Professor Louis Rene Beres - 1999 Archives

Israel, Golan, and the Force that does not Kill Just Yet

"All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know they are in the right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done but because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision; and whether or not they survive physically depends on chance. If circumstances are not favorable, they end up in gas chambers."

Bruno Bettelheim, FREUD'S VIENNA AND OTHER ESSAYS

Bettelheim, like the Greek poet Homer, understands that the force that does not kill - that does not kill just yet - can turn a human being into stone, into a thing, while it is still alive. Merely hanging ominously over the head of the vulnerable creature it can choose to kill at any moment, poised portentuously to destroy breath in what it has allowed, if only for a few more moments, to breathe, this force makes a mockery of the fragile life it intends to consume. The human being that stands helplessly before this force has effectively become a corpse before any lethal assault is even launched.

Barak's Israel, now grinning slavishly before the potent force of American incentives and a triumphant Syria, is this human being writ large.

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Arming the Arsonists: Israel Begs, then Embraces its Murderers

In The Firebugs, a work exquisitely relevant to present-day Israel, Swiss playwright Max Frisch tells the ironic story of Gottlieb Biedermann, a cautious businessman who contends with an epidemic of arson by implementing a deadly series of capitulations and surrenders. Ultimately, Biedermann invites the murderous arsonists into his home, lodges them, feeds them a sumptuous dinner, and finally provides them with matches. Not surprisingly, the play ends on an incendiary note. It also ends, predictably, with a pathetic and revolting disclaimer from an academic "expert" who has counseled appeasement all along.

There is an enormously important lesson here for present-day Israel, especially after the latest Barak surrenders and in anticipation of Barak's relinquishing the Golan. Faced with an impending epidemic of "arson," Jerusalem has again and again responded exactly like the playwright's weak and foolish character. Asking the enemy into Israel's very "home," because it believes that entreaty and humiliation are now preferable to courage and struggle, the Government of Israel, too, is prepared even to help light the fuse.

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Israel's Worst Case: A "Successful" Agreement with the PLO

The following article was written by Professor Beres more than five years ago. It appears that no one in Rabin's Government was listening. Today, the Barak Government is still not listening. "Success" is at hand.

August 1995

The Rabin government has again decided to "hang tough" in its negotiations with the PLO. Determined that the "peace talks" will not be derailed by Palestinian terrorism, even by persistent suicide bombings in the country's major cities, this government is bent upon completing a "successful" agreement at all costs. The problem with this reasoning is that such an agreement would represent the absolutely worst case scenario for Israel's security, a condition wherein enlarged opportunities for terrorism against defenseless Israeli citizens would be accompanied by greatly expanded prospects of catastrophic war.

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Reemergence of the "Suicide Bomber"

Soon, as Israel hesitates in its codified pattern of surrender to "Palestine," the Arab suicide bomber will reemerge. Yet, for all his alleged courage, the "suicide bomber" will always be a coward. Wanting the world to believe that he is willing to suffer death for his cause, it is actually an overriding fear of death that will again occasion his ecstatic murder of old women and young children.

The suicide bomber's fiery part in the terrorist drama is expected to bring him immortality amidst seventy-two virgins and rivers of honey. There is, therefore, nothing remotely heroic about his shared self-immolation. This suicide bomber who sees incomparable personal benefit in killing Jews does not really commit suicide. He commits only murder.

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Israel, Time and Power

As "Palestine" emerges as an independent state - one carved from the very body of the State of Israel - one thing is certain: Israel's enemies understand time; Israel does not. Aware that time is "presently" on their side, the Palestinians, together with the Arab states and Iran, wait patiently for Israel's now codified self-destruction. For them, such waiting is integral to a no-risk "Peace Process." Pretending that they are actually making meaningful concessions in exchange for Israel's tangible land assets, these enemies - including, of course, "peace partner" Egypt - draw great comfort from their unwitting (and witless) collaborators in Jerusalem.

Traditionally, philosophers have distinguished dimensionally between space and time, but today Prime Minister Barak - continuing the mistakes of his three immediate predecessors - forges a new conceptual unity. Surrendering Israel's space, one piece at a time, Barak reveals the ominous temporal interrelatedness between sequential territorial loss and imminence of total military defeat. The more Israel's land is transferred to enemy hands, the less time Israel has to endure. Left to proceed with the Peace Process, therefore, this latest confused leader of the Jewish State will discover only too late that time is power, that the power of time is transmitted with the power of space, and that the powerful influences of time now accrue entirely and portentously to Israel's enemies.

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Where the Shadow Really Falls: An Informed Response to Arab Calls for Israeli Nuclear Disarmament

In a recent article in THE BROWN JOURNAL OF WORLD AFFAIRS, Abdel Monem Said Aly - Director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo - presents a prevailing Arab (and especially Egyptian) view of Israel's undeclared "nuclear bombs." Acknowledging his country's persistent pressure upon Israel to sign the NPT, Professor Said Aly seemingly forgets that Israel's strategic policies are fashioned in context. These policies are not created in a geopolitical vacuum. Although, as the author argues, "Both geography and history...have defined the constants of the Egyptian perception of national security," it is remarkably ironic to conclude that it was creation of the State of Israel in 1948 that "constituted a major security threat to Egypt." Even today, when a formal condition of peace obtains between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian side has ensured that the peace remains an altogether cold one, and one that endures in the midst of almost frenetic Egyptian militarization.

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Israel's Ill-Conceived Retreat from Uniqueness

Martin Buber once observed: "There is no re-establishing of Israel, there is no security for it save one: it must assume the burden of its uniqueness...." Yet, today, virtually all of Israel wants only to be like everyone else. Becoming America, becoming "successful," becoming rich - this is what drives most of Israel at the present moment. The resultant triumph of uniformity, of inappropriate goals and values, as Buber understood, will only ensure Israel's collective demise.

Israel now faces many threats, some of them authentically existential. These threats, primarily the growing risks of unconventional terrorism and unconventional war, understandably preoccupy the concerns of Israel's political leaders and military planners. But there are also less obvious and less palpable threats that, in certain respects, are every bit as ominous and are actually interrelated. None is more serious than the accelerating national retreat from Israeli Jewish uniqueness, a retreat animated by steadfast imitation of popular culture in the United States.

For many states on this endangered planet, imitation is not a conscious choice. For a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with unyielding economic and systemic constraints, these states are simply consigned to mimickry by circumstances beyond their control. What distinguishes Israel from these other imitative states is that it has purposely chosen mediocrity, preferring an incremental pattern of social and political imitation to even a hint of leadership by Jewish example. As for originality, in political arrangements, in military calculations, in non- technical academic investigations (we all know how wonderful Israelis are as innovators in high-tech industries), in virtue, it has become an embarrassment, one already swept into the ash bin of contemporary history, a burdensome impediment to an Israel that wants, above all else, to be "less Jewish."

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Israel, Memory and the APOCALYPSE

Imaginations of the end of the world are often accompanied by visions of a terrible beauty. It is as if wholly catastrophic destruction were much more than the regrettable death and suffering of individuals, but actually a thoroughly appropriate instance of divine justice. With such apocalyptic imaginations, logic inevitably yields to passion, and technology can make the surrender complete.

Israel's Islamic enemies are animated by certain apocalyptic imaginations, by visions of a Third Temple Commonwealth that has been reduced to ashes. What is more, as this Commonwealth approaches the end of the Second Millennium, Israel's political leadership - in an ironic twist of circumstances - does a great deal to encourage these portentous imaginations. For Israel's regional enemies, the destruction of the Jewish State - a destruction that begins with the impending declaration of "Palestine" - is now a positively beatific expectation, one made distinctly possible, even probable, by the combining of Israeli territorial concessions with assorted Islamic weapons of mass destruction.

More than anything else, Israel requires memory. Without memory, Israel will be unable to recognize the critical imperatives of justice and power. Without a concern for justice and power, Israel will be unable to survive.

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We Should Support Acts of Civil Disobedience Against Barak Government in Israel

In Claude Lanzmann's momumental documentary, SHOAH, one of the surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising remarks: "If you could lick my heart, it would poison you." Sadly, the time will surely come - if Barak continues on his shameless course of unilateral surrender to Yasir Arafat - that a surviving leader of present-day Israel will someday express similarly bitter sentiments. To prevent such a horribly ironic repetition of Jewish history, Israelis who are still able to separate fact from fantasy must now embark upon massive civil disobedience. Such essential democratic behavior should be fully supported by all American friends of Israel.

Soon, throughout Israel, thousands upon thousands of people will likely be engaged in coordinated protests against what is now the Barak government's "Peace Process." Although police authorities, acting upon direct orders of the Prime Minister, can be expected to react with extraordinary harshness (this was, after all, their behavior in the Rabin and Peres years), the protesters should always behave lawfully. In view of pertinent national and international law - which are both based upon notions of a Higher Law - the protesters will be undertaking civil disobedience which is authentically law-enforcing.

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Israel and Chaos

The current and ongoing disintegration of the world is creation in reverse. For Israel, the Jewish State - the prime inheritor of Genesis - there are special lessons to be learned from this disintegration. The geometry of chaos, in a strange and paradoxical symmetry, reveals both sense and form. How shall they be discovered? This is a vitally important question for Israel, one that goes far beyond the usual and unimaginative queries concerning territories, "peace" agreements, confidence building measures, Palestinian "compliance" and regional military power balances.

The world, like the individual state units that comprise it, is best understood as a system. What happens in any one part of this system affects what happens, more or less, in all of the other parts. When deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one country to another, the effects can undermine, more or less, international stability in general.

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Attrition, Annihilation and the End of Israel

Military analysts customarily distinguish between wars of attrition and wars of annihilation. Yet, such wars need not be mutually exclusive; they can be complementary parts of a single belligerent strategy. So it is today with respect to present and future aggression against the Jewish State by Israel's multiple Islamic enemies.

Consider Iran and Syria. While these enemy states prepare patiently for an eventual unconventional assault upon Israel, they first weaken the Zionist "cancer" incrementally, bit-by-bit, by sustaining the Hizbullah in south Lebanon. As for the PLO, soon to become the full-fledged enemy state of Palestine, it works hand-in-hand with Hamas and other terrorists (including Hizbullah), assisting in breaking down Israeli will and preoccupying Israel Defense Force (IDF) attention. Once the Peace Process has "succeeded," Palestine - in concert with Iran, Iraq and Syria among others - will assuredly prepare to shift military orientation from a strategy of attrition to one of annihilation.

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Preparing for the Last Days of Israel
An anti-eulogy for the future

There are redeeming lessons to be learned from the Jewish tragedy that remains a black hole in the history of civilization. For present day Israel, the Holocaust teaches an unalterable obligation to avoid, however possible, the numbing descent into an inverted moral universe. Remembering a recent Jewish history built upon mountains upon mountains of corpses, the young Jewish State is obliged, above all, to remain strong, to endure.

But this obligation has already been forgotten. As matters stand today, Israel will disappear soon after the start of the next millennium. Under the very best of circumstances, it will disappear "only" as a Jewish State, remaining intact physically as a "secular" unit of world politics. Under the worst of circumstances, it will not even endure physically - Jewish or secular - having been destroyed altogether in the predictably fiery spasms of a more or less catastrophic war. In either case, the end of the Third Temple Commonwealth will have been produced by a Jewish people effectively committed to its own annihilation.

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Arafat back in Washington, Again

It has happened yet again. Yasir Arafat, in late September, returned as an honored guest of the President of the United States. Once again, President Clinton acted, with apparent impunity, in stunning defiance of national and international law. What went wrong, again?

"No crime without a punishment!" This major principle of law, essential to civilized international relations, obligates all states to seek out and prosecute the perpetrators of crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Today, this obligation extends as well to crimes of terrorism. Only days before Arafat's meeting with Clinton, his Palestinian Authority recruited into its "security forces" ALL of the 199 terrorists recently released by Israel.

It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that Arafat was again hosted ceremoniously by the President of the United States on behalf of the American People.

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Letter from Porfessor Beres to Prime Minister Ehud Barak

On Sptember 13th, 1999, Professor Beres sent the following open letter to Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The article goes into some very important and interesting issues surrounding the OSLO Agreements:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

Today is an important anniversary. Oslo I, known generally as the Declaration of Principles, was signed in Washington D.C. on September 13, 1993. On this day, six years later, Israel has a critical opportunity to reconsider its alleged legal obligations under these agreements. As a professor of international law with whose work you are personally familiar, I ask that you now consider the following.

The Oslo Agreement is inherently illegal from the standpoint of international law. Hence, in view of the supremacy of international law over national law, your Government should be advised (as I had advised your predecesor) that it is compliance with the Agreement, not a lack of compliance, that will pose legal problems. In other words, your Government now has an overriding jurisprudential obligation to abrogate the illegal agreement. A near-universal reaction to such an abrogation would be to condemn Israel for allegedly failing to stand by its legal obligations, but this would be an uninformed reaction and would be challenged, at least jurisprudentially, by informed adversarial counterarguments.

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Israel's Freeing of Terrorists would Violate International Law

Once again, Palestinian terrorists who killed Israelis may be released in the cause of "peace." From the political standpoint, especially as a quid pro quo for presumed Palestine Authority (PA) concessions to Oslo/Wye River and for certain U.S. guarantees, it would appear that such release may yet take place. Yet, as a matter of law, such action would represent a very substantial and ominous wrongdoing by the State of Israel.

Every state has an obligation under international law to seek out and to prosecute terrorists. This obligation derives from a long-standing principle known as Nullum crimen sine poena, "No crime without a punishment." It is codified directly in many different sources, and is also deducible from the binding Nuremberg Principles. According to Principle I: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment." It follows that the State of Israel, in the process of releasing convicted terrorists, would be acting in clear violation of international law.

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When Death is Imminent: Some Timely Reflections

What does it feel like to "almost die?" What can be learned from experiencing "near death" and emerging, whole, to live "again?" How stark, how porous, are the boundaries that demarcate the Kingdom of Life and the Kingdom of Death?

All life moves in the midst of death, but our awareness of this fact is blunted by a seemingly purposeful denial. After all, to acknowledge that we are all, in the end, mere creatures of biology - that we will inevitably decompose and be erased - is more than most of us can believe or bear. Not surprisingly, we generally cling tenaciously to various promises of redemption and immortality, promises that allow us to labor in day-to-day life as if such labor actually mattered.

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Power and Survival: Some pertinent reflections on Israel's Strategic Future

Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote of not being dead as the essence of power. Confronted with what he called "the terror at the fact of death," humankind - individually and collectively - seeks above all else "to remain standing." In the final analysis, it is those who remain upright (however temporarily) who are victorious. It is these fortunate ones, who have "diverted" death to others, who have power.

There is a lesson here for states as well as for individual persons, and for the State of Israel in particular. The situation of survival is the central situation of power. Yet, as the Middle East Peace Process makes Israel's survival more and more problematic, this misnamed Process now deprives Israel of its power. Left to proceed, this Process will permit Israel's enemies to enjoy a triumph that still remains concealed, the triumph experienced by the living person who is confronted by one who is dying.

I refer to the triumph of power. Israel's enemies understand this power. Israel does not. Believing, naively, in a common international obligation to preserve life, Jerusalem fails to understand that death is identified by its enemies as a zero-sum event.

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Should Terrorists be Assassinated?

Forthcoming turmoil in the Middle East concerning "Palestine" will soon spark major debates about Israeli security. One such debate will likely focus upon the appropriateness of assassination as counterterrorism. Whether or not such a controversial remedy could ever make long-term tactical sense for Israel remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that such assassination could - in certain limited circumstances - be judged law-enforcing according to international law.

Normally, assassination is a crime under international law. Yet, in our system of world law, self-help by individual nations is often necessary. In the absence of particular assassinations, terrorists - like those who intermittently wreak havoc in Israel - could remain altogether free. Immune to the proper expectations of extradition and prosecution, these terrorists would continue to murder Jewish men, women and children with impunity. And while it is true that custody over terrorists may be achieved by forcible abduction and subsequent trial in domestic courts, this remedy inevitably costs a great many more innocent lives, both in the operation itself and in the form of additional terrorism.

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Israel and Hamas: A Reciprocity of Suicides

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," says Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, "and that is suicide." Nowhere is Camus's fundamental observation currently more insightful than in the strangely interactive relationship between Israel and Hamas. Here, an imperilled Jewish State that wishes to endure takes "security" measures that are markedly suicidal. For its part, Israel's main Islamic terrorist adversary, choosing suicide as its very modus operandi, prods Israel to hasten the pace to collective Jewish disintegration. The result of this reciprocal relationship is an overwhelmingly ironic synergy of suicides, an unrecognized mutuality between enemies that assures collective life to Hamas but offers only death to Israel.

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Israel and Memory: The Next Fifty Years

Imaginations of the end of the world are often accompanied by visions of a terrible beauty. It is as if wholly catastrophic destruction were uch more than the regrettable death and suffering of individuals, but actually a thoroughly appropriate instance of divine justice. With such apocalyptic imaginations, logic inevitably yields to passion, and technology can make the surrender complete.

Israel's Islamic enemies are animated by certain apocalyptic imaginations, by visions of a Third Temple Commonwealth that has been reduced to ashes. What is more, as this Commonwealth approaches the end of the Second Millennium, Israel's political leadership - in an ironic wist of circumstances - does a great deal to encourage these portentous imaginations. For Israel's regional enemies, the destruction of the Jewish State - a destruction that begins with the declaration of "Palestine" - is now a positively beatific expectation, one made distinctly possible, even probable, by the combining of Israeli territorial concessions with assorted Islamic weapons of mass destruction.

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On Munich, Abu Daoud and Jewish Justice: Some Considerations From International Law

Palestinian terrorist mastermind Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud), planner of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre which left seventeen people dead - including eleven Israeli athletes - holds a VIP pass issued by Israel. Presently in Jordan, Daoud would like to cross from that country through Israel in order to enter Palestinian Authority (PA) territory. Fearful of an Interpol arrest warrant issued at the request of Germany, Daoud now seeks safety at his residence in PA-controlled Ramallah.

A complex legal issue arises. Palestinian officials have already begun to try to cancel the German warrant, which is based on the principle of territorial jurisdiction (the 1972 hostage-taking and murder took place in Munich.) The Jordanians, formally at "peace" with Israel, are not interested in bringing a Palestinian terrorist to justice, least of all in Israel or in the United States. The Americans are involved in a direct, legal sense, largely because one of the murdered athletes, David Berger, was a dual American-Israeli citizen from Cleveland. U.S. laws permit the prosecution, in this country, of anyone who kills an American citizen abroad. This follows from traditional bases of international law that afford prosecutorial jurisdiction, in certain circumstances, based upon nationality of the victim.

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Violence And The Sacred: Understanding The Coming Wave Of Terrorism Against Israel

There is always a calm before the storm, and for Israel, this calm is about to end. Sometime soon, perhaps even within the next sixty days, Arab terrorism will resume, probably with a vengeance and with a ferocity unseen for the past several years. Although this Palestinian return to indiscriminate violence might appear inconsistent with the widely- celebrated "peace process," it will actually represent an altogether predictable expression of the sacred.

For Israel's enemies, violence and the sacred are always inseparable. To understand the rationale and operation of coming Palestinian terrorism against Israel, it is first necessary to understand PLO/HAMAS/ISLAMIC JIHAD conceptions of the sacred. From these pertinent conceptions it will become clear that Arab terror against Jews is, at its heart, a manifestation of religious worship long known as sacrifice.

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Israel, "Palestine" and a Future of the Terrible

The "official" map of Palestine - distributed widely by the Palestine Authority - defines the emergent Arab state to include all of Judea, Samaria (West Bank), Gaza, and the entire State of Israel. A small slice of Jordan is also included on the map, which purposefully excludes any references to Jewish populations. Only Christian and Muslim holy sites are noted in this rare but candid example of cartographic ingenuity.

Israel still refuses to take proper notice. In Jerusalem, despite the new Prime Minister's tough talk about Israeli security, nothing is being done to effectively slow the metamorphosis of Israel into Palestine. Soon the real geography will resemble the map. Soon the PA cartographers will be recognized for providing an indisputably forthright blueprint for a Palestinian Final Solution to the Israel Question.

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Opposing the Barak Government

It is virtually certain that Prime Minister Barak will continue and even accelerate the incremental abandonment of Yesha (the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza). Hence, this Government will very likely be confronted with various forms of civil disobedience. Although the new Prime Minister will assuredly seek to stifle such opposition (harshly, in the fashion of predecessors Rabin and Peres, or more gently, in the fashion of Netanyahu) civil disobedience flows originally from an ancient Jewish tradition of a Higher Law. Moreover, this vital tradition is authoritatively codified within the constitutional foundations of all modern democracies, especially those of the United States, and in contemporary international law. As will be revealed in the following discussion, a policy of stifling civil disobedience in Israel, a policy that would represent official reaction to opponents of the suicidal "Peace Process," would be not only destructive of Israel's security, but would also be starkly injurious to the overriding expectations of Higher Law.

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Imaginations of Death and Survival of the Jewish State

In a story told by Jorge Luis Borges, a condemned man, having noticed that expectations rarely coincide with reality, ceaselessly imagines the circumstances of his own death. As they have become expectations, he reasons, they can never actually come to pass. So it should now be with the State of Israel. Recognizing that fear and reality go together naturally, the People of Israel should begin immediately to place themselves, as a State, firmly within the ambit of mortality. Only then could Israel undertake the more specific policies needed to secure the Third Temple Commonwealth.

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Israel, "Palestine," and the Paradox of Power

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes an interesting point: Although power is powerful and weakness is weak, power can weaken itself and weakness can become a source of power. This point is extremely pertinent to Israel and to the still-emergent state of "Palestine." Over the years, especially since Oslo, Israel's power has sabotaged itself in so many ways, undermining its capacity to endure. After Oslo, however, Israel's Palestinian "partners" have skillfully transformed their relative weakness into a purposeful means of commanding world attention and eliciting global sympathies. Not suprisingly, the "weak" Palestinians have repeatedly overpowered the "powerful" Israelis.

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Israel and the Vulture

A vulture was hacking at my feet. It had already torn my boots and stockings to shreds, now it was hacking at the feet themselves. Again and again it struck at them, then circled several times restlessly round me, then returned to continue its work. A gentleman passed by, looked on for a while, then asked me why I suffered the vulture. "I'm helpless," I said. "When it came and began to attack me, I of course tried to drive it away, even to strangle it, but these animals are very strong, it was about to spring at my face, but I preferred to sacrifice my feet. Now they are almost torn to bits."

Even by the standards of Kafka's uncannily prophetic insights, the parable of the Vulture is remarkable. Examined as a lesson for Israel in its protracted struggle for survival in the Middle East, especially as it prepares to coexist with "Palestine," this cautionary tale is right on the mark. Indeed, it reads as if it were written originally with no other struggle in mind.

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Sailing Without Oars: Israel's Ship Adrift at Sea

Horace was born in 65 BCE, and died in 8 BCE. His ode (I, 14) on the "ship of state" pertains to ancient Rome, but it might just as well refer to Israel after Palestine. Sailing without oars, the Jewish State flounders, out-of- control, heaving around and around the shining Cyclades.

What has gone wrong? This ship, though built of noble timber, and from wondrous forests, can hardly hold together. Its sails are shredded. What has happened?

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Politics, Palestinian Demilitarization and International Law

Those Israelis whose support for the creation of a Palestinian state is contingent upon Palestinian demilitarization are sorely confused. International law will not necessarily require Palestinian compliance with pre-state agreements concerning weaponry and the use of armed force. From the standpoint of international law, enforcing demilitarization upon a state of Palestine would be enormously problematic. As a fully sovereign state, Palestine would not necessarily be bound by any preindependence compacts, even if these agreements were to include U.S. guarantees. Because treaties can be binding only upon states, an agreement between a nonstate Palestine Authority (PA) and an extant State of Israel would have no real authority and little real effectiveness.

At its heart, the problem of Israel's survival now lies in the Jewish State's basic assumptions concerning war and peace. While Israel's regional enemies, state and nonstate, believe that any power gains for Israel represent a power loss for them - that is, that they coexist with Israel in a condition of pure conflict - Israel assumes something very different. For Israel, relations with Arab/Islamic states and organizations are not, as these enemies believe, zero-sum relations, but rather a mutual- dependence connection, a nonzero-sum relation where conflict is mixed with cooperation. Israel, unlike its enemies, currently believes that any gain for these enemies is not necessarily a loss for itself. Indeed, since Oslo, Israel is generally unwilling even to identify its enemies as enemies.

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Israel: Life, Death and the Meaning of Anxiety

Every Jew is familiar with Deuteronomy 30:19. "I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your descendants may live." But in choosing life, there must be a prior anxiety about death. Without such anxiety, there can be no correct understanding of what is needed to live or of the overriding urgency of the choice.

Israel now suffers acutely from insufficient anxiety. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective chaos and disintegration - a substantially forseeable prospect including both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward life. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its exceptional national mortality deprives its still living days - however precarious - of indispensable absoluteness and growth.

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On the Need for an Avant-Garde in Israeli Strategic Studies

What is to be done? And what is to be done for Israeli strategic studies in particular? I propose to argue here that the benefits of Kuhn's useful concept of paradigm could be enhanced by pertinent reference to the world of art. In this world, creative "advance" is achieved via ongoing and persistent challenges to dominant orthodoxies, what Kuhn would call the dynamic of "paradigm shifts." Significantly, in the world of art, these entirely revolutionary transformations of prevailing epistemologies are spawned by an always emergent avant-garde, by an indispensable "vanguard" for the new.

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Arafat back at the White House: President Clinton's Real Assault upon Law and Justice

"No crime without a punishment!" This major principle of law, essential to civilized international relations, obligates all states to seek out and prosecute the perpetrators of crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Today, this obligation extends as well to crimes of terrorism.

It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that Yassir Arafat, on March 23, was again hosted ceremoniously by the President of the United States as an honored guest of the American People. Understood in terms of international law, in particular Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, this formal welcome represented a clear assault upon elementary principles of justice. Conflicting with what we international law scholars call a "peremptory" or basic rule, the principle of "No crime without a punishment," this indecent and un-American event (a repeat performance of several prior Arafat visits to Washington) should not have been allowed. Instead, United States authorities, including the President, were obligated under national and international law to arrest and prosecute Yassir Arafat.

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Some subjects should be approached with fear and trembling. One such subject concerns nuclear war in the Middle East. Because the impending creation of a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel will heighten this prospect considerably, ongoing Arab militarization in that unsteady region should be viewed with a unique kind of apprehension.

The Olso architects, Prof. Beres maintains have opened Israel, and indeed, the Middle East itself, to the gravest of dangers, all for the "hope" that it will all turn out for the best ...

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" Many people prowl round Mount Sinai. Their speech is blurred, either they are garrulous or they shout or they are taciturn. But none of them comes straight down a broad, newly made, smooth road that does its own part in making one's strides long and swifter."

Using this parable written by Franz Kafka, Prof. Beres links it to the present situation among Jews in Israel. In this article, he warns against taking the "easy" road.

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Palestine, More of a Threat to Israel than The Uprising

The following article appears exactly as it was written by Professor Beres ten years ago this month. Events have proven his predictions to be entirely correct.

February 1989

A pair of prominent Israeli commentators have recently pointed out that continued control of the territories would have grave consequences for Israel's security. In this connection, Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former chief of military intelligence, argues in his newest book, ISRAEL'S FATEFUL HOUR, that refusal to end occupation of West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza will produce escalating terrorism and further incentives for war by neighboring Arab states. And Abba Eban, Foreign Minister of Israel from 1966 to 1974, insists in a January 2, 1989 editorial in THE NEW YORK TIMES ("Israel, Hardly the Monaco of the Middle East") that Israel would have nothing to fear from an independent Palestine. Such a state, he claimed, "would be the weakest military entity on earth."

Rescuing Israeli Strategic Studies (and Israel)

As Israel faces its most significant existential threats since 1948, citizens should begin to ask serious questions about the prevailing levels of strategic discourse. Presently, a suffocating intellectual stubborness stands in the way of productive Israeli strategic thinking. Moreover, there is great danger that Israel's political and military leaders, presuming high- quality scholarship in the universities and think-tanks, will accept properly credentialed academic recommendations with insufficient skepticism. The net effect of such "courtesies" could be of considerable consequence, including even unconventional war and unconventional terrorism.

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Honoring Sisyphus Israel's only way to Endure

According to ancient myth, the Greek gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. In imposing this terrible judgment the gods understood the dreadful punishment of interminable labor, but they also understood that such labor need not be futile in all respects. Such labor could also be heroic.

This is exactly where Israel stands today. For what reason, I don't dare ask, Israel now faces the potentially unending task of pushing massive weight up on to the mountain. Inevitably, the rock will roll right back down to its point of origin. There is no forseeable end in sight for Israel, no probable "solution." Rather, in the fashion of Sisyphus, the Jewish State must now accept the inconceivably heavy burden of a suffering without end.

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