FACING THE APOCALYPSE (Continued from p.4) established by nature among all Nations is likewise that of mutual assistance in order to perfect themselves and their condition. The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations. The problem, of course, is that Vattel's "first general law" is an elaborate fiction, derived from an altogether illusory model of human and state behavior. What is required instead, especially for Israel and the continuing Old Middle East, is a model that reflects, accurately, the determining passions and principles of all players in the region. Such a model, wherein things would be called by their correct names, would yield "laws" drawn not from idealized visions of a New Middle East, but from the dreadful awareness that Israel's enemies, crouched for so long in a bruising darkness, remain face down to life for the Jewish State, their mouths sometimes even spilling calls for peace, but their peoples arming only for slaughter. There exists, among Israel's enemies, a voluptuousness all their own; the voluptuousness of conflict against the Jewish State as such. It is in Israel's strategic interest not to lose sight of this voluptuousness. Israel's regional enemies, in good measure, do not read Clausewitz. They are, in good part, animated by far more primal needs and expectations, ones based upon very particular visions of God and religion. When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration and other speeches, with their elaborate praise of Athenian civilization, his perspective was largely military. Recorded by Thucydides, an historian whose main interest was to study the growth and use of power for military objectives, the speeches of Pericles express confidence in ultimate victory for Athens, but they also express grave concern for self-imposed setbacks along the way: "What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes." Although Pericles exaggerated the separateness of enemy strategies and Athenian mistakes (they were interrelated and even synergistic), there is an important lesson here for Israel: In observing enemy preparations for war, do not forget that the effectiveness of these preparations will always depend upon Israel's particular responses. The obligation to remain powerful in a world of international anarchy forms the central argument of world politics from the Melian Dialogues of Thucydides and Cicero to Machiavelli, Locke, Spykman and Kissinger. "For what can be done against force without force?" asks Cicero in one of his Letters. Later, in our own century, Nicholas Spykman replied: "In a world of international anarchy, foreign policy must aim above all at the improvement or at least the preservation of the relative power position of the state." Such arguments are assuredly not incorrect, but it is likely that today they have become somewhat trivial.

The anarchy that Israel confronts in world politics today is vastly different from what it was even fifty years ago; it is now more far-reaching, extending not only between states but within them. It is almost a primordial anarchy, the anarchy of William Golding's Lord of the Flies; it is almost sui generis. What does this suggest about Israel's particular survival imperatives, about its current march to disappearance? How should Israel's leadership plan in the face of this new kind of anarchy? How will Israel be affected by anarchy amidst its enemies? And how will it be For the immediate future, the enemies of Israel will continue their preparations for chemical/biological/nuclear war. affected by anarchy amongst its "friends"? In all world politics, but especially in the Middle East, we are present at the gradual unveiling of a secret, but the nucleus of meaning, the essential truth of what is taking place, is what is not said. For the immediate future, the enemies of Israel will continue their preparations for chemical/biological/nuclear war. Altogether unaffected by parallel public commitment to a so-called "peace process," these preparations will proceed on their own track, culminating, if unobstructed, in new and substantially more portentous aggressions against Israel. It follows that Israel must not close its eyes to such apocalyptic enemy preparations or to the associated and synergistic danger of a "Palestinian" state, one-sided denuclearization and/or one-sided "peace" settlements. "We are often asked," said the late Italian Jew and survivor Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, "as if our past conferred a prophetic ability upon us, whether Auschwitz will return..." However we might choose to answer so terrible but unavoidable a question, our past seems to have conferred precious little in the way of prophetic abilities. On the contrary, by persistently deluding itself that not seeing is a way of not knowing, Israel has now distanced itself from the most indispensable forms of warning. A passage in the Odyssey speaks of two gates, one of horn and one of ivory. Through the ivory gate false dreams pass to humankind, and through the gate of horn go only the true and prophetic dreams. At this moment in its always precarious history, Israel is sorely tempted by the ivory gate, choosing to base preservation of the Third Temple Commonwealth upon delusions of a "peace process." Israel would be far better off to pass instead through the gate of horn, preparing to use power and force as needed in order not to disappear. This decision would likely occasion great pain and uncertainty in the short run, but it would surely be better than to foolishly entice the Apocalypse. Prof. Louis Rene Beres is author of a new book, Facing the Apocalypse: Israel's "Peaceful" March to Disappearance. He is a frequent contributor to Outpost.

July-August 1996               - 5 -               Outpost