Why Israel Needs the Bomb

Mark Helprin
Wall Street Journal
18 October '10

Sixty-five years after Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews, of the many countries in the world Israel is the only one repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction. Though Pakistan and India, like Israel and the Arabs, have suffered population exchange and territorial wars, neither questions the other's right to exist. So rare and extreme is such a position that one might think the countries of Europe, so many of which cooperated in hunting down their Jews, would do more to recognize its endemic presence in the Middle East.

They don't—their publics having largely accepted that, in regard to the question of Palestine, Arabs were the victims and Jews the victimizers and colonialists to boot. Even though, strangely for colonialists, the Jews had no mother country and it was their armed struggle that ejected Great Britain from the Levant. Conveniently forgotten is that the Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not; that half the Palestinians who left in 1948 did so of their own volition; that more Jews left and were expelled from Arab countries than Arabs left and were expelled from Palestine; that Arabs were able to remain in Israel whereas the Arab states are effectively Judenrein; that Israel ceded the Sinai for a paper treaty, and Gaza in return for nothing but rockets and bombs; that, amidst a sea of Islamic states, it has accepted a Palestinian state while the Palestinians indignantly refuse to recognize it as a Jewish state; and that it was ready to compromise even on Jerusalem had Yasser Arafat been willing to take yes for an answer.

And conveniently forgotten in fallacious references to a cycle of violence is that—following from their oft-stated call for the destruction of Israel— Hamas, Hezbollah (which is more or less an Iranian expeditionary force), Iran itself, and the Arab confrontation states are the parties that want to change the status quo, by violence and by their own flamboyant admission.

It exists, they assert that it has no right to exist, they act to destroy it, and then they claim that they are resisting it. Last week, the Iranian president traveled 1,000 miles from Tehran to stand on Israel's border and threaten annihilation. One can only imagine the hysteria—not only in Iran but in London and Paris—if Israel's prime minister were to go to the Iranian border and do the same.

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