Can Kafka’s parable illuminate Israel’s strategic riddles in a time of war?

by Prof. Louis Rene Beres

“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 special part in making one’s strides long and swifter. Franz Kafka, Mount Sinai

Gershom Scholem, noted authority on Kabbalah, associated Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka with a “light of the canonical.”  By focusing his illuminating beams in short and dense parables, a genre in which Kafka deployed image and motif with very strict economies of language, the writer forced his readers to unravel deep mysteries to more fully “understand” certain problems. A “heretical Kabbalist,” as Scholem called him, Kafka still offers us a surrealistic yet clarifying glimpse of the sacred Jewish world.

A pertinent thought dawns. Now, during an intensely bitter Gaza War, such a glimpse could prove useful for Israel, doing “its part” in making the Jewish State’s “strides long and swifter.” These strides, as we are about to see, could represent variously indispensable elements of Israel’s strategic survival.

There will be relevant details. Sometimes, in Kafka’s strange but conspicuously holy world, encrypted words are permitted to intrude upon an otherwise reverential silence. For the benefit of Israel, these “encrypted” messages could be decoded in ways that are both logical and productive. Among other things, this interpretive task could be handled from the converging standpoints of Israel’s presumptive nuclear strategy and its official stance on Palestinian statehood.

Though counter-intuitive, these seemingly discrete issues are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. They may also be “synergistic,” at least to the extent that their likely intersections could produce a national security “whole” that is greater than the sum of its “parts.” Prima facie, such synergies will need to become a more special object of strategic analysis in Jerusalem.

There is more. Israel’s capable thinkers (however unaccustomed they may be to any such eccentric genre) should consider Kafka’s bewildering but still-decipherable parable Mount Sinai.  Embedded in this multi-layered tale are potentially purposeful strategic “axioms” and “theorems.” In the end, it will be up to the individual Jewish thinker, obstructed by variously grave conceptual difficulties and derivative conundrums, to extrapolate hidden meanings. Always, this eccentric effort – not an effort designed for pundits or politicos – should be preceded or underpinned by a coalescing theme. This means essentially a lucid policy motif from which assorted existential security clarifications could be reasonably expected.

To proceed, let all first agree that combined intellectual energies should be directed toward the “big question” of Israel’s survival. Such a no-nonsense Jewish focus would have intrigued and challenged Kafka himself. Imagine the scene. Franz Kafka, a keen student of Jewish religious texts who regarded the destruction of Israel’s First and Second Temples as a cosmic catastrophe, is laboring painfully in Prague. Hunched over his meticulously crafted prose, this lonely and tormented writer/philosopher would have been grateful for any personal opportunity to assist a soon-to-be reborn Jewish State, perhaps even deliriously grateful.

But let us return to the Kafka parable. The people who “prowl round Mount Sinai,” the emancipated Children of Israel, are afflicted by interminable wanderings. Though a “newly made, smooth road” might still be followed to the top of their holy mountain – hence, toward much-higher levels of emancipation and safety –  these people, all of these people, have somehow managed to avoid the better road. Accordingly, they remain situated uneasily at Sinai’s base, not yet climbing, stationed, like castaway prophets, at the distressingly outer margins of solidarity, redemption and solemnity. Understandably, these long-suffering people stand perplexed, distressed, sometimes shrill, sometimes silent.  Always, however, they suffer grave difficulties in making their survival choices.

How could it be otherwise?

There is more. Enduring in the midst of an all-consuming conflict with adversaries who desperately seek “martyrdom,” the People of Israel struggle in roughly the same bad neighborhood, only now with a reconstituted State to protect and with a foreseeably murderous enemy State of “Palestine” screaming to be born. And what of this “bad neighborhood” as a whole? In essence, the adversary states that comprise this twisting region embrace (more or less voluptuously), a theologically based ethos of Jewish annihilation.

To be sure, nothing less than annihilation is intended by any “Palestine from the river to the sea.” Under international law, such an exterminatory mantra suggests nothing less than “incitement to genocide.” But before Israel can oppose such a recalcitrant slogan, its people will need to calculate the cartography to Sinai’s intimidating summit.

For those prowling around Kafka’s Mountain seeking answers, secular or sacred, the chaotic Islamic world should first be understood as being cross-cut by certain vital and not-always-coherent cleavages. Most obvious, in this regard, is the doctrinal split between Sunni and Shia camps. Nonetheless, whatever the “balance of power” currently integral to this original bifurcation, both camps share a gratifyingly beatific vision of Israeli and Jewish eradication. How, then, should Israel finally prepare to climb the sacred Mountain?

By confusing rough roads for safe paths, contemporary “Israelites” (now Israelis) are apt to mumble, scream, shout, and (sometimes) become mute. Who could blame them? Daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, Israel searches faithfully and diligently for decent and purposeful instructions. This time, however, a collective Jewish redemption will not spring forth ex nihilo, out of nothing. It will only spring forth from a society that openly prioritizes high intellect and utter candor over shallow politics or divine rescue. This time there will be no galvanizing survival warnings from a prime minister or a burning bush.

Kafka would have understood. He might not always have approved of Israel’s specific strategic policy directions, but that’s “not the point.” Sinai is, after all, the Jews’ sacred mountain. The eternal conflict between Eros and Thanatos, between life and death, can never be abruptly suspended or “called off.” It’s not the same thing as a diplomatically arranged cease-fire between a peace-seeking sovereign state and a terrorist criminal band.

This brings us back to the Mountain. How, precisely, shall Israelis attempt a triumphant climb to Sinai’s summit?  “Show restraint, compromise” say some, even after suffering unprecedented Gaza War terror-criminals. “Commit more fully to Palestinian statehood,” say certain others who absolutely loathe history and insistently embrace the senseless.

“Climb slowly” and with “good will gestures,” say some of the taciturn, for they blithely ignore Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Dostoyevsky’s “sick man.” They remain resolutely stubborn in their conviction that human life is fundamentally predictable and rational. But even for them, none of the still-available roads is a smooth one and none is plausibly capable of making Israel’s security “strides long and swifter.”

Where should Israel seek this necessary road, this shorter and surer path to the top of the Jews’ holy mountain?  It may exist, at least in principle, but it is still very far from the intermittently desolate routes favored by Israel’s security policy-makers. Constructed by those who may still remember serious meanings of a “civilization,” it is discoverable not by the Many (nothing important is ever discoverable by the Many), but by the Few. Aware that smooth roads can always turn out to be rocky, and that seemingly smooth roads are often treacherous, this Few may still hold the most hidden and yet most vital survival messages of Sinai.

“Hear, O’ Israel,” Kafka would have urged, look beyond the crowd, beyond the “experts,” beyond the politicians, beyond the journalists, beyond the financiers, beyond geography, beyond maps. Look in secret places, look where no one else is looking. Look especially where looking is forbidden. Look to some roads “newly made,” and even to some roads not even imagined. Above all, look not for ease or painlessness of access, but solely for “destination.”  Look not to Washington or even Jerusalem, but only to Sinai’s original voice.

Sinai’s summit, a perpetual symbol of Israel’s ultimate survival, remains accessible only to those who would heed this eleventh=hour injunction. Detached from any time-dishonored national policies that are rooted in continuous intellectual error, Israel’s still-alert strategic climbers should now consider obscure roadways that are harder to identify or might still need to be constructed. Though there are no guarantees that more openly creative Israeli minds would be able to see clearly, it is certain that minds habitually closed to intellectual discovery can never bring the sovereign People of Israel to the Mountain’s summit.

At one level, of course, Israeli scientists and engineers have been at the forefront of technological innovation, industrial wizardry and artificial intelligence, but these are not the particular kinds of “intellectual discovery” here being urged.

There is more. Sinai’s summit remains blocked by unchanging enemy intentions and by ever-changing enemy armaments, some already deployed and some still “waiting” to be conceptualized. In part, these enemy convictions and weapons center on indissoluble connections between “sacred violence” and immortality, especially those linkages that enhance the false but incomparable promise of “power over death.” For Israel’s enemies, it ought never be forgotten, there can never be any more hideously seductive form of power. This conclusion is most plainly evident today in Hamas terrorist policy-associations of rape, pillage and the indiscriminate murder of Jews with “martyrdom.”

In such falsity-driven matters, core truth lies in paradox. The Hamas terrorist “kills” himself (or herself) in order not to die. The “heroic” death that he plans to suffer represents merely a transient inconvenience on a “shahid’s” blessed propulsion into a “life everlasting.” In reality, what is being sought here is not only an unheroic death, but a death of incomparable cowardice.

Though not explicitly within the symbolic foresight of Franz Kafka or plausibly a part of rational human thought, the jihadist criminal is convinced that martyring himself in order to kill Jews (a perverse form of religious expiation) will buy himself free from the penalty of dying. In the explanatory language of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.  an otherwise insufferable death fear of the terrorist ego is ceremoniously relieved by the religious “sacrifice” of “infidels.” If, at some point, such terrorists would be armed with weapons of mass-destruction, the expected consequences of Palestinian “martyrdom” could prove catastrophic beyond any previous measure of reasonable expectation.

We should circle back to Kafka and his potent parable. The People of Israel, after all, are “still” trying to ascend Sinai. What else will they need to know? What else can they learn from the Jewish writer Franz Kafka?

At their core, the parameters of a successful climb remain fixed and immutable. The summit is remains blocked. Inevitably, to reach this blocked summit, those who prowl round the base of the mountain will have to contend with glaringly formidable obstructions.

If necessary, the imperiled People of Israel will need to prepare continuously for protracted war and terror. This could include even a nuclear war with Iran, a war in which Iran itself would remain non-nuclear. This would be possible because even “only” a devastating conventional/chemical/biological threat from Iran could sometime elicit some form of rational Israeli (tactical) nuclear reprisal.

Significant policy decisions would need to be made regarding Israel’s longstanding posture of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.” It is not difficult to imagine that the “broad smoothly made new road” to Sinai’s summit will have to be “paved” with more carefully worked-out foundations of incremental nuclear disclosure. In such a dense scenario, Israel’s intelligence community would be seeking not information protection but information release. Any purposely disclosed information would be released selectively, and in a fashion presumed to best support Israeli nuclear deterrence.

Aimlessly circling the Mountain’s base – that is, keeping Israel’s bomb “in the basement” – could threaten the core stability of the Jewish State and ultimately the entire “House of Israel.” At times, Israel would have to strike certain enemy leaders or military positions preemptively. Sometimes, Jerusalem would have to respond to enemy first strikes (both state and sub-state enemies) with overwhelmingly destructive reprisals. In some instances, Israeli decision-makers would have to let these enemies know more about particular elements of Israel’s defensive and retributive plan. This strategic imperative could be obtained even when no expressly nuclear strategies would be involved.

From a legal or justice-centered perspective, Israel could need to be reminded that the Lex Talionis, the ancient Jewish law of exact retaliation, was born upon Sinai. Such a reminder would be especially relevant and timely after the present Gaza War, and whatever the cumulative outcomes. Though the international law of war has much to say about “proportionality” – a principal source of disagreement and controversy during Israel’s “Swords of Iron” operation – a time could still arrive when the expectations of this law would become subordinate to more blatantly retributive Biblical injunctions.

Ultimately, in a sorrowful and required awareness, Israel should learn from Franz Kafka that Sinai’s summit can never be rendered fully accessible, that all roads, including the smoothest, will need to be temporary, and that even the most conspicuously “broad” and “newly made” roads, while attractive, will inevitably remain only partially navigable.

What summary conclusions can be gleaned from Kafka’s intellectual labors? Irrespective of content, such findings should occasion no Israeli tears of lamentation, no sadness, no bitter regrets, only gratitude for the opportunity to see Jewish survival matters with rarefied insight and possibility. In ongoing and future situations of Israel’s existential defense, the Jewish Genius of Prague should be assigned a respected and “religious” place.

Though not directly associated with Israel’s Biblical prophets, Kafka’s representations of Sinai, depending upon interpretation, are prophetic.  For such potential to be realized, however, an otherwise abstract parable must first be “translated” into tangible policy issues. In any such translation, most important would be the “Talmudic” process of asking and answering relevant questions –incrementally, sequentially, and logically –  not the answers per se.

There is one last observation. In Jewish scripture and philosophy, an isolable warning appears and reappears concerning the grave risks of deliberately putting oneself in mortal danger because divine rescue is expected. This is not a warning to Jews about challenging their faith in God’s protection, but rather a clarification that the first line of protection must always be the responsibility of individuals.

In their theatrical productions, the ancient Greeks were sometimes able to draw survival hopes from a reassuringly tangible god, a close-by deity who would supply happy endings to otherwise insoluble plots. This conveniently simplifying device was often central to Euripides’ plays, and involved a kind of crane designed to hoist a pertinent god above the other actors. The main problem with this deus ex machine, or “god out of the machine,” was that it exemplified what Sigmund Freud would later have called “wish fulfillment.” In “real life,” in any “plot” where there could be no calculable interventions from “above,” the normal consequences of players’ actions could be singly or recurrently catastrophic.

But back to Kafka and Sinai. Israel’s Jewish population must figure out how best to climb Israel’s holy mountain and accomplish this ascent without divine assistance. For the Jewish State, there will be no helpful “god out of the machine.” For Israel, inter alia, there will be incessantly militarizing jihadist adversaries, hideously relentless enemies who continue to tie their frenzied hopes for life everlasting to ritualistic mass killings of “unbelievers.”

For these barbarous enemies, especially Hamas, terror crimes will continue to express conspicuously preferred modes of religious sacrifice. To defeat such refractory enemies, Israeli planners should esteem a new generation of “high-thinkers,” broadly educated strategists and jurists who could make do with roads that are never going to be “smooth,” but – with benefits of a diligent and disciplined intellectual dialectic – could still be traversable. In candor, Israel doesn’t necessarily need a Kafka parable to reach this conclusion, but the best path to “Sinai” could sometimes be discovered via analytic indirection, abstraction, and metaphor.

Prof. Louis Rene Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles dealing with war, terrorism and human rights. His latest and twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy. Professor Beres’ published writings on law and strategy have appeared in Modern War Institute (West Point); BESA (Israel); JURIST; Yale Global Online; Parameters: The Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); Horasis (Switzerland); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern Diplomacy; The Atlantic; and more. Dr. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2003-2004. He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.