One woman, whose son was the sole survivor of a disastrous military engagement, killed him with a tile - the correct punishment for his apparent cowardice. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, citing to Plutarch, describes a certain citizen-mother as follows: "A Spartain woman had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. A Helot (slave) arrives trembling; she asks him for the news. `Your five sons were killed.' `Base slave, did I ask you that?' The slave responds: `We won the victory.' The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods."

Why recount these tales from ancient Sparta about sacrifice? What have they to do with the current threat of war and terrorism to Israel? The answer is important. Today, this threat to Israel originates, at least in part, from cultures that sometimes embrace similar views of sacrifice. However, in these cultures, the purpose of sacrifice goes well beyond civic necessity. It goes to the very removal of personal death, to realizing the otherwise terrifyingly elusive promise of immortality.

For Israel's survival, the implications are profound. Convinced that particular forms of violence against Jews and the Jewish State will lead to martyrdom, the agents and expressions of certain Islamic cultures cannot be deterred by ordinary threats of reprisal and harm. This means that effective measures additional to deterrence are now indispensable to Israel's security.

At the surface, it would appear that such self-sacrificing individuals are utterly fearless of death. In fact, however, it is precisely their profound terror of death that leads them to "martyrdom." Paradoxically, because dying in the act of killing Jews is believed to buy freedom from the penalty of death, these enemies of Israel seek to conquer mortality by committing "suicide." Such efforts are not an example of ordinary political violence, but of religious sacrifice.

While Israel's mortal enemies calculate one way, the Jewish State calculates another. In the fashion of many of its enemies, certain Islamic states and terror groups, Israel imagines, for itself, only life everlasting. But unlike these enemies, Israel does not see itself achieving immortality, individually or collectively, by killing "others." Rather, at least for the most part, it sees its collective survival as the product of meticulously crafted diplomatic settlements.

The resultant asymmetry between Israel and its enemies, however much more humane and decent is Israel's posture, puts the Jewish State at a notable and forseeably catastrophic disadvantage. While Israel's enemies manifest their "positive" expectations for immortality, individual and collective, by the intended and doctrinal slaughter of Jews, Israel's Jews display their particular expectations for collective immortality by incremental surrenders of vital territories. In the end, the inevitable clash between Islamic believers in violence and Israeli believers in diplomacy will surely favor the former. In the end, unless the prevailing asymmetry is replaced by new and far-reaching Israeli imaginations of existential disaster, the believers in diplomacy will be forced to exit, yet again, from the Promised Land.

Nor should it be presumed that Jews outside of Israel are immune to Islamic hatreds or that Israelis are hated merely because they are "occupiers." Israelis are despised because they are Jews. Period! In the words of a recent article published in AL-AHRAM: "The first thing that we have to make clear is that no distinction must be made between the Jew and the Israeli....The Jew is a Jew, through the millennia....in spurning all moral values, devouring the living and drinking his blood for the sake of a few coins. The Jew, the Merchant of Venice, does not differ from the killers of Deir Yasin or the killers of the camps. They are equal examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such distinctions (Jews and Israelis) and talk only about JEWS."

In a current Egyptian textbook of "Arab Islamic History" (a textbook in a country "at peace" with Israel) new teachers are informed as follows: "The Jews are always the same, every time and everywhere. They will not live save in darkness. They contrive their evils clandestinely. They fight only when they are hidden, because they are cowards....The Prophet enlightened us about the right way to treat them, and succeeded finally in crushing the plots they had planned. We today must follow this way and purify Palestine from their filth."

Ayatollah Khomeini, in the Foreword to his book on Islamic Government, offered remarks which are today still taken as the dominant and incontestable orthodoxy in Iran: "The Islamic Movement was afflicted by the Jews from its very beginnings, when they began their hostile activity...." Continuing on "The Zionist Problem" in AL-AHRAM, Dr. Yahya al-Rakhawi writes: "...we are all, once again, face to face with the Jewish Problem, not just the Zionist Problem; and we must reassess all those studies which make a distinction between `The Jew' and `The Israeli'....and we must redefine the meaning of the word `Jew' so that we do not imagine that we are speaking of a divinely revealed religion or a minority persecuted by mankind." Al-Rakhawi concludes: "...we cannot help but see before us the figure of the great man Hitler, may God have mercy on him, who was the wisest of those who confronted this problem...and who, out of compassion for humanity, tried to exterminate every Jew, but despaired of curing this cancerous growth on the body of mankind."

It is with such rabid views in the mind of its many enemies that, today, Israel faces a real threat of unconventional war and unconventional terrorism. This threat is enlarged, substantially, by evidence of Arab and Iranian "sacrificers." Faced with adversaries who are not only willing to die, but who actively seek their own "deaths" - because this death of a sacrificer is presumed to yield personal immortality - Israel must now understand the critical tactical and strategic limits of deterrence. In the final analysis, as Israel's policies of deterrence are contingent upon assumptions of rationality in world politics, these policies will be immobilized by self-sacrificing enemies.

The danger to Israel lies at two discrete but interrelated levels. First, it exists at the level of the individual human being who chooses martyrdom through a path of terrorism. Second, it exists at the level of states, the individual self-sacrificers in macrocosm, which may someday soon choose collective self-sacrifice through initiation of chemical, biological or even nuclear war against the Jewish State. Such a war would be fought not for traditional military purposes, but for "liquidation of the Jews." Jurisprudentially, it would represent the unholiest of marriages between aggressive war and genocide as crimes under international law.

From the beginning, Israel has been identified as a "cancer" by the Arab world. The following quote from Cairo Radio of April 20, 1963, is still echoed daily in Egypt and throughout the Arab world: "Israel is the cancer, the malignant wound, in the body of Arabism, for which there is no cure but eradication. There is no need to emphasize that the liquidation of Israel and the restoration of plundered Palestine Arab land are at the head of our national objectives."

Such longstanding Arab/Iranian references to Israel as a "cancer" are far more than a vile metaphor. They are profoundly theological characterizations of an enemy that must ultimately be excised, that is -"liquidated." Where this unavoidable removal of Jews from "Palestine" would be accomplished by self-sacrifice, possibly even by a nuclear attack that expectedly elicits overwhelming Israeli retaliations, it would be life-affirming for the aggressors. Because the exchange of unconventional weapons would signify not only self-destruction, but also perpetual deliverance, this exchange would presumably grant the aggressors eternal life. Of course, every Islamic government and movement would deny such eschatological thinking, but it operates nonetheless.

The root problem here is Arab/Iranian death fear and the consequent compulsion to sacrifice despised "others." This compulsion, in turn, stems from a widespread and doctrinal belief that killing Jews, and being killed by Jews, is simultaneously a path away from cowardice and toward immortality. The pertinent Arab/Iranian unwillingness to accept personal death leads, then, to the killing of others to escape this death. The ironies are staggering, but the connections persist. For Israel, they must now be examined with great care.

Citing to a well-known HADITH (an Arabic term which refers to the oral tradition by means of which sayings or deeds attributed to the prophet Mohammed have been handed down to Muslim believers), King Sa'ud once informed a British visitor to his court: "Verily, the word of God teaches us, and we implicitly believe it, that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him an immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty." This doctrinal premise is very widely accepted by Israel's Islamic state and nonstate enemies.

Significantly, although not well-known, is that Ibn Sa'ud's remarkable hatred for the Jews paralleled the Christian core of antisemitism: "Our hatred for the Jews dates from God's condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus Christ), and their subsequent rejection of His chosen Prophet." In other words, Islamic hatred of Jews, which leads doctrinally to obligatory killing of Jews, is also tied to Jewish "interference" with promises of immortality.

For so many of Israel's enemies, individuals and states, killing Jews is the optimal immunization against death. The death fear of the enemy "ego" is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the Jew. Generically, this idea has been captured by Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

The enemy of Israel that commits itself to mass butchery of Jews will not intend to do evil. On the contrary, this enemy will commit itself to meting out death for the sake of life, prodding the killing of Jews with utter conviction and purity of heart. A sanctified killer, this enemy will generate an incessant search for Jewish victims. Though mired in blood, the search will be tranquil and self-assured, born of the knowledge that its perpetrators are neither infamous not shameful, but sacrificial and heroic.