Fear and Trembling: Israel's Sickness Unto Death

Louis Rene Beres - Professor of International Law
Department of Political Science - Purdue University
beres@polsci.purdue.edu
Date: July 27, 2001

Israel, judging by its indefatigably foolish actions and inactions, is determined to die. Ironically, the Arabs won't oblige this determination all at once. Instead, they will "allow" Israel to disappear slowly; first, by Oslo-mandated territorial dismemberment and war. Then, and only then, by forcible absorption into "Palestine." Such absorption - some will prefer to call it an "incorporation" (after all, that would have a nice juridical ring), will be accompanied by massive Jewish emigrations and quasi-medieval expulsions. The Final Solution to Middle East "peace" - if present trends remain constant - will be the End of Israel and near-total Jewish rediasporization.

Despair, we learn from Kierkegaard, "is the sickness unto death," and it is now Israel's likely fate - following eight years of a "Peace Process" - to despair for a long, long while, even to a point where it might prefer to die. Indeed, the torment of Israel's despair will be precisely this; that it will not be able to die, not until its enemies decide that they are ready for the moribund Jewish State, humiliated and stripped of all grace, to exit the earth. To be sick in this fashion, to be sick unto death and not to be able to die, will be, for Israel, the cruelest blow of all.

The despairing state, like the despairing individual, cannot die. For Israel, the agonizing hopelessness - in this case, even the last hope of death will be unavailable - will entail "dying the death," actually living to experience death. This fate is so much worse than simply being allowed to die; quickly, completely, blessedly. But to die and yet not to die, to actually die the death, is for Israel, unquestionably, a fate far worse than death.

Israel will not be annihilated in the sudden spasms of unconventional war. While this sounds like a prediction that ought to elicit far-reaching relief, even happiness, exactly the opposite is true. For Israel will likely not avoid death altogether, and it will likely die at the hands of its many increasingly powerful enemies. It WILL probably die, but only after a seemingly endless period of despair in which death, paradoxically, will appear as unimaginably welcome.

Thus it is that despair, this sickness in the Israeli-Self, is the Jewish State's sickness unto death. The despairing Jewish State is mortally ill, but it will not be allowed to die, at least not for a while. To be delivered from this sickness unto death is impossible, unless - unless - Israel's profound sickness of the spirit is quickly understood and cured. This sickness, a true rotting of Israel's Jewish soul, is vastly more dangerous than enemy armies and missiles. Although it is certainly correct that a dramatic synergy exists between enemy military might and Israel's growing "soulessness," it is the latter that breeds a virulent sickness unto death.

Israel's sickness of the spirit is not its sickness unto death. Rather, it is the pathology that leads to the sickness unto death. It is, then, an illness that leads not to death directly (that would be a relatively favorable outcome), but to death very indirectly by extended despair.

Israel's sickness of the spirit has several expressions. One is the pervasive and collective self-loathing that turns away from everything Jewish in the desperate search to be modern and "post-Zionist." Another is the fawning servility with which five successive Israeli governments have capitulated to every outrageous Palestinian demand, proceeding from one forfeiture to the next, neglecting both dignity and common sense in a frenzied ambition to be thought "decent" and to please the Americans. Still another is the flagrant disregard for serious intellectual analysis of Israel's security situation, a disregard so incomprehensible that the country's strategic "master plans" are now concocted by "theorists" who have never read a serious book or entertained a truly complex idea.

Fear and Trembling. It is time for Israel to experience these sorts of dread, to acknowledge that the Third Temple Commonwealth may not live to see a Third Temple, and to understand that it has been thinking against itself. Israel is not doomed to corrupted forms of wisdom. It has chosen to be "too lucid" to be "too Jewish." A change in lucidity can still prevent the country's sickness of the spirit from becoming the sickness unto death. Without such a change in lucidity, death will ultimately appear to Israel as a welcome but unrealizable objective.

Arafat's appointed clergy, preaching on the Temple Mount, recently offered the following weekly sermon: "Palestinians spearhead Allah's war against the Jews. The dead shall not rise until the Palestinians shall kill all the Jews....All agreements with Israel are provisional." The Palestinian solution for "the Jews" is a Final one. As long as Israel agrees to yield to such a solution - that is, to abide by any element of the grotesque Oslo Accords - its sickness of the spirit will spread and spread, until - finally - it will become the sickness unto death.