It should be obvious to anyone who follows the daily news: In world politics, the ultimate “payoff” for individuals and nation-states is “power over death.” The fact that acquiring such power is illogical is beside the point.
Prima facie, when offered a seductive promise of immortality, human beings are incentivized to act without logic. Taken by themselves, such inducements would likely be harmless. In all civilizations, they become dangerous only when pertinent “wish fulfillment” is coupled with a presumed obligation to kill “others.”
It’s time for particulars. Almost everywhere, but especially the Middle East, terrorism expresses a murderous response to what philosopher Oswald Spengler calls “metaphysical fear.” Though this mind-challenging coupling is ignored by national leaders and policy-makers, it remains largely determinative.
When Donald J. Trump pledged stability for the region by way of his “Board of Peace,” the US president’s plan missed every conceivable element of serious understanding. This conspicuously shallow plan – much like Trump’s “peace” for Ukraine (i.e., the assaulted country’s self-annihilation) – is destined to fail.
For Israel, “defeating Hamas” is a transient and tactical goal. The core enemy for Jerusalem is not Hamas or any kindred terror group as such, but rather a jihadi ideology based on ritualistic violence against “unbelievers.” Among the variously configuring and reconfiguring jihadi organizations, terror-violence is often conceived as a pragmatic form of religious sacrifice.
This conception was certainly the driving force behind the Bondi Beach murderers in Australia. What outcome other than “martyrdom” could this father and son jihadi duo have expected? Surely, they did not expect to escape from the expected carnage and incident-chaos. Surely, they were not “radicalized” by such law-based rewards as Palestinian sovereignty or statehood.
Understanding jihadist terrorist motivations
UNTIL JIHADI terrorist motivations are fully understood, the Jewish state and also the United States will remain vulnerable to singular attacks, insurgent warfare, and (potentially) derivative chaos.
Nuclear terrorism, it should be kept in mind, need not depend on authentic chain-reaction technologies. Grievous nuclear harms could be inflicted by way of radiation dispersal devices (“dirty bombs”) and/or conventional missile attacks on nuclear reactors.
Years ago, in separate instances, Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor was attacked by both Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Hamas. While both attacks failed, a current adversary of Israel (state or sub-state) could have access to much more destructive drone and ballistic missile technologies.
There is more. While the jihadi terrorist proudly claims to “love death,” exactly the opposite is true. It is this criminal’s exceptional terror of death that leads him or her to commit egregious “sacrificial” harms. Under authoritative international law, terrorism is always criminal behavior (even when the announced cause is allegedly just) and the individual perpetrator is always hostes humani generis, a “common enemy of humankind.”
To survive as nation-states, the members of civilizations must first be able to survive as individuals. But the most glaringly evident requirement of species survival – a sine qua non that calls for deeper and wider expressions of human empathy – could render each person’s non-transferrable life altogether unbearable. The problem is that once the necessary levels of caring for others would be achieved, corresponding levels of pain for the empathic will have become intolerable.
For jihadists, there is a “correct” way to achieve both personal and collective redemption. This is the combined path of victim and perpetrator “sacrifice.” Operationally, this signifies a glorious “martyrdom” that rewards doubly.
Ignoring the psychological dimension of “too much empathy,” ancient Jewish tradition generally calls for conspicuous caring behavior. Indeed, as the reciprocal of modern-day jihadi justifications of terror, this tradition views empathy as a sacred path to personal and collective redemption. With this difference in mind, a critical question should be made plain: Is there anything to be learned here for dealing with jihadi terrorism and its underlying death fears?
IN ONE form of another, a meaningful redemption is the core hope of all human societies. The psychologist Carl G. Jung once remarked that “Society is the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.” To redeem the whole world, as the seminal Swiss thinker understood, we must first call forth and “sanctify” certain exemplary metamorphoses. In essence, all such needed transformations must begin with the individual, whatever the “metaphysical fears” of divergent groups, states, or faiths.
There is more. In similar fashion to Jung, his Swiss acolyte and colleague, Sigmund Freud (who early on refined the notion of “wish fulfilment”), spoke unscientifically of “souls.” Nonetheless, he understood, even in the bewildering vortex of his own professed atheism, that an indecipherable mystery of “eternity” hovers above and beyond the temporal world. The very deepest realities of human love and empathy, Freud already knew, can never be elucidated through science.
What does all of this have to do with combatting jihadi terrorism? Here is a succinct answer: In all the world, there can never be any greater form of power than “power over death.” Now faced with jihadi adversaries who discover such incomparable power in the “religious sacrifice” of terror-violence, Israel and other vulnerable nation-states must learn how to respond.
All promising tactical and operational strategies must stem from the view that counter-jihadi terror is a problem of “mind-over-mind,” not “mind-over-matter.” Though ever-improving weapons technologies will continue to warrant expert and financial support, Israel could never compete successfully against the promise of immortality with guns, battleships or missiles.
Going forward, Israel’s best “weapon” against jihadi criminality will be a less tangible but more determinative kind of “qualitative edge.” This means having a consistent intellectual advantage – an indispensable quality in a region where even a small number of aspiring “martyrs” could cause an incomparable measure of harm.
The author is emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University.