off by the picture of an enemy that seems the very picture of madness.

The inner-aspect of the Iranian power seeker may appear entirely incomprehensible, an aspect going completely against the grain of rational judgment, but this does not mean that it can afford to be dismissed. Mad or not, Iran's desired effect upon its Jewish enemy would like to be annihilatory. It wishes to attract and to collect Jewish bodies, reducing and devouring them. Everything they once were would now benefit its own collective Islamic body, sustaining it in the present life, and, much more importantly, preparing it for life everlasting.

The goal of war, all war, is obvious: killing, preferably mass killing, of other human beings. The state that can produce mountains of corpses on the despised other side knows that it may also have to pile up corpses of its own, but this pile is for the benefit of all those who do not die. For the Islamic state, however, in our case the state of Iran, both piles are fundamentally and inherently good, insofar as both piles confer a vastly more important condition of aliveness. In this case, where the corpses are those of Jews and of Muslims killed by Jews, the radiance of immortality rewards doubly, clinging not only to those Muslims who have benefited vicariously, that is, to the civilian noncombatants, but also to the "victims" themselves, who have now guaranteed themselves a special place in Paradise.

The Iranian threat to Israel cannot be measured in guns, battleships, missiles, etc. It must be ascertained much more subtly, with a view toward understanding that Islamic country's individual and collective lust for survival. It may well be that this lust, this overwhelming desire to massively survive other people, is the key to Iranian power over Israel. My analysis, no doubt, is confusing. It is not orthodox. It is not mainstream. But Israel can no longer afford orthodox, mainstream analyses. Recalling Sun Tzu, it must come to understand the importance of the unorthodox.

Iran, a society acutely afraid of death, afraid so intensely that it is driven to divert death to others, is not likely a state that is subject to nuclear deterrence. Left to be analyzed like every other state, this Islamic Republic, this state that loathes so much because it is filled with the horror of death, could bring Israel into a primal chaos of unimagined proportion. In this chaos, every flower of civilization would be trampled; there would be neither escape nor sanctuary. While Israel's military and academic strategists debate the latest numbers about the Middle East Military Balance, this state that loathes Israel more than any other state may itself be inattentive to equilibrium, emphasizing instead its presumably stable opportunities for the hereafter. It follows from all this that the direct Iranian threat to Israel's survival, like the indirect Hamas threat to Israeli security, must be understood in reference to heterodox analyses fashioned from the awareness that "all things move in the midst of death."

IN THE END, UNFASHIONABLE AND GROTESQUE AS IT MAY BE, THIS MAY MEAN ACCEPTING THAT ISRAELI-IRANIAN CO-SURVIVAL IS IMPOSSIBLE.