From “Security Or Peace” to “Secure Peace”: A False Dichotomy Threatening Israel’s Future
Mike Prashker
Stoked by Hamas’s savage attack on 7th October 2023 and fueled by years of Iranian encirclement and three years of brutal war, Jewish-Israelis have increasingly come to believe that they must choose between security or peace.
This is a false dichotomy that threatens Israel’s future. It has been meticulously engineered by Benjamin Netanyahu over the course of three decades. His efforts – not unlike or unrelated to the expansion of settlements across the West Bank – have intensified since the onset of his personal legal jeopardy.
Motivation for propagating both the false dichotomy and for settlement expansion is heightened when personal liberty depends on maintaining an extremist, expansionist and aggressive coalition for which the very mention of peace is the worst poison and autocratic populism is the best medicine.
Just how the idea of peace came to be anathema; ideologically, politically and theologically toxic to a coalition and a public significantly comprised of traditional, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews is of course a cruel and tragic irony. The foundational place of praying and striving for peace in Jewish teaching, traditions – the starting point of every routine interaction “Shalom” - is a matter of fact. Just how the most Kosher of concepts became Treif (unclean) demands collective Jewish soul-searching and academic consideration in the realms of theology, history and social psychology.
But at this moment, when this insidious false dichotomy is being relentlessly hawked to Jewish-Israeli voters and Diaspora Jewry in the lead up to Israel’s fateful election, it is important to expose the disingenuity and falsity of the lie.
At the outset, we will do well to remember that for none other than Netanyahu, it was not always so. At least not semantically. Netanyahu used the slogan "making a “safe” (or secure) peace” during the 1999 general election campaign against Ehud Barak, thereby emphasizing a security-focused approach to the peace process with no sense that he genuinely believed the two conditions fundamentally contradicted each other.
Of course, the term “secure peace” can mean different things to different people over time. Netanyahu seemingly introduced the term as a direct rebuke to the Oslo Accords, which he maintained gave up tangible strategic assets (territory) for delusional peace. Unsurprisingly, the poisonous seeds of this mind-set needed little help establishing deep roots through the five dark years of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) in which over a thousand Israelis lost their lives in what felt like an endless series of terrorist attacks on hotels, busses, shopping malls and other civilian targets across Israel.
So rather than deploy the term “secure peace” to help Israelis get to grips with the nuanced reality - that security and peace are interconnected - it was relatively easy --- aided by Palestinian terrorism --- to persuade them that Israel should no longer gamble security for peace. We should never forget – and we are all required to remember and teach our children – that it is now approaching thirty-six years since Prime Minister Rabin (a former IDF chief of staff and war hero) was branded a traitor by Netanyahu’s nascent poison machine, by Ben-Gvir and others now in and around power.
In a very real sense, Rabin was the first Israeli victim of the false dichotomy and to this day a potent cautionary tale for any politician entertaining the idea of challenging the lie.
Without absolute security the big lie went - and still goes - there can never be real peace. Over time, the very mention of the idea of peace – even daring to imagine it – undermines the prospect of absolute security. In such a world there is no value in diplomacy and negotiations, better as the dehumanizing saying goes, to keep on “mowing the grass”.
This cancerous line of thinking - for Israel’s future security and Israeli society - is further metastasized by two complementary strands of racism by which genetic “Jewish genius” and genetic Arab “inferiority” combine to provide an iron-clad guarantee that 7th October could never happen.
Over time the false dichotomy gained axiomatic status – cemented by the all too real threats represented by Iran and its proxies, and by the horrors of the ongoing war. Every Israeli is called on to make a stark choice: Sparta - a fortress state engaged in eternal conflict, constantly “mowing the grass” and on track for absolute security (always just over the horizon) or a weak and pathetic self-harmer and self-hater pursuing naïve, delusional and suicidal peace. All this, notwithstanding the hundreds of retired generals and security experts – anything but naïve - who tell us repeatedly that the calculated pursuit of secure peace is Israel’s only realistic option for a better if not absolutely perfect future.
Whether or not Netanyahu deployed the term “secure peace” entirely cynically in 1999, he would certainly be aware as an ex-officer in the IDF and the son of a historian that the relationship between them over more than two millennia is anything but binary.
The interplay between war and peace has been the subject of enquiry for philosophers since antiquity. With the help of AI, I took a look at what some of history’s finest minds have had to say on the matter.
Thucydides, the Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, argued that relying exclusively on military superiority without striving for political accommodation will inevitably exhaust a state and undermines any prospect of long-term stability.
The 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that leaders who prioritize a permanent state of embattlement over the cultivation of internal and external peace fail to deliver on their main sovereign purpose: tranquillity and freedom from fear for their citizens.
According to Gemini, “the most devastating critique of the security-versus-peace dichotomy [came] from Immanuel Kant…In his landmark 1795 essay Perpetual Peace, [he] argued that a true peace is not merely a temporary cessation of hostilities—which he characterized as a mere truce—but an active arrangement that aims to eliminate the causes of future wars” and that “managing conflict through ‘superior force’ and the idea of achieving secure peace through military occupation is a contradiction in terms”.
Kant argued that real security can only be secured among states through mutual recognition and international law. It follows from this that he would view that the false dichotomy of security or peace that Netanyahu has enshrined - in the face of all the bloody evidence - is both immoral and strategic folly.
When all considered by Gemini – a review of pretty much everything written by philosophers of war and peace over more than two millennia – outstanding thinkers over time overwhelmingly hold the view that security and peace are not zero-sum propositions. Serious – and above all – honest thinkers and leaders have a far more nuanced view that acknowledges a profoundly interdependent relationship between them.
Needless to say – supreme political strategist, zeitgeist and societal shaper that he is – Netanyahu has far too many Jewish-Israelis and not a few members of Diaspora Jewry convinced, despite all evidence, that the very idea of peace is for losers and fools and (nothing new thirty-one years after Rabin’s assassination) is the stuff of traitors.
To descend even deeper into the swamp of Netanyahu’s poisonous legacy, (October 21st, 1997, to be precise caught on a hot mic educating Rabbi Yitzak Kaduri), speaking about peace is not only the talk of leftists and traitors; it is the purview of those who have forgotten what it is to be Jewish - “they believe they can trust our security in the hands of the Arabs”.
The accumulative result of this is that Israel’s entire eco-system of all things relating to war and peace – to liberal democracy and social justice which are also interconnected and interdependent – is degraded and fractured. Those who speak of democracy rarely speak of the unresolved conflict and occupation that are having such a disastrous impact on it. Those who consider frameworks of security rarely speak with those engaged with consideration of the social, psychological, economic, diplomatic, cultural and educational conditions for cultivating and promoting secure peace with the Palestinians; the beating heart of the conflict.
Ominously as the elections draw near, opposition leaders, who include an ex-chief of staff and an ex-deputy Chief of Staff and who know all this very well, are largely silent or at least not sufficiently vocal in challenging the false dichotomy. They too will be tough on security, possibly even talk of absolute victory and fear speaking of secure peace.
Sooner or later, and we must hope it is sooner and right after the coming election, this must change. It is beyond time for true and principled, honest and courageous Israeli leaders to sensitively but firmly expose the big bloody lie.
Choosing between security or peace is unrealistic and unnecessary. It is a false dichotomy threatening Israel’s future.
Israel needs different political leaders. Leaders of integrity guided by an unwavering commitment to courageous truth-telling and decisive strategic action. Leaders who are determined to shape robust security, geo-political and societal conditions conducive to secure peace. Leaders able to inspire Israelis to embrace the only realistic goal despite and because of decades of conflict and far too much collective trauma: the tireless and strategic pursuit of secure peace.
