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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NY Times correspondent attacks Israel's ultimate existential deterrent

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
17 October '10

In a review of Avner Cohen's "The Worst Kept Secret," Ethan Bronner, the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief, joins a growing tide of pressures on Israel -- from the Arab League, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, and even the Obama administration -- to come clean and open its nuclear program to global scrutiny.

Israel's half-century-old policy of nuclear ambiguity -- "don't ask, don't tell" whether it has a nuclear arsenal -- has served it well as its ultimate deterrent. Today, it keeps Iranian leaders, in their vow to destroy the Jewish state, guessing whether an all-out missile attack on Israel from their proxy Hezb'allah in Lebanon might prompt nuclear retaliation that would incinerate Tehran. And with Iran hell-bent to develop a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian threat to expunge Israel would rise exponentially.

Even without an Iranian nuclear capability, It doesn't take much imagination to visualize a scenario of Israel being on the ropes if Hezb'allah fired its 40,000 Iranian-supplied rockets against Israel's major population centers. In such an eventuality, Israel might not be able to mount an adequate, commensurate conventional response and, as a last resort, might well have no choice but to go nuclear.

This was exactly the military posture of NATO during the darkest days of the Cold War when U.S. strategic thinkers wondered how the West could stand up to a massive Soviet tank attack across Germany with merely conventional weapons. NATO then might indeed have been forced to stem such an offensive with atomic weapons.

Avner Cohen and Ethan Bronner, however, are oblivious to current existential threats to Israel emanating from Iran's theocracy. In his review, Bronner showers praise on Cohen's 1998 book, "Israel and the Bomb," for "exposing the history of Israel's nuclear program" and he's equally generous in his assessment of Cohen's new tome, "The Worst Kept Secret."

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Peres' Office Responds to Guardian Report

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
24 May '10

A front-page article in the Guardian today claims to reveal how apartheid-era documents prove that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to the apartheid regime of South Africa. The office of President Peres, who was named by the Guardian as the leading Israeli official involved in the alleged affair, issued the following statement:

There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian that in 1975 Israel negotiated with South Africa the exchange of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, The Guardian elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts. 

Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place.

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Israel’s Right To Dimona And To The Weapons That Emerge From It

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
13 May '10

Having failed (and failed abysmally) to curb Iran’s nuclear vault, what’s called the “international community”—a very silly phrase, isn’t it?—is attempting to focus an accusatory spotlight on Israel’s long-held (but ritualistically shrugged off) capacity to make atomic war. The truth is that an Israel without nukes is an axiomatic target for wave combat in which hordes of soldiers, terrorists, and civilians would be deployed almost haphazardly literally to overwhelm the Jewish state.

It is ironic that this fixation on Israel comes at the tail-end of President Obama’s phlegmatic and ultimately failed effort to bring Dr. Ahmadinejad’s Tehran into line. There is meaning to the connivance of both Russia and China in this adventure of the mullahs. But hardly anyone seems to want to make the point.

In any case, as to Israel’s atomic capacity as a guarantee of its survival, Ari Shavit—perhaps the country’s most sage columnist, who publishes weekly in Ha’aretz—has written a very persuasive justification.

And, here, a one-time plea: To the three or four frothers who prevent a sensible discussion of the matters I raise, why don’t you just leave this one alone? Go to The Nation and Matthew Yglesias. You’ll have a very good time.

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