Israel’s final decision concerning what to do about a nuclear Iran will depend on answers to certain core psychological questions. Is the Iranian adversary rational, valuing national survival more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences? Or, on even a single occasion, is this enemy more apt to prove itself irrational, thereby choosing to value certain preferences more highly than the country’s indispensable physical security?

It is also possible that authoritative Iranian decision-makers could be neither rational or irrational but mad. In such unlikely, but especially daunting, circumstances, deterrence would no longer serve any conceivable Israeli strategic purpose. At that point, Jerusalem’s only effectively remaining policy choice would be: (1) to hope for regime change in Tehran, but otherwise passively await Israel’s destruction, or (2) to strike first itself, preemptively, whatever the global outcry, and irrespective of the shattering military consequences.

These are not frivolous or contrived descriptions of presumed Iranian leadership orientations. To be sure, the resultant wisdom of any considered Israeli preemption will ultimately depend on choosing correctly, and on reliably anticipating Iranian judgments over an extended period of time. For genuine safety, Israel must prepare to make decisions that are subtle, nuanced, and of protracted utility.

This is not the time to confuse conventional meanings with strategic precision. Even an irrational Iranian leadership could maintain a distinct and determinable hierarchy of preferences. Unlike trying to influence a “mad” leadership, therefore, it could still be purposeful for Israel to attempt deterrence of such a “merely” irrational adversary.

More than likely, Iran is not a mad or crazy state. Though it is true, at least doctrinally, that Iran’s political and clerical leaders could sometime decide to welcome the Shiite apocalypse, and even its associated destructions, these enemy decision-makers might still remain subject to certain different sorts of deterrent threats.

Faced with such extraordinary circumstances, conditions under which an already nuclear Iran could not be effectively prevented from striking first by threatening the usual harms of retaliatory destruction, Israel would need to identify, in advance, less orthodox but still promising, forms of reprisal.

Such eccentric kinds of reprisal would inevitably center upon those preeminent religious preferences and institutions that remain most indisputably sacred to Shiite Iran.

For Israel, facing a rational adversary would undoubtedly be best. A presumably rational leadership in Tehran would make it significantly easier for Jerusalem to reasonably forego the preemption option. In these more predictable circumstances, Iran could still be reliably deterred by some or all of the standard military threats available to states, credible warnings that are conspicuously linked to “assured destruction.”

But it is not for Israel to choose the preferred degree of enemy rationality.

Unless there is an eleventh-hour defensive first strike by Israel – a now improbable attack that would most likely follow an authoritative determination of actual or prospective Iranian “madness” – a new nuclear adversary in the region will make its appearance. For Israel, this portentous development would then mandate a prudent and well thought out plan for coexistence. Then, in other words, Israel would have to learn to “live with” a nuclear Iran.

There would be no reasonable alternative.

And it would be a complex and problematic education. Forging such a requisite policy of nuclear deterrence would require, among other things, (1) reduced ambiguity about particular elements of Israel’s strategic forces; (2) enhanced and partially disclosed nuclear targeting options; (3) substantial and partially revealed programs for improved active defenses; (4) certain recognizable steps to ensure the perceived survivability of its nuclear retaliatory forces, including more or less explicit references to Israeli sea-basing of such forces; (5) further expansion of preparations for both cyber-defense and cyber-war; and, in order to bring together all of these complex and intersecting enhancements in a coherent mission plan, and (6) a comprehensive strategic doctrine.

Additionally, because of the residual but serious prospect of Iranian irrationality – not madness – Israel’s military planners will have to identify suitable ways of ensuring that even a nuclear “suicide state” could be deterred. Such a uniquely perilous threat could actually be very small, but, if considered together with Iran’s Shiite eschatology, it might still not be negligible.

Further, while the expected probability of having to face such an irrational enemy state could be very low, the expected disutility or anticipated harm of any single deterrence failure could be flat out unacceptable.

(Continued Next Week)

Dear Abba,

Thanks you for your letters. And for writing them in English. I don’t understand all the words, but one of my friends, Johnny, the “chayal boded” from America who spent a few Shabbat with us because he doesn’t have any family in Israel, he translates for me what I don’t know. He likes your letters too. We all call him “Stallone” because of his heavy American accent, and because he’s so eager to go into action to “wipe out the Apaches” as he calls the Hamas. All day long, he badgers the commanders, wanting to know what’s holding things up. He’s like the spring on an Uzi, ready to fire. All of us are.

I’m writing in Hebrew because it would take me all day to write an SMS in English. Sorry I was so groggy when you phoned me this morning. I didn’t get much sleep last night because of the flies. We’re stationed on the edge of the Negev and the flies here are ferocious. I don’t know what’s worse, the grad missiles over Beer Sheva or the flies. Maybe Hashem is sending them to get us out of our sleeping bags and into action. I wish He would send them to Bibi and Barak, so they’d give the orders already. What are they waiting for?

We have a lot of free time here while we’re waiting for the green light to go into Aza, and we talk about the things you have written, in our own way, but let me assure that the moral is extremely high – everyone wants to go in. As you know, we only have another two more months before we finish our service and everyone is happy that we finally have a chance to do something important for the country.

If you were here, you’d think we were off to a wedding, the spirit and joy is so great. Among the soldiers there isn’t any indecision or argument like there is in the media. I don’t listen to the radio anymore because of the talk all day long about whether it’s worthwhile or not to send troops into Aza. This is a war isn’t it? The Hamas is making a joke out of Israel and we have to teach them a lesson. Not everyone here is religious but everyone feels the honor of Israel is at stake. If you ask me, it’s more than regular patriotism. Even soldiers who never studied Torah understand that this is a war of good over evil, and everyone is ready to go into battle with “Shema Yisrael” on their lips. Not surprisingly, minyans are packed.

If we don’t get the orders to go into Gaza, every soldier is going to be very disappointed. I can’t speak about the reservists who have been called up, but our guys are counting the seconds until we get the OK. No one is afraid. Every one of our commandos is like 10 Rambos. Guys aren’t worried about dying. The opposite – they’re dying to get into action.

We learned in Lebanon that we can’t defeat the enemy with our Air Force alone. What’s the point of a truce that will last for three weeks until Hamas fires more rockets at Israel? Why not finish the job once and for all? My unit has been training for almost three years how to wage combat in populated areas. We’re ready. We all know what the dangers are. That’s what our training is all about. We’re not here against our will. We want to do the job. Not just to kill Arabs to pay them back for all the Israelis they’ve killed without any distinction. We want to destroy the Hamas and the Jihad because we all know it’s the right thing to do.

I sense the country is behind us – certainly the people of the south, and now in Tel Aviv. In a way it’s good that finally they hear the sirens there too, instead of just watching the missile attacks on TV.

I invited Yonaton to be with us the first Shabbat we’re free. I know it’s all right with you and Ema. Give her my love and tell her not to worry – even though I know that she’ll worry all the same. Right now, I’m fine, but if this waiting game continues, I may need more socks, and I forgot the cream against foot allergies, so if you decide to drive down, bring them with you. Ema knows where everything is. I’m pretty sure the roads to our base are still open.

Give my love to everyone.

Noam

I forgot to ask on the phone – how are Saba and Safta in Ashkelon?

Israel does not target, with malice aforethought, children and other non-fighter populace.

50,000 warning phone calls were made last week to residents at potential locations that could be attacked.

Hamas places its weaponery amidst the civilian population. Its rockets also kill their own children when they explode on ignition or fall short.

A poster like this

is not only horrendously gruesome and posed but evil misrepresentation.

With an enemy like this, with its warped logic, there is no common language.

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Once upon a time it was the objective of the military to win wars. Now the objective of the military is to avoid incidents.

An incident happens when civilians are killed, prisoners mistreated or some other event that is photographed, videotaped and then flashed around the world. This results in an Incident, capital I, that triggers much artificial soul-searching by the media which spends the next two years beating the incident to death and flogging its corpse across television programs, newspaper articles, books, documentaries and finally, if it’s a big enough incident, a real life movie version that is based on the book, which was based on the article, where the idealistic reporter/lawyer/activist who uncovered the truth about the incident will be played by Matt Damon or George Clooney.

The main objective of the military in most civilized countries is to prevent this chain of articles, programs, books, documentaries, dramatized plays and Matt Damon movies from coming about by making sure that no Incident can ever happen. And the best way to do that is by not fighting. And if the enemy insists on fighting, then he must be fought with razor sharp precision so that no collateral damage takes place. And if someone must die, it had better be our own soldiers, rather than anyone on the other side whose death might be used as an Incident.

Incidentism isn’t derived from a fear of Matt Damon movies, but from the perception that wars are not won on the battlefield, but in the minds of men. And that perception has a good deal to do with the kind of wars we choose to fight.

The military, whether in the United States or Israel, does not exist to win wars. It exists to win over the people who don’t want it to win a war.

The guiding principle in such conflicts is to use the military to push back the insurgency long enough to win over the local population with a nation building exercise. This program has never worked out for the United States, but that doesn’t mean that generations of military leaders don’t insist on going through the motions of applying it anyway.

In Israel, the last time the military was sent to win a war, was 1973. Since then the military has been used as a police force and to battle militias in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. In the Territories, the ideal Israeli soldier was supposed to be able to dodge rocks thrown by teenagers hired by Time correspondents looking to score a great photo. Today the ideal Israeli soldier is capable of visiting an American college campus to dodge the overpriced textbooks hurled at him by the local branch of Students for Justice in Palestine or the International Socialist Organization, while explaining why the IDF is the most moral army in the world except for the Salvation Army.

The ideal Israeli soldier, like his American, British and Canadian, but not Russian or Chinese, counterparts, is supposed to avoid Incidents. That means operating under Rules of Engagement which make firing at an assailant almost as dangerous as not firing at an assailant.

The ideal American soldier is supposed to avoid the Taliban, or as one set of orders urged, patrol in places where the Taliban won’t be found. And that’s sensible advice, because if the goal is to avoid creating an Incident, then avoiding the enemy is the best way to avoid an Incident. Unfortunately the enemy has a bad habit of appearing where he isn’t supposed to be and creating his own Incidents, because Taliban and Hamas commanders are not concerned about being yelled at in a fictional courtroom by Matt Damon. They actually welcome Incidents. The bigger and bloodier the Incident, the more hashish and young boys get passed around the campfire that night.

American soldiers operate under the burden of winning over the hearts and minds of Afghans and New York Times readers. Israeli soldiers are tasked with winning over New York Times readers and European politicians. But some hearts and minds are just unwinnable. And most wars become unwinnable when the goal is to fight an insurgency that has no fear of the dreaded Incident, while your soldiers are taught to be more afraid of an Incident than of an enemy bullet.

Israeli leaders live in perpetual fear of “losing the sympathy of the world”, little aware that they never really had it. The “Sympathy of the World” is the strategic metric for conflicts. And so Israel does its best to minimize any collateral damage by using pinpoint strikes and developing technologies that can pluck a bee off a flower without harming a single petal. But invariably the technocratic genius of such schemes has its limits, an Incident happens, the Israeli leftist press denounces the Prime Minister for clumsily losing the sympathy of the world, and international politicians order Israel to retreat back behind whatever line it retreated to during the last appeasement gesture before the last peace negotiations. And its experts ponder how to fight the next one without losing the sympathy of the world.

American and Israeli generals live in fear of losing political support and so they never put any plans on the table that would finish a conflict. Instead they choose low intensity warfare with prolonged bleeding instead of short and brutal engagements that would finish the job. They talk tough, but their enemies know that they don’t mean it. Worse still, that they aren’t allowed to mean it because meaning it would be too mean.

Incidentism leads to armies tiptoeing around conflicts and losing them by default. Avoiding them becomes the objective and that also makes Incidents inevitable because the enemy understands that all it will take to win is a few dead children planted in the ruins of a building; in a region where parents kill their own children for petty infractions and frequently go unpunished for it. The more an army commits to Incidentism, the sooner its war is lost. Prolonged low intensity conflicts are ripe with opportunities for Incidents, far more so that hot and rapid wars. And so the hearts and minds, those of the locals and those of New York Times readers, always end up being lost anyway.

War is no longer just politics by other means, it actually is politics with the goal of winning over hearts and minds, rather than achieving objectives. The objectives of a war, before, during and after, have become those of convincing your friends and your enemies, and various neutral parties, of your innate goodness and the justice of your cause. Propaganda then has become the whole of war and those who excel at propaganda, but aren’t any good at war, now win the wars. The actual fighting is just the awkward part that the people who make the propaganda wish we could dispense with so they can focus on what’s really important; distributing photos of our soldiers protecting the local children and playing with their puppies.

Take all that into account and the miserable track records of great armies are no longer surprising. Armies need to prove their morality to win a war, but are never allowed to win a war because it would interfere with proving their morality. Conflicts begin on the triumphant moral high ground and end with the victors slinking back defeated after an Incident or two has been splashed all over the evening news and the book based on the article on it has already been optioned by Matt Damon’s production company for a movie to be funded by the same people who fund the terrorists.

The war of words, the conflict of images and videos, the clash of arguments, has become the sum of war. And that war is unwinnable because it must be fought on two fronts, against the cultural enemies within and the insurgents outside.

An army cannot win a war and win over the New York Times at the same time. And so long as it fears Incidents more than operating in an aimless counterinsurgency twilight that eventually shades into defeat, then it is bound to lose both to both the terrorists and the New York Times.

Originally published at Sultan Knish.

Nuclear weapons and nuclear war. This is not a new subject for my column in The Jewish Press. What is new is the urgent need to confront, head on, an expanding international movement to eviscerate Israel’s nuclear posture – and at precisely the precarious moment when this critical posture should actually be made more visible, and hence, more compelling.

Si vis pacem, para bellum atomicum. “If you want peace, prepare for atomic war.” At first glance it would seem an odd maxim for Israel, perhaps a misconceived admission of belligerence, or even an embarrassingly empty witticism.

Still, however reluctantly, this maxim must become Israel’s core strategic mantra in the years just ahead. This is not because a nuclear war is necessarily likely, but rather because Israel’s nuclear deterrent will remain utterly indispensable for the prevention of large-scale conventional conflict.

Nonetheless, the myriad threats facing Israel are not mutually exclusive. With Iran’s steady and unhindered nuclearization, an eventual nuclear war, or even a “bolt-from-the-blue” nuclear attack, cannot be ruled out. Considered together with the plausible understanding that an Iranian nuclear enemy could be driven by apocalyptic visions of jihad, this means Israel’s military planners will need to augment credible strategic deterrence with apt forms of diplomacy, ballistic missile defense, and (possibly) preemption.

At the moment, this last option might already be limited to cyber-attacks, assassinations and/or regime-change interventions, and/or to certain more traditional sorts of defensive physical harms. Jurisprudentially, all of these kinds of preemption could be considered as entirely proper expressions of “anticipatory self-defense.”

Now, Israel must simultaneously examine the strongly related and inter-penetrating issue of a Palestinian state. If President Obama or his successor should persist with the so-called Road Map To Peace in the Middle East, an independent state of Palestine could still be carved out of Israel. Palestine would then become an additional and largely optimal platform for launching future war and terror.

President Obama still seeks “a world free of nuclear weapons.” However, the existential threat posed by a Palestinian state would require some forms of prior Israeli nuclear disarmament. Once a new enemy state and its allies believed that Israel had been bent sufficiently to their nicely-phrased “nonproliferation” demands, an adversarial military strategy could progress rapidly from terror to war, and subsequently from attrition to annihilation.

Any discernible movement toward Israeli denuclearization could remove the tiny country’s last stage barrier to national survival.

To be sure, Israel’s unilateral nuclear disarmament is improbable. But it is not entirely out of the question. For whatever reason, certain of the country’s leading academic strategists continue to advance this plainly insupportable recommendation. I have debated these strategists myself, most recently on the pages of Harvard University’s leading journal, International Security.

True, it is generally difficult to imagine nuclear weapons as anything other than implements of evil. Still, there are circumstances wherein a particular state’s possession of such weapons may be all that protects it from catastrophic war or genocide. Moreover, because such weapons may most effectively deter international aggression, at least in those cases where the prospective aggressor remains rational, their possession could also protect neighboring states (both friends and foes) from war-related, or even nuclear-inflicted harms.

Not all members of the Nuclear Club must necessarily represent a security threat. Some such members may even offer a distinct benefit to world peace and security. This point should already be clear to anyone who can remember the Cold War.

Should Israel ever be deprived of its nuclear forces because of naive hopes for peace, it could become vulnerable to overwhelming attacks from enemy states. Though such an existential vulnerability might be prevented, in principle, by simultaneously instituting parallel forms of chemical/biological weapons disarmament among these enemies, such parallel steps would never actually be undertaken. Meaningful verification of compliance in these complex matters is very difficult. Further, any such verification would become even more problematic in those conceivable cases wherein several enemy states might be involved.

It is time to be clear. Nuclear weapons are not the problem per se. In the volatile Middle East, the core threat to peace remains a far-reaching and unreconstructed jihadist commitment to “excise the Jewish cancer.”

Jerusalem should finally understand that the Road Map, like the prior Oslo agreements, is merely a convenient enemy expedient. Taken seriously in Jerusalem, it could easily become a cartographic detour to national oblivion.

The yartzeit of our Matriarch, Rachel, falls this year on Shabbat. Every year, more and more people gather at Rachel’s Tomb to pay respects to the Matriarch who is known as Rachel Emanu – Rachel Our Mother.

Thousands of pilgrims will travel there today and tomorrow from all over the country, and perhaps 200,000 more will make the annual pilgrimage the day after Shabbat, every type of Jew there is, religious and non-religious, Haredim, Hasidim, and Dati Leumi, men, women, and children, busload after busload after busload, from far and near, waiting long hours for their turn to enter the small but beautifully renovated tomb near Betlechem on the way to Efrata .

Rachel’s Tomb is also a very frequented site during the year. The new enclosure houses a Kollel, and while men fill their side of the Tomb around the clock, learning and praying throughout the night, they are outnumbered by the enormous number of women who visit the Tomb, to identify with the mother of the Jewish People and to cry out their prayers for themselves, their families, their children, and for all of the Nation, beseeching the Almighty to grant health and happiness, blessing and salvation, shiduchim-tovim and children, to everyone in distress and need, all in the merit of Rachel Emanu.

While Sarah, Rivka, and Leah are also Matriarchs of the Jewish People, why did Rachel merit the special calling of Rachel Emanu, our mother? On one hand, as the last Matriarch in the chain, we are most directly descended from her. But the reason goes deeper than that. In the Kabbalah, Rachel is identified with the Shechinah, and with the sefirah of Malchut. In her spiritual capacity as the Shechinah, Rachel is truly the mother and provider of the Jewish People, caring, like a mother, for all of her children.

The famous verse of the Prophet Yirmeyahu regarding Rachel declares:

“Thus says the Lord: A voice was heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping – Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted for her children because they are not” (Yirmeyahu, 31:14). What does it mean – “they are not”? It means that Rachel’s children are not in the Land of Israel. It means they have been exiled from the Land. Our Sages tell us that Rachel is not buried with the other Matriarchs in Hevron, but rather “on the way” so that when the Jewish People were exiled from Yerushalayim, as they passed by her Tomb on the way to foreign gentile lands, Rachel would cry over them and beg Hashem to have mercy on them and return them to the Land.

Make no mistake. Rachel’s bitter weeping, still heard today at her Tomb, is over her children in exile. She weeps over you – that’s right – you, the Jews in Brooklyn, and the Jews inLakewood, and her children in LA. You may think things are wonderful, but Rachel’s lamentation and bitter tears are shed over you, filling almost two-thousand years of exile and weeping.

Rachel Emanu weeps over the presidents of Jewish Federations who marry gentiles, and she weeps over the directors of the major Diaspora Jewish organizations who marry Jews. She weeps over the Diaspora rabbis and yeshivas and pop singers and Hollywood directors and stars. Rachel weeps over Sarah Silverman and the tzaddikim who condemn her. She weeps over The Jewish Press and The Jewish News. She weeps over you, you, and you, and yes, she weeps over me, and all of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael who can’t be complete until all of our brothers and sisters return home from their adulterous sojourning in alien gentile lands.

But all is not lost. The Prophet has words of comfort for us and for Rachel:

“Thus says the Lord: Keep thy voice from weeping, and thy eyes from tears; for thy work shall be rewarded, says the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy; and there is hope for thy future, says the Lord, and thy children shall come back again to their own border” (Yirmeyahu, 31:15-16).

There is hope for the future. You can end Rachel’s tears. You can put an end to your mother’s pain and sorrow. You may believe things are as “colossal” and “gevaltik” as can be in Boro Park, Monsey, the Five Towns, Boca, and Palm Beach, but the Shechinah is weeping over you, and the Holy One Blessed Be He roars out like a lion in the middle of the night over the exile of his children who prefer America to Eretz Yisrael!

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There was not that much doubt, when reports of Israel bringing down an unidentified drone over the southern Hebron Hills first appeared a week ago [see our post "6-Oct-12: Someone's drone manages to reach southern Israel before being shot down. Questions outnumber answers for now"], that the spy plane originated with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.

The head of Hezbollah confirmed the suspicion on Thursday [report]:

Today we are uncovering a small part of our capabilities, and we shall keep many more hidden,” Nasrallah said, adding that it is Hezbollah’s “natural right” and the group “can reach any place we want.

The drone, he said, was made in Iran. And today, the defense minister in the Iranian government, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, says on Iranian state television that this was a “great job by Hezbollah.”

How significant are the admissions? Yaakov Lappin analyzes it on the JINSA website and says they are crucially important

since it will be Hezbollah, with its tens of thousands of rockets, that will lead Iran’s reprisal attempts for any potential Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons development program… Over the duration of the [2006 was with the Lebanese-based terrorist organization], some 4,000 Hezbollah rockets struck northern Israel. That’s a pattern the IDF believes must not be repeated, since Hezbollah is today armed with some 60,000 rockets, including projectiles that can strike any location in Israel including the heavily populated area of greater Tel Aviv. Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s by Iranian intelligence agents operating within the Lebanese Shi’ite community. Today, the organization is an alien feature in the Lebanese landscape, and represents Iran’s strike force in the Levant, situated right on Israel’s northern border.

Robin Shepherd publishes an excellent blog called The Commentator. On Thursday, under the heading “The banal realities of Israel’s self-defence“, he writes:

The key phrase [in the Nasrallah claim of credit] is this: “it is our natural right…” That is a precise and accurate reflection of how Israel’s enemies have always seen the rules of the game in their decades long struggle to annihilate Israel. They are justified in doing anything to anyone in pursuit of their ambitions; if Israel puts up the slightest resistance, it is Israel that must be held to responsible for what follows. And it is a measure of what Israel is up against in the wider world that the United Nations, the British Foreign Office, the European Union (absurdly just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), most of the world’s NGOs, and all of the world’s Islamic states have to varying degrees internalised this narrative and made it their own… If an enemy state or organised military group sent drones over Russia, or Britain, or France, or China, or (your candidate here), as part of an openly stated campaign of ultimate destruction, there would not be the smallest word of dissent against the victim’s right to defend itself… To people of goodwill – i.e. none of the above – this underlines the daily realities that Israel has to confront in securing its borders and protecting its citizens.

Some sample complaints by distant onlookers about the scale of Israel’s response to attacks on its civilians territory:

* “Finland’s Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen has expressed his incredulity at the attack by Israeli commandos on an aid flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. He added Israel all too often used disproportionate military force…” [An unpronouncable news-site from Finland - June 1, 2010];

* “Moscow condemns Israel for using disproportionate force against Palestinians” [Russia's Interfax news agency - October 9, 2012];
*”UN rights boss condemns disproportionate use of force” [Turkish newspaper Sunday's Zaman, June 1, 2010];

* “Israel’s increasingly aggressive stance on the regional stage is also reflected in its disproportionate response to the UNESCO decision to admit the Palestinians to full membership…” [From a November 4, 2011 editorial in the Irish Times entitled "A dangerous game"].
The Iranians, feverishly developing nuclear capacity even while their economy and currency crumble, are especially fond of dismissing Israel’s concerns.

The Israeli military frequently bombs the Gaza Strip. In the attacks, disproportionate force is always used, in violation of international law, and civilians are often killed or injured… [Iran's PressTV - Wednesday, October 10, 2012. And repeated verbatim on numerous other government-owned Iranian news channels like SaharTV andShiapost and Ahlul Bayt andTehran Times and so on.]

And finally a brief reminder, via Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post some weeks back of how proportionality actually works:

Israel [is] a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job… The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war… Israel refuses to trust its very existence to the convenient theories of comfortable analysts living 6,000 miles from its Ground Zero.

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