Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect

Despite his successful effort to release the hostages, Donald Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East is destined to fail. Among other things, the American peace plan fails to understand basic Hamas ideas of death and time. Without a correct understanding, Israel will be left hanging in the wind, directionless, desperately fighting an interminable and unwinnable war.

Truth is exculpatory. Contrary to Trump’s hopes, there is no credible outlook for genuine peace in the region. Though Palestinian violence has once again been turned on itself, including the extra-judicial Hamas executions of “collaborators,” longer-term consequences will imperil Israel. Soon, the newly-released Hamas criminals will prepare not just for “ordinary” terror attacks, but also for calibrated escalations to chemical, biological or nuclear (radiological) weapons.

There is more. Any future war between Israel and its jihadi adversaries would have little or nothing to do with Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. To wit, the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians was detached from any rational plan for a Palestinian state. This mega-crime’s only plausible motive was debasement and lascivious satisfaction.

While veiled from ordinary assessments of politicians, pundits and strategists, the most authentically animating motives for jihadi terror stem from primal needs to overcome personal mortality. It follows, ipso facto, that visible struggles between the Jewish State and Hamas et. al. are generally reflections of much deeper issues.

Rejecting the syntax and generalities of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Israeli planners need to inquire: What are actual jihadi goals? If Hamas and kindred terror groups seek “power over death,” how should Israel respond? This query is urgent because the jihadist path to immortality is expressly linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.”

For Israel, the potentially existential threat stems from an adversary that regards violence against Jews and the Jewish State as “sacred.” Today, in the bewildering cacophony of a demonstrably false peace, Jerusalem should distinguish Middle Eastern reality from shadows of reality. To do this capably, three basic concepts will need to be examined in tandem: death, time, and immortality.

What can these three interrelated concepts teach Israeli planners about the force-multiplying perils of Trump’s agreement? To answer thoughtfully, refined thinkers should undertake disciplined inquiries at the individual level, i.e., the level of microcosm. Though an illogical assurance, the promise of “power over death” offers jihadists the greatest imaginable reward for faith-based destructiveness. Significantly, this reward pertains to Islamist adversaries both as direct beneficiaries and reciprocal benefactors.

But first there must be a prior order of business. A two-part question will need to be raised and answered:

How can any one individual, terror group, or state gain “power over death,” and what can such presumed gain have to do with Israel’s fate?

On occasion, as Israelis ought already to have learned, the search for “power over death” demands an explosive end to the jihadist’s life on earth. Although revered by Hamas as “martyrs,” virtually all jihadi leaders strive more-or-less desperately to avoid personal death. As recent facts will affirm, these openly-unheroic commanders are usually “willing” to endure Israeli military retaliations while residing in Qatari five-star hotels. For such senior commanders, it would be difficult to contest, life amid secular affluence remains preferable to a martyr’s existence in asphyxiating tunnels.

All jihadists welcome the “sacrifice” of “unbelievers.” On October 7, 2023, Hamas and kindred perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females. They burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.” To support these “battles,” and later engagements with IDF forces, absent Hamas leaders sent large sums of money to “heroic martyr’” families. Often, as a correlative benefit duly sanctified by Islamic clerics, these families were gifted “collective immortality.”

On such matters, history deserves pride of place. In his Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Such widely-believed views link loyalty to the state with the promise of “power over death.” In world politics, this is always a monumental promise, but one recognizable only in the eternal shadows of death and time. In the issue at hand, Hegelian and von Treitschke linkages apply equally to an aspiring state (i.e., “Palestine”).

Though it is an incomparable promise, personal immortality still represents an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This judgment owes both to the promise’s calming expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and to the fact that any search for life everlasting can foster war, terrorism, and genocide. Looking beyond Trump “remedies,” Israel’s task should be not to remove adversarial hopes for personal and collective immortality, but to “de-link” this search from variously barbarous behaviors.

In Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), Karl Jaspers comments: “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are ones that offer to confer some otherwise unattainable “power over death.” It is somewhere within the twisted criteria of such a “selection” (an appropriate term made infamous at Auschwitz) that rapidly expanding acts of terror-violence can be spawned. This is because any jihadi- promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of specific “others.”

To deal satisfactorily with both immediate and long-term security threats, Israeli policy-makers will have to understand the most elemental sources of war, terror, and genocide. These sources, which generally evade analytic scrutiny, are rooted in complex intersections of death, time, and immortality. In the end, ipso facto, it is at the conceptual or theoretical level that Israeli scholars and policy-makers must fashion pragmatic operational responses to jihadist violence.

Donald Trump will not save Israel. The Hamas/jihadi terror threat has not been eliminated or reduced. In significant measure, this continuing vulnerability is explicable by enemy ideas of time. Ultimately, it is to “sacred time” rather than “profane time” that jihadi criminals will turn for confirming chronologies of life-everlasting.

Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).