“If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.” – T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Whatever its ongoing strategic and tactical challenges, Israel will need aptly nuanced understandings of time. This means more than refining traditional defense-community notions of “clock time” – for example, notions about “time-remaining” to avoid a nuclear conflict. In essence, what should be examined by Jerusalem are the jihadi enemy's ideas of “sacred time.”
There is a dilemma, however. Though Israel lives according to clock time, its jihadi adversaries (state and sub-state terror groups) regard such mechanistic chronology as a theological profanation. The conceptual differences could have major policy implications for the Jewish state’s management of war and terror.
To dedicated policy-makers, all this will sound excruciatingly theoretical.
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