Posted on 04/20/2008 6:56:56 AM PDT by SJackson
Can Israel Slay Clocks? Understanding Chronology Of War And Terror In The Middle East (Part One) By: Louis Rene Beres
http://www.jewishpress.com/displayContent_new.cfm?contentid=31209&mode=a&contentname=Can_Israel_Slay_Clocks%3F_Understanding_Chronology_Of_War_And_Terror_In_The_Middle_East_%28Part_One%29__&recnum=1§ionid=14
Over the years, regular readers of my column in The Jewish Press may have noticed a continuing regard for the concept of time. On the surface, it might not appear that chronology can possibly have much to do with war and terror. Some deeper reflection, however, should reveal several interesting and intimate connections. Moreover, much of what we can now learn about time, war and terror has its essential roots in original Jewish ideas of community. Here, in these Jewish prophetic visions, authentic community was actually defined by very explicit reference to existing in time under a transcendent G-d. Land and space were also important, to be sure, but derivatively; only because of the verifiably sacred events that would necessarily take place therein.
Time now has a great many different meanings. It certainly means very discrepant things to the very assorted players in world politics. Historically, the specific idea of felt time – of time as lived rather than clock time – also has its origins in ancient Israel. Deliberately rejecting the concept of time as mere linear progression, the early Hebrews approached chronology as a fully qualitative experience. Thus dismissed as something that can submit to abstract or quantitative measure only, time was understood in ancient Israel as something that is always logically inseparable from a distinctly personal content.
We can learn a great deal from this today. Drawing from this ancient Jewish wisdom, true chronology in understanding war prevention and counter-terrorism must now embrace more than the uniform intervals of clocks. For Israel, time must also be understood in the acknowledged and exquisitely meaningful terms of its enemies. What are these terms?
For Israel’s determined Islamist terrorist enemies, real time means something very different from what is measured by clocks. There is, therefore, an ironic but altogether noteworthy commonality between Israel and its enemies in the complex matter of time. For the still-expanding legions of Jihad, real time also has significant foundations in ancient Israel. Much as they would be loathe to admit it – and, more than likely, it is not a commonality they even recognize – these legions of death dutifully obey the manifestly subjective idea of felt time.
The idea of Jihad is not animated by any standard measures of duration. Not at all. If it were otherwise, and Israel’s enemies were to calculate solely or primarily in ordinary strategic and hence measurable terms, there would never be any cessation of Arab violence. Why would there be?
“Yesterday,” says Samuel Beckett in his analysis of Proust, “is not a milestone that has been passed, but a day stone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, heavy and dangerous.” Newly aware that tomorrow will always be structured by “yesterday,” at least in part, and especially by the all-important memory of “yesterday,” Israel’s Prime Minister – beginning to think more conceptually - should finally be made aware that time is power. But this imperative will make sense only insofar as time is first correctly understood.
Presently, Mr. Olmert’s plan to capitulate to the so-called “Road Map” and to the corollary creation of “Palestine,” indicates that this crucial awareness is fading. Naturally, this capitulation has everything to do with the new $30 billion in military aid promised by Washington. Although this aid will surely be valuable to Jerusalem, in the end it will prove to have been a foolish exchange. In other words, the actual gain afforded by the aid will be overshadowed by the actual loss.
The subjective metaphysics of time, a reality that is never based on equally numbered moments, but rather upon particular representations of time as lived, should immediately impact the way in which Israel confronts its Arab/Islamic enemies. At a minimum, this means struggling to understand even more precisely the manner in which these enemies – both state and sub-state adversaries – live themselves within time. How then do they live in terms of chronology?
For Israel today, encumbered by the twisted cartography of a Road Map to a 23rd enemy Arab state called “Palestine,” the pertinent space-time relationship must necessarily be seen along two complex dimensions. Any planned further surrenders of territory by Israel will inevitably reduce the time that Israel still has left to resist certain mega-forms of both war and terror. Moreover, such surrenders, considered cumulatively, have already provided time to Israel’s enemies to await more perfect opportunities for eliminating the hated “Zionist entity.” It follows, in an apparent paradox, that time now best serves Israel’s enemies, and that it does this by both its diminution and its extension.
These are difficult ideas to grasp, especially for political and military decision makers unaccustomed to imprecise and “unscientific” modes of analysis. Nonetheless, there are many things that science can never understand, and that must therefore be understood according to very different but certainly not inferior forms of reasoning. A markedly greater awareness of the subjective metaphysics of time, a reality that is based not on equally numbered moments, but rather upon representations of time as lived, should impact the way in which Israel now confronts its principal terrorist enemies. This means, inter alia, struggling to fathom the manner in which these Islamist enemies (again, both state and sub-state) actually live within time. Ultimately, this has to do with conceptualizing the very precise religious obligations that are drawn from very particular Arab/Islamic interpretations of faith and law.
Let me be more “operational.” If Israel should determine that certain Jihadist terror groups and/or their state mentors now accept a very short time horizon in their plan for future attacks, its apt response to planned aggressions and materialized expectations would have to be correspondingly swift. If, on the other hand, it would seem that this time horizon is substantially longer, Israel’s defensive response could reasonably be more patient and less urgent. The exact duration of this enemy time horizon must always be determined by identifying the enemy’s own idea of divine expectation. It must now be Israel’s main task, therefore, to accurately determine this idea, an indispensable task that would also affect the way in which Israel may have to decide the increasingly critical trade-off between civil liberties and public safety.
Can Israel Slay Clocks? Understanding Chronology Of War And Terror In The Middle East (Conclusion) By: Louis Rene Beres
http://www.jewishpress.com/displaycontent_new.cfm?contentid=31360&mode=a§ionid=14&contentname=Can_Israel_Slay_Clocks%3F__Understanding_Chronology_Of_War_And_Terror_In_The_Middle_East_%28Conclusion%29&recnum=1
Protecting Israel from terrorism is, at least in part, an intellectual task. Let us, therefore, now think very deliberately about terrorism. An improved understanding of “terrorist time” would have very special benefits in Jerusalem’s dealings with the “suicide bomber.” This murderous terrorist is afraid of death, so afraid in fact, that he/she is actually willing to “kill him/herself” as the means of becoming immortal. In a sense, this ironic attempt to conquer death by “dying” in a homicide is a recognizable tactic designed to unstop time (the late Kurt Vonnegut even wrote more generally about such notions in his Slaughterhouse Five.)
Truth, here, lies buried in contradiction, and Israel can now benefit substantially by disinterring an apparent oxymoron. Israel’s understanding should quickly focus upon a core Islamist terrorist idea that real time does not have a “stop”. For Israel’s time-centered terrorist enemies, who incontestably seek to soar way above the mortal limits imposed by clocks, such real time is also sacred time. Sacred time gives rise to anti-Israel terror. How, then, can an improved counter-terrorist focus for Israel be achieved, that incorporates appropriately refined concepts of sacred time?
The most obvious way to combat the Islamist suicide bomber’s deadly notion of time is to disabuse him/her of such a notion. This, in turn, would entail our prior realization that the suicide bomber sees himself/herself as a sacrificer, who in full ceremonial action seeks an escape from time. Abandoning the profane time of ordinary mortals – a chronology that is always linked to personal death, which is intolerable – the Islamist suicide bomber prepares to transport himself/herself into the exclusive and divinely-protected world of immortalized martyrs. It should hardly be a surprise that the prevailing Islamist temptation to sacrifice despised “infidels” at the purifying altar of Jihad can now so often be irresistible.
Israel and its allies must soon do something productive to actively inhibit this barbarous temptation. What, then, can Israel do immediately with its improved understanding of enemy time? Clearly, by itself, Israel’s military war against terrorist infrastructures can never offer a total solution. Rather, Israel’s prompt and corollary task must be to convince prospective suicide bombers, either directly or indirectly, that their intended “sacrifice” of “infidels” can never elevate them above the immutable limits of time. Never.
Before Israel can ever “win” its War on Terror, the Jihadist terrorists will first need to be convinced that they are not now living in profane time, and that every intended act of sacrificial killing would represent a true profanation of Islam. The great majority of Islamic clergy all over the world may already accept this salutary view, however silently. Israel’s essential struggle against terrorism in time can thus be improved only when the particular Islamist vision of time is first recognized, then suitably challenged and operationally transformed.
For Israel, there is still a remaining opportunity to transform time from a “past” source of debility to a “future” source of power. Israel’s existence is always emerging, always developing, always becoming in time. To survive well into the future, to ensure its own national self-preservation, Israel must now draw wisdom and strategic understanding from both a true understanding of “terrorist time,” and from a more self-conscious awareness of “Jewish time;” that is, from the ancient Jewish experience of time as the intangible flux of righteousness and strength. While the ancient Greeks experienced temporality as a breakdown of order, the Hebrews identified it as a source of unlimited possibility and even of messianic redemption.
In the final analysis, for modern Israel, the power of Jewish time is manifest not only through its sacralization of space, but also as the rudimentary source of memory. By recalling the historic vulnerabilities of Jewish life in the world – vulnerabilities long prior to Israel’s formal national reemergence in 1948 – and also by recalling that others will not recall, Prime Minister Olmert could still begin to take vitally needed steps back from the tortuous Road Map toward a nascent Palestinian state.
Until now, both Israel and its Arab/Islamic enemies have shared a basic understanding of felt time. Still, Israel’s enemies have seemingly understood time as an integral element of faith-based strategy; Israel however has not. To change this dangerous state of affairs “in time,” Israel’s leaders must now draw carefully upon their memories as Jews, both before and after 1948, in the Diaspora and in the Jewish State.
Taken together with the productive view that time becomes especially injurious to Israel whenever there are persistent surrenders of Israel’s space – that is, that the power of time operates relentlessly against an Israel that yields territory for false promises – such use of Jewish memory could prove invaluable. International conflict, most apparently in the contemporary Middle East, is largely a waiting game. In this game, one perhaps better understood by the playwright Samuel Beckett (Waiting For Godot) than by the scholars and diplomats, meaningful victory will ultimately favor the side that feels it can best afford to wait.
None of this is meant to suggest that “waiting” is determined by reference to clocks. Exactly the contrary is true. Here, “real” time will have far more to do with a private awareness of duration, with inner feelings, than with the allegedly objective measures of chronology. “Clocks slay time,” says William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, and “time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
my three kids are talking, my wife is making a cake and for the life of me i dont know what i just read
either it was jibberish or my mind is gone.
happy Resurrection Day...Christ has risen (yesterday was Passover)
Whew. Glad you didn’t understand it. I didn’t either. I was beginning to seriously question my reading ability.
It was like totally wow! A complete tapestry of the relation between time and space and continuum of deep thought.
Throw in a few references to hope and change and you would have an Obama speech.
After the first two paragraphs, my first impression was that the author is someone who likes to read his own words, and thinks that any unconventional series of words creates a “Deep Thought”
[ ] comment posted in error,
I was swimming with dolphins whispering imaginary numbers in the fourth dimension ...
it became jibberish when it decided time-as-measured-by-a-clock became less important than a subjective recall of time. “I remember when” becomes somehow more important than “The record says”. I think most of us would call that BS.
Measured and recorded time is like a rudder for the ship of state or even one person’s life. Otherwise, you, your culture, just drifts all over the place, unable to navigate through events in time. In it’s place you get stream of consciousness type writing rich with free asssociation, random connections and wonderful imagery. It’s an artist’s play with time. But’s it not time. So, please, guys, you aren’t going to slay any clocks.
This guy is trying to sound as erudite as WFB, but fails miserably.
WFB as able to keep one’s interest even while using uncommon words and phrasing. This fellow simply comes across as self-absorbed and elitist.
I gave up reading this about halfway through.
Geez, I skipped to the comments thinking you all could add meaning to this.
you live a porpoiseless life.
If your mortal enemy is living, acting, dying on a different time scale than you are, then on that time scale, he will likely win, even as you win on your time scale.
Presently, Israel is acting in the shorter, more practical time scales, while its mortal enemy is acting on longer, less physically constrained time scales. In the long run, this will doom Israel.
For example, Israel is being short sighted, accepting more American billions in military aid, even as they abandon more land for the creation of a separate Palestine state. This appeasement, while sensible in the practical short term time frame, is a disaster in the longer time frame.
Israel can only win by also playing in the longer time scales. Israel must do two things to win on those scales:
There are actually some pretty good thoughts in that. Not sure whether they’re yours or the original author’s ...
If my translation is correct, then these thoughts are the original authors. I will concede that, like translations from ancient Sanskrit, it is difficult to verify the accuracy of the translation.
I think we could say that this article fails the “effective communication” test.
Yes - one could say that ;).
You get a prize for actually reading it through and assimilating the content.
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