Tag: enemy

In our age of Total War, Israel must always remain fully aware of those harms that would threaten its very continuance as a state.

Project Daniel examined some of the precise ways in which a nuclear war might actually begin between Israel and its enemies.

Israel remains the openly declared national and religious object of Arab/Islamic genocide.

The views expressed in these six columns are those of Professor Louis René Beres, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any other members of Project Daniel, or of any government.

We have seen that, among other purposes, Israel needs nuclear weapons to undertake and/or to support various forms of preemption.

We have seen (in last week's list of reasons, numbers 1 and 2) that Israel needs nuclear weapons, among other purposes, to deter large conventional attacks and all levels of unconventional attack by enemy states.

According to a May 1, 2008 article by Aaron Klein in WorldNetDaily, Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, and an adviser on nuclear issues to Senator Barack Obama, has essentially urged Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.

ITEM: The Jerusalem Post (March 10) vividly recounted the heroism of Capt. David Shapira, a former student at Mercaz HaRav, who, hearing gunfire at the yeshiva during the recent terrorist atrocity, grabbed his weapon, left his nearby home, and ran to the rescue of Jewish children:

From the beginning, Israel's policy on its nuclear weapons and doctrine has been to keep the bomb quietly in the "basement." To be sure, this deliberate policy of nuclear ambiguity has done very little to deter "ordinary" conventional enemy aggressions or acts of terror. But it does seem to have been entirely adequate in keeping Israel's foes from mounting existential attacks.

With the country on high alert for possible attacks during Purim, Israeli Defense Force soldiers arrested two Palestinians outside Nablus attempting to smuggle an...

It is not just our enemies who show us no mercy and who "love death" who bring us death. The triumph of the absurd (the world of Chelm or the world of Kafka?) can be found also in sober actions of the United Nations.

War is never far from the minds of prudent Israelis, and prudent operational planning must always look closely at the regional "correlation of forces." Drawn from the military lexicon of the former Soviet Union, this concept is usefully applied as a particular measure of armed forces, from the subunit level to major formations.

Taken in isolation, the emerging Palestinian state - a state that is now being forged with the open support of U.S. President George W. Bush - will have no direct bearing on Israel's nuclear posture. Yet, although obviously non-nuclear itself, Palestine could substantially diminish Israel's capacity to wage certain forms of conventional war and could thereby enlarge the Jewish State's incentive to rely on unconventional weapons in particular circumstances.

I once thought that my study of logic would prepare me to understand how the world behaves. Living in Israel these past months has cured me of this assumption.

Israel's nuclear capacity remains undeclared. For now, this is in Israel's overall best interest. In a world where the United States currently expresses serious concerns about nuclearization in Iran and North Korea, it would be inappropriate for Israel to embarrass its major ally by any form of nuclear disclosure.

A new state of "Palestine" will very likely be carved out of the still-living body of Israel. Supported by the President of the United States, this 23rd Arab state will quickly try to extend, incrementally, even within the "Green Line" boundaries of Israel itself.

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...."

With Pertinent Policy Recommendations For The President of the United States

Since the presentation of our original Project Daniel document to Prime Minister Sharon on January 16, 2003 (it remained secret until this past May), there have been a few relatively minor "victories" in the effort to control WMD proliferation among Israel's enemies.

Apocalypse, of course, was pretty much a Jewish invention (at least if you ignore ancient Persia and the Zoroastrians), and there is certainly an apocalyptic element in Chicago's own Saul Bellow.

With Pertinent Policy Recommendations For The President of the United States

My prior column in this special series dealt with the existential threat to Israel. To best deal with this multifaceted threat, Project Daniel recommended to Prime Minister Sharon that Israel do everything possible to prevent a coalition of enemy states from coming into possession of mass destruction weapons, and that this effort be undertaken while Israel continues with its longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity.

My previous column in the Project Daniel series dealt with Israel's survival problem in a world of increasing chaos and anarchy. Recalling apt images of the Irish poet Yeats, of a world wherein "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed," and where "the ceremony of innocence is drowned," we must now quickly acknowledge that certain current threats to Israel are profoundly existential.

My prior column dealt with some of the precise ways in which a nuclear war might actually begin between Israel and its enemies. From the standpoint of preventing such a war, it is essential that Israel now protect itself with suitable policies of preemption, defense and deterrence.

Israel's survival problem is basically as follows: A small state, indeed a microstate that is less than half the size of Lake Michigan, is surrounded by several openly-genocidal enemy states - some of which still seek biological and/or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

My previous column on Project Daniel considered the dire consequences of a nuclear war in the Middle East, an almost unimaginable scenario of devastation and suffering that Israel must carefully avoid. It was the spectre of precisely such a scenario that first gave rise to Project Daniel.

Israel holds nuclear weapons for only one purpose: To prevent catastrophic destruction of the Jewish state by enemy state aggression. It is altogether inconceivable that Israel would ever resort to such weapons as an initial move of war

Israeli strategist Zeev Maoz, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, has written a controversial article calling for Israel to disband its nuclear weapons program and to join with Arab states in the region to create a "nuclear-weapons- free-zone."

"Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman?" asks Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV. "Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather."

Due to pressing post-holiday obligations, the Monitor yields this week to the Media Research Center's Brent Baker and Rich Noyes, who prepared the following summary of MRC's assessment of war coverage by American television: