Z STREET

The Washington Times
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Louis Rene Beres
The comedy is finished!
- Pagliacci (Clowns)

Now, years after the international community has been deluding itself about Iranian nuclear intentions, Tehran openly and arrogantly confirms the worst. The Islamic republic is destined to become a fully nuclear power - international law and diplomacy be damned.

Not surprisingly, Iran has made clowns of all those smug world leaders who placed their faith in reason and statecraft. The principal loser in this lethal comedy is plainly apt to be Israel. What exactly does this microstate have to fear from a nuclear Iran?

Thirty years ago, I published the first of 10 books that contained authoritative descriptions of the physical and medical consequences of nuclear war, any nuclear war. These generic descriptions were drawn largely from a 1975 report by the National Academy of Sciences and included the following still valid expectations: large temperature changes; contamination of food and water; disease epidemics in crops, domesticated animals and humans caused by ionizing radiation; shortening of growing seasons; irreversible injuries to aquatic species; widespread and long-term cancers because of inhalation of plutonium particles; radiation-induced abnormalities in persons in utero at the time of detonations; a vast growth in the number of skin cancers; and increasing genetic disease.

What does all this mean to Israel, as it soon will face a determined and possibly jihadist nuclear adversary in Iran?
Overwhelming health problems would afflict the survivors of any Iranian nuclear attack upon Israel. Those difficulties would extend far beyond prompt burn injuries. Retinal burns would even occur in the eyes of persons very far from the actual explosions.

Tens of thousands of Israelis would be crushed by collapsing buildings and torn to shreds by flying glass. Others would fall victim to raging firestorms. Fallout injuries would include whole-body radiation injury produced by penetrating, hard gamma radiations; superficial radiation burns produced by soft radiations; and injuries produced by deposits of radioactive substances within the body.

After an Iranian nuclear attack, even a "small" one, those few medical facilities that might still exist in Israel would be taxed beyond capacity. Water supplies would become unusable. Housing and shelter could be unavailable for hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of survivors. Transportation would break down to rudimentary levels. Food shortages would be critical and long-term.

Israel's normally complex network of exchange systems would be shattered. Virtually everyone would be deprived of the most basic means of livelihood. Emergency police and fire services would be decimated. All systems dependent upon electrical power could stop functioning. Severe trauma would occasion widespread disorientation and psychiatric disorders for which there would be no therapeutic services.

Normal human society would cease. The pestilence of unrestrained murder and banditry could soon augment plague and epidemics. Many of the survivors would expect an increase in serious degenerative diseases. They also would expect premature death, impaired vision and sterility. An increased incidence of leukemia and cancers of the lung, stomach, breast, ovary and uterine cervix would be unavoidable.

Extensive fallout would upset many delicately balanced relationships in nature. Israelis who survived the nuclear attack still would have to deal with enlarged insect populations. Like the locusts of biblical times, mushrooming insect hordes would spread from the radiation-damaged areas in which they arose.

Insects are generally more resistant to radiation than humans. This fact, coupled with the prevalence of unburied corpses, uncontrolled waste and untreated sewage, would generate tens of trillions of flies and mosquitoes. Breeding in the dead bodies, these insects would make it impossible to control typhus, malaria, dengue fever and encephalitis. Throughout Israel, tens or even hundreds of thousands of rotting human corpses would pose the largest health threat. The survivors would envy the dead.

Unanticipated interactions between individual effects of nuclear weapons would make matters worse.

Although any 11th-hour pre-emption would encounter overwhelming operational difficulties, Israel can never rely upon the still-smooth assurances of clown-leaders in Washington or elsewhere. Nor can it rely entirely upon its own system of ballistic missile defense to protect civilians, Arabs as well as Jews. Until now, it seemed to many that Israel could reasonably renounce its legal right to anticipatory self-defense and depend instead on promises from others. The many were wrong.

"The comedy is finished!"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/09/concluding-the-sanctions-comedy//print/

ISRAEL’S SECURITY AND ENEMY RATIONALITY

4 February 2010
Louis René Beres
----------------

"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."  What is true for individuals is sometimes also true for states. In the often absurd theatre of modern world politics, constructions that rest upon ordinary logic can quickly crumble before madness.
Consider Israel, especially as it may soon have to confront an Iranian nuclear adversary with a potentially “suicidal” preference ordering. Left to proceed unhindered with its ongoing and illegal (under international law) program of nuclearization, Iran’s current leadership (and possibly even a successor “reformist” government in Tehran) could proceed to value Israel’s destruction more highly than even its own physical security. Such a prospect is highly improbable, to be sure, but – if rooted in particular visions of a Shiite apocalypse - it is not inconceivable.

Israel’s ultimate source of national security lies plainly in nuclear deterrence. Although obviously still implicit, and not at all open or acknowledged, this policy that is necessarily based upon enemy rationality could “crumble before madness.” In certain imaginable instances, the result of failed Israeli retaliatory threats could be total destruction.

By definition, the logic of deterrence always rests upon assumptions of rationality. History, however, reveals the persistent fragility of all such assumptions. We know too well that nations sometimes even behave in ways that are consciously self-destructive. Sometimes, perhaps even mirroring the infrequent but decisively aberrant behavior of individual human beings, national leaders choose to assign the very highest value to preferences other than collective self-preservation.

Strange as it may seem, it has happened before, and it will happen again.

For the moment, no single Arab/Islamic adversary of Israel would appear to be conclusively irrational.  No current adversary appears ready to launch a major first-strike against Israel using weapons of mass destruction (in the future, this calculation could include nuclear weapons) with the recognition that it would thereby elicit a devastating reprisal.  Of course, miscalculations and errors in information could always lead a perfectly rational enemy state to strike first, but this decision, by definition, would not be the outcome of irrationality or “madness.”

Still, certain enemy states, most likely Iran, could one day decide that "excising the Jewish cancer" from the Middle East would be worth the costs, any costs. In principle, this improbable prospect might be avoided by Israel with timely and pertinent "hard target" preemptions, but any such expressions of what is known under authoritative international law as "anticipatory self-defense" are presently difficult to imagine. This difficulty lies in myriad operational  limitations (today, all Iranian nuclear assets are deeply hardened, widely dispersed, and substantially multiplied), and also in expected political costs. For now, this means that : (1) a tactically successful Israeli preemption must remain very unlikely;  and (2) any preemption, even a tactical failure, would elicit overwhelming and possibly unendurable public and diplomatic condemnation.

Interestingly, a "bolt-from-the-blue" CBN (chemical, biological or even nuclear) attack upon Israel that is launched with the expectation of city-busting reprisals would not  necessarily exhibit irrationality or madness. Within such an attacking state's particular ordering of preferences, a presumed religious obligation to annihilate the "Zionist Entity" could simply represent the overriding value.  Here, from the standpoint of the prospective attacker’s authoritative decisional calculus, the expected benefits of producing such annihilation would exceed the expected costs of any expected Israeli reprisal. Judged from this critical standpoint, therefore, a seemingly “crazy” attack decision would be perfectly “logical.”

To better understand this scenario, an enemy state with these particular sorts of exterminatory orientations could represent the individual suicide bomber in macrocosm.  It is a powerful image. Just as individual Jihadists are now manifestly willing to achieve "martyrdom,” so might certain Jihadist states become willing to sacrifice themselves collectively.

In one more or less likely variation of this scenario, it is conceivable that Iranian or other Arab/Islamic leaders making the decision to strike at Israel would be willing to make "martyrs" of their own peoples, but not of themselves.  In this significant decisional variation, it would be judged “acceptable” by these leaders to sacrifice more-or-less huge portions of their respective populations, but only while they (and presumably their families) were themselves already underway to a predetermined albeit still earth-bound safe haven.

There would be no alluring visions of paradise in these particular enemy calculations.

So, what is Israel to do?  It can't very well choose to live, indefinitely, with enemies who might not always be reliably deterred by usual threats of retaliation, and who are themselves armed with weapons of mass destruction.  Jerusalem can't readily decide to preempt against selected Iranian or other threatening military targets, as the tactical prospects of success would now be very remote, and because the global outcry (even in Washington)  would be deafening.  It cannot place more than partial faith in anti-tactical ballistic missile defenses, which, after all, would require a near-100% reliability of intercept to be purposeful in any "soft-point" protection of Israeli cities.

The essential strategic opportunities still available to Israel now seem very limited, and the existential consequences of failure could effectively include national extinction.  What, then, shall the Government of Israel do?

Here is one suggestion. If Israel's enemies were all presumably rational, in the ordinary sense of valuing physical survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences, Jerusalem could begin, among other things, to productively exploit the strategic benefits of pretended irrationality. Recognizing that in certain strategic situations it can be rational to feign irrationality, Jerusalem could then work to create more cautionary behavior among its relevant adversaries.  In such cases, for example, the threat of an Israeli resort to a "Samson Option" could be enough to dissuade an enemy first-strike. Recalling the ancient Chinese strategist,  any more explicit Israeli hints of “Samson” could indicate a very useful grasp of Sun-Tzu’s good advice to always diminish existential reliance on defense, and, instead,  to “seize the unorthodox.”

If, however, Israel's relevant adversaries were presumably irrational in the ordinary sense, there would likely be no real benefit to pretended irrationality.  This is the case because the more probable threat of a massive Israeli nuclear counterstrike associated in enemy calculations with irrationality would be no more compelling to Iran or any other Arab/Islamic enemy state than if it were confronted by a presumably rational State of Israel.

Israel could benefit from a greater understanding of the "rationality of pretended irrationality,"  but only in special reference to expectedly rational enemy states.  In those circumstances where such enemy states were presumed to be irrational, something else would be needed, something other than nuclear deterrence, preemption and/or ballistic missile defense.  Although many commentators and scholars still believe the answer to this quandary lies in far-reaching political settlements (President Obama still talks enthusiastically of the Road Map and Mitchell Plan),  this belief is born largely of frustration and naïve self-delusion, and not of any deliberate or informed strategic calculation.

No meaningful political settlements can ever be worked out with enemies who openly seek Israel's "liquidation,” a word still used commonly and openly in very many Arab/Islamic newspapers and texts.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. What is Israel to do?  "In the end," we may learn from the great classical poet, Goethe, "we depend upon creatures of our own making."  What, then, shall Israel "make?"

To begin, Israel must fully understand that irrationality need not mean craziness or madness. Even an irrational state may have a consistent and transitive hierarchy of wants. The first task for Israel, therefore, must be to identify this operative hierarchy among its several state enemies. Although these states might not be deterred from aggression by even the plausibly persuasive threat of massive Israeli retaliations, they could still be deterred by threats aimed toward what they do hold to be most important.

What, then, might be most important to Israel's prospectively irrational enemies, potentially even more important than their own physical survival as a state?  One possible answer is the avoidance of shame and humiliation.  Another would be avoidance of the unendurable charge that they had somehow defiled their most sacred religious obligations. Still another would be leaders' avoidance of their own violent deaths at the hand of Israel, deaths that would be attributable to Israeli strategies of "targeted killing" and/or "regime-targeting" by Jerusalem. This last suggestion may be problematic, however,  to the extent that being killed by Jews for the sake of Allah could be regarded as a distinct positive. In this connection, we must recall that there is no greater form of power in world politics than power over death. Dying for the sake of Allah could be regarded in certain contexts as a clerically-blessed passport to heaven-bound immortality.

These tentative answers are only a beginning; indeed, they are little more than the beginning of a beginning.  Strategic problems are fundamentally intellectual problems. What is needed, now, is a sustained and conspicuously competent intellectual effort to answer such questions in much greater depth and breadth.

Clearly, Israel, in the future, will need to deal with both rational and irrational adversaries. In turn, these enemies will be both state and sub-state actors. On occasion, Israel’s leaders will even have to deal with various complex and nuanced combinations of rational and irrational enemies, sometimes simultaneously.

Israel must prepare to deal with “nuclear madmen,” both as terrorists and as national leaders, but, at the same time, it must fashion a suitable plan for dealing with nuclear adversaries who are neither mad nor irrational. With such an imperative, Israel must do everything possible to enhance its deterrence, preemption, defense and war-fighting capabilities. This means, inter alia, enhanced and explicit preparations for certain “last resort” operations.

Concerning any prospective contributions to Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable preparations for a Samson Option could serve to convince certain would-be attackers that aggression would not be gainful. This is especially true if such Israeli preparations were combined with certain levels of disclosure, that is, if Israel’s  “Samson” weapons were made to appear sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first-strikes, and if these weapons were identifiably “countervalue” (counter-city) in mission function.

The Samson Option, by definition, would be executed with countervalue-targeted nuclear weapons. It is likely that any such last-resort operations would come into play only after all Israeli counterforce options had been exhausted.

Concerning the previously mentioned “rationality of pretended irrationality,” Samson could enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a national willingness to take existential risks, but this would hold true only if Israeli last-resort options were directed toward rational adversaries.

Concerning prospective contributions to preemption options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince Israeli leaders that their own defensive first-strikes could be undertaken with diminished expectations of unacceptably destructive enemy retaliations. This sort of convincing would depend, at least in part, upon antecedent Israeli government decisions on disclosure (that is, an end to “nuclear ambiguity”); on Israeli perceptions of the effects of disclosure on enemy retaliatory prospects;  on Israeli judgments about enemy perceptions of Samson weapons’ vulnerability; and on an enemy awareness of Samson’s countervalue force posture. In almost any event, the time to end Israel’s “bomb in the basement” policy will soon be at hand.

Similar to Samson’s plausible impact upon Israeli nuclear deterrence, last-resort preparations could enhance Israeli preemption options by displaying a clear and verifiable willingness to accept certain existential risks. In this scenario, however, Israeli leaders must always bear in mind that pretended irrationality could become a double-edged sword. Brandished too flagrantly, and without sufficient nuance, any Israeli preparations for a Samson Option could actually impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear war-fighting options.

Concerning prospective contributions to Israel’s nuclear war fighting options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince enemy states that a clear victory over Israel would be impossible. With such reasoning, it would be important for Israel to communicate to potential aggressors the following very precise understanding: Israel’s counter value-targeted Samson weapons are additional to its counterforce-targeted war fighting weapons. Without such a communication, any preparations for a Samson Option could impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear warfighting options.

Undoubtedly, as was formally concluded by Project Daniel more than seven years ago (see Israel’s Strategic Future, the Report of Project Daniel), nuclear warfighting should always be avoided by Israel wherever possible. But, just as undeniably, there are some circumstances in which such exchanges could be unavoidable. Here, some form of nuclear warfighting could ensue, so long as: (a) enemy state first-strikes launched against Israel would not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) conventional Israeli preemptive strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capability; and (d) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capability. From the standpoint of protecting its overall existential security, this means that Israel must take appropriate steps to ensure the plausibility of (a) and (b), above, and also the implausibility of (c) and (d).

“Do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman?” This opening question from Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV does have considerable and immediate relevance to Israel’s existential dilemma. At the same time, the mounting strategic challenge to Israel will assuredly and primarily come from enemy decision-makers who are not-at-all mad, and who are altogether rational.  With this in mind, Israel will need to promptly fashion a comprehensive and suitably-calibrated strategic doctrine from which various specific policies and operations could readily be extrapolated. This focused framework would identify and correlate all available strategic options (deterrence, preemption, active defense, strategic targeting, nuclear war fighting) with evident and indisputable survival goals. It would also take close account of the possible interactions between these strategic options, and of the determinable synergies between all conceivable enemy actions directed against Israel. Figuring out these particular interactions and synergies will be a computational  task on the very highest order of intellectual difficulty.

Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational people can and must play, but to compete effectively and purposefully, a would-be winner must always first assess (1) the expected rationality of each critical opponent; and (2) the probable costs and benefits of pretending irrationality oneself. These are undoubtedly complex, interactive and glaringly uncertain forms of assessment, but they also constitute an utterly indispensable foundation for Israel’s long-term security.

“For by wise counsel,” we learn from Proverbs (24, 6), “Thou shalt make thy war.”


Louis René Beres - Jan 20, 2010 
The Jewish Press

The core of Israel's active defense plan remains the phased Arrow anti-ballistic missile program. Designed to intercept medium and short-range ballistic missiles, the various operationalized forms of Arrow (Hetz in Hebrew) are expected to deal especially with Iran's surface-to-surface missile threat. Basically a high stratospheric system, Arrow is also capable of low-altitude and multi-tactical ballistic missile interceptions.

For the moment, things seem to be looking good. Test results for the Arrow continue to be significant and promising. Indeed, they indicate not only the substantial mutual benefits of ongoing strategic cooperation between Washington and Tel-Aviv, but also the intrinsic technical promise of Israel's primary active defense system.

Yet, there are also some very important and underlying conceptual problems. Still faced with a steadily nuclearizing Iran, Israel must carefully consider whether it can rely entirely upon a suitable combination of deterrence and active defenses, or whether it must still also prepare for preemption. Can Israel live with a nuclear Iran? The answer to this question will have genuinely existential consequences for the Jewish State.

Israel's preemption option should now appear less urgent. Many strategic planners and scientists believe that the Arrow's repeated success in testing confirms that Israel is suitably prepared to deal with any Iranian nuclear missile attack. After all, on many occasions, the Israel Air Force has already successfully tested the Arrow against a missile precisely mocking Iran's Shihab-3.

In Israel, it seems, optimism should abound. On its face, it would appear that if Arrow were efficient in its expected reliability of interception, even an irrational Iranian adversary armed with nuclear and/or biological weapons could be dealt with effectively. Indeed, even if Israel's nuclear deterrent were somehow made irrelevant by an enemy state willing to risk an almost certain and massive "counter-value" Israeli reprisal, that aggressor's ensuing first-strike could still presumably be blocked by Arrow. So, we should now inquire, why even still consider preemption against Iran?

The meaningful answer lies in certain untenable assumptions about any system of ballistic missile defense. Israel's problem is essentially a generic one. No system of ballistic missile defense, anywhere, can ever be appraised as simply reliable or unreliable.

Operational reliability of intercept is a distinctly "soft" concept, and any missile defense system - however successful in its test results - will have "leakage." Of course, whether or not such leakage would fall within acceptable levels must ultimately depend largely upon the kinds of warheads fitted upon an enemy's incoming missiles. In this connection, the Arrow's commendable test successes might not necessarily be reproducible against faster and more advanced Iranian missiles.

Shall Israel now bet its collective life on a defensive capacity to fully anticipate and nullify offensive enemy capabilities?

In evaluating its rapidly disappearing preemption option vis-à-vis Iran, Israeli planners will need to consider very carefully the expected leakage rate of the Arrow. In principle, a tiny number of enemy missiles penetrating Arrow defenses could still be "acceptable" if their warheads contained "only" conventional high explosive, or even chemical high explosive. But if the incoming warheads were nuclear and/or biological, even an extremely low rate of leakage would certainly be intolerable.

A fully zero leakage-rate would be necessary to adequately protect Israel against any nuclear and/or biological warheads, and such a zero leakage-rate is unattainable. This means that Israel can never depend entirely upon its anti-ballistic missiles to defend against any future WMD attack from Iran, and that even a thoroughly capable Arrow system cannot obviate altogether Israel's preemption option. Moreover, even if Israel could somehow expect a 100% reliability of interception for Arrow- a technically inconceivable expectation - this would do nothing to blunt the unconventional threat from terrorist surrogates opting to use much shorter-range missiles, and/or delivery systems from ships, trucks or automobiles. Special points of vulnerability for Israel would obviously be in Lebanon, with Hezbollah proxies acting for Iran, and possibly also Gaza, where Iran-supported Hamas is currently developing dangerous new ties with al-Qaeda.

Israel must immediately strengthen its nuclear deterrence posture. To be deterred, a rational adversary will need to calculate that Israel's second-strike forces are plainly invulnerable to any first-strike aggressions. Facing the Arrow, this adversary will now require increasing numbers of missiles to achieve an assuredly destructive first-strike against Israel. The Arrow, therefore, will compel any rational adversary, including Iran, to at least delay an intended first-strike attack against Israel. With any non-rational adversary, however, all Israeli bets on deterrence would necessarily be off. A non-rational adversary would be one that does not value its own continued survival more highly than all other preferences.

In Iran, Israel still faces a state enemy whose undisguised preparations for attacking the Jewish State are authentically genocidal, and which may not always remain rational. Aware of this, Israel is not obligated to sit back passively, and simply respond after a nuclear and/or biological attack has already been absorbed.

International law is not a suicide pact. Israel has the same right granted to all states to act preemptively when facing an existential assault. Known formally as anticipatory self-defense, this general right is strongly affirmed in customary international law and in "the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations." It is also supported by the authoritative 1996 Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice.

Israel must continue to develop, test and implement an Arrow-based interception capability to match the growing threat dictated by enemy ballistic missiles. Simultaneously, it must also continue to prepare for certain possible preemptions, and to suitably enhance the credibility of its nuclear deterrent. Regarding such enhanced credibility, Israel must appropriately operationalize a recognizable second-strike force, one that is sufficiently hardened and dispersed, and that is ready to inflict a decisive retaliatory salvo against identifiable enemy cities.

Arrow is necessary for Israeli security, but it is not sufficient. To achieve a maximum level of security, Israel will also have to take appropriate and coordinated preparations for both deterrence and preemption. Moreover, ballistic missile defense will do nothing to thwart certain terrorist surrogates of Iran who could someday utilize ordinary modes of travel and transport as nuclear delivery vehicles.

Together with the U.S, Israel exists in the cross hairs of a far-reaching Jihad that that will likely not conform to any of the settled international rules of diplomacy and negotiation. Under no circumstances, can Israel and the U.S afford to allow a seventh-century view of the world to be combined with twenty-first century weapons of mass destruction. Left unimpeded in its relentless plan to nuclearize for war (so-called "economic sanctions" are not an impediment), Iran, in the future, could share certain of its atomic munitions with anti-American proxies in Iraq.

The Arrow-based ballistic missile defense is indispensable for Israel. But it is now critical for both Jerusalem and Washington to remember that it is also not enough. In the end, therefore, both Israel and the United States may still have to destroy Iran's pertinent nuclear infrastructures at their source.

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971), is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press. Professor of International Law at Purdue, he was chair of Project Daniel, a private nuclear advisory group to counsel former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He is also the author of many books and articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war.

DISTORTIONS OF OBAMA’S ROAD MAP AND MITCHELL PLAN
31 January 2010

Prof. Louis Rene Beres

Credo quia absurdum. "I believe because it is absurd." Arming Fatah against Hamas is a plainly foolish and self-defeating American foreign policy, one based on the utterly false presumption of a consequential difference between criminal terrorist organizations.  In the related matter of arming or otherwise supporting certain Sunni Arab states against Shiite Iran, our leaders in Washington and Jerusalem also exhibit another flagrant example of  “distorting the truth.”

Back in the 1990s, assorted Palestinian terrorist militias were already being trained by the CIA in “counter-terror tactics.” Now, a core component of the Obama Administration’s Palestinian policy is training the “moderate” Fatah-led Palestinian Authority “security service.” Still led by U.S. Lt. General Keith Dayton, this odd program is being supervised in Jordan. Energetically integrated into the so-called five-point Mitchell Plan, it seeks to push Israel into acceptance of an expanded deployment of “counter-terrorist” Fatah forces throughout the West Bank (Judea/Samaria). Inevitably, of course, this would hasten the arrival of a terror-state in “Palestine.”

The Obama administration understandably seeks some sort of tangible balance among states in the Middle East. But in today's  complex world politics, where sub-state actors often assume very critical roles, antiquated policies of  contrived "equilibrium" are destined to fail. This is especially the case when one considers the inherently destabilizing impact of Iranian nuclear weapons, a future impact made possible by the persistent American and Israeli unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious futility of "sanctions."

Prudently attentive to the President of the United States,  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will reluctantly stay close to the prescribed Mitchell Plan version of the Road Map.  Supporters of this latest expression of a "Middle East Peace Process" (before highway metaphors became fashionable,  there was “Oslo”) will continue to base their principal argument on a series of manifestly unwarranted assumptions.  Assessing all ascertainable evidence, and all explicit Palestinian  threats, it should already be obvious that absolutely no process of unilateral dismemberment (former Prime Minister Sharon called it "disengagement;" successor Prime Minister Olmert called it  “realignment”) can bring peaceful resolution to what is fundamentally a religious dispute between Israel and the recalcitrant Arabs.
The essential Israeli struggle against Arab/Islamic genociders (what else should one call adversaries who seek Israel's destruction "in whole or in part"?) has little or nothing to do with territory. Rather, it has to do with an altogether irreconcilable configuration of enemies that seeks not land, but religious hegemony. Ultimately, Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu should finally recognize that  these particular Islamic enemies seek something far more  personal than any kind of political settlement. In the final analysis, what they seek is nothing less than immortality.
In all world politics, there is no greater form of power than the power over death. The core dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is thus not about any sort of secular or territorial compromise; it is about God.  From 1948 to the present, the Arab/Islamic world's authentically existential opposition to Israel has stemmed preeminently from a deeply doctrinal hatred of a Jewish state in its midst – indeed, of any Jewish state that dares to defile the Dar al Islam.

Now, truly basic questions need to be asked. If Arab/Islamic opposition to Israel were only about West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza, why, then, were there so many Arab terrorist attacks against Jews between 1948 and 1967? Then, these disputed territories were in Arab hands? What, exactly, were these terrorists seeking to "liberate" before there were even any “Israel-occupied territories?" What, in fact, were Arab terrorists trying to accomplish before Israel even became a state?

For that significantly sizeable portion of the Arab/Islamic world that remains dedicated to Israel’s annihilation, an inventive cartography is part of a wider strategy of genocide. To understand this, we must recall that in the generally accepted Arab/Islamic view, Israel is always the individual Jew writ large.  The Jewish State, any Jewish state,  must always be loathed. This easily documented and nefarious deduction is a far cry from the persistently wishful  view of Oslo/Road Map/Mitchell Plan/Disengagement/Realignment supporters - that is, that Israel is despised only because it is Zionist, because it is an "occupier."

Israel is hated in the Arab/Islamic world because it is the singular Jew in macrocosm.  Period! That is the whole story. All else is commentary. All else amounts to offers of land for nothing.

An authoritative expression of this Islamic view is stated unambiguously in a widely-cited article from Al-Ahram. Here, the religiously prominent Dr. Lufti Abd al-Azim wrote straightforwardly and portentously:

The first thing 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 killer of Deir Yasin or the killer of the camps. They are equal examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such distinctions and talk about Jews.

The regionally and Islamically revered Dr. Abd al-Azim is not alone in this revealing position. A current Egyptian textbook on Arab Islamic History – one widely used in teacher training colleges - expresses the following parallel sentiments:

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 that they had planned. We today must follow this way and purify Palestine from their filth.

We may also consider some very recent postings from the Muslim Brotherhood Children's Website (based in Egypt, a country allegedly "at peace" with Israel):

Did you know that the Jews murdered 25 of the Prophets of Allah, and that their black history is full of crimes of murder and corruption?

Did you know that the criminal Jews frequently revile and curse our Lord?
 

Did you know that the Jews made several attempts to murder our beloved Prophet, but that Allah the Omnipotent saved him from their plot?

Did you know that the corruption and deviance widespread in the world today are the result of activity and planning by the Jews, who are interested in leading people astray, away from the path of Allah?

Did you know that the Jews who occupy our land and our holy places in beloved Palestine are planning to occupy the rest of the Muslim countries and to establish a Greater Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile, and that they are interested in excavating in the tomb of our beloved Prophet?

Did you know that today the Jews are inciting the entire world against Islam and the Muslims, on the pretext of the war against terror?

And so it goes.

How, then, shall we understand President Obama's unswerving position on Palestinian statehood?  How, too, shall we understand other current advocates of the so-called "peace process?"

Some supporters of the Road Map and its attendant disengagements and realignments, preferring to simply disregard the widely prevailing Arab/Islamic image of Israel as a pathology,  base their flawed position on a problematic acceptance of the Palestinian claim to the remaining "territories" (Judea/Samaria).  Leaving aside the very questionable nature of the underlying demographic argument (e.g., the commonly stated and unsupported assertion that current Palestinians are descended directly from the ancient Canaanites), these supporters conveniently ignore the continuous Jewish presence in these lands. They also ignore that more than one million Palestinians are now full citizens of Israel. This is a juridical condition that is hardly mirrored in the Arab world, where 900,000 Jews were slaughtered or expelled from area states after 1948, and which presently denies Jews any remotely parallel rights of nationality.  Yet, it is the Palestinians - not the Israelis - who cling relentlessly to the idea of Jihad or holy war.

The unchanging struggle to evict the Jews from "all of Palestine" (that is, from Israel proper, as well as from Judea/Samaria/Gaza), is driven by this idea. According to Islamic orthodoxy, the Prophet is said to have predicted a final war to annihilate the Jews.  Mohammed, it is reported, had stated:  "The hour (i.e., salvation) will not come until you fight against the Jews; and the stone would say, `O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me: come and kill him.'"   

Israel's Peace Process supporters, in advancing Palestinian legal claims, forget, inter alia,  that the PLO had openly urged Saddam Hussein to launch annihilatory attacks upon Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Yassir Arafat had enthusiastically embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, sending units of the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) to actively assist with the inter-Arab killing, rape and torture of Kuwaitis. Following the Iraqi aggression in early August 1991, Arafat and the PLO had plainly and vigorously supported Baghdad.  

At the Cairo Summit of August 10, 1990, Arafat deflected attention from the invasion toward the crises in Afghanistan and Kashmir.  Abdul Abbas sent his own paramilitary forces into the occupied state to help "police" the sheikhdom.  So, too, did the PFLP's George Habash and the DFLP's Nayef Hawatmeh. At the time, Mohammed Milhem, a senior aide to Arafat, publicly threatened Fatah-led terrorism "everywhere" in support of Iraq.  Today, U.S. President Barack Obama uses American tax dollars to "train" Fatah "security forces." Doesn’t anyone remember U.S. aid to the Afghan "freedom fighters" then called Mujahedeen?

Arab/Islamic critics of Israel often speak of sinister Jewish migrations to “Palestine” after World War I, neglecting to mention that (1) there has been a substantial and continuous Jewish presence in the land for over three thousand years; and (2) there has been a steady Jewish majority in Jerusalem.   Nor do they bother to  recall that after World War II, when the General Assembly proposed to partition Palestine, this offer followed an earlier (1922)  illegal partition by the British which gave almost 80% of the land promised to the Jews by the Balfour Declaration to create the Arab state of Trans Jordan.  From the standpoint of authoritative international law at the time of the 1947 partition vote in the United Nations, the Jews had already been unlawfully deprived of four-fifths of their lawful entitlement.

How did protracted warfare first arise between Israel and the Arabs?. Not even militant Arab leaders or anti-Zionist historians could conceivably accept the view that the 1948-49 conflict was a war of Jewish origin.  On February 16, 1948, the U.N. Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council:  "Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."   Ironically, the Arabs themselves were entirely honest in accepting responsibility for starting the war. Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16, 1948:  "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting.  We did not deny this.  We told the whole world that we were going to fight."  

As for the British commander of Jordan's Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, he remarked candidly:  "Early in January, the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria.  Some came through Jordan and even through Amman.... They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine."

The State of Israel came into being on May 14, 1948.  The five Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Trans Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq immediately invaded the new microstate.  Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, expressed their combined intention publicly:  "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." In terms of international law, the Arab League thus spoke from the beginning in unhidden support of genocide. This is hardly surprising, especially in view of their candid and warm personal cooperation with Hitler and the Axis against the Allies in World War II.

Israel's critics maintain that the 1967 War was one of Israeli aggression, rather than a war of Israeli self-defense.  Yet, on May 15, Israel's Independence Day, Egyptian troops began moving into the Sinai, massing near the Israeli border.  By May 18, Syrian troops, too, were preparing for battle along the Golan Heights, 3000 feet above the Galilee, from where they had freely shelled Israel's farms and villages for years.  Egypt's Nasser ordered the U.N. Emergency Force (UNEF), stationed in the Sinai since 1956, to withdraw, whereupon the Voice of the Arabs proclaimed, on May 18, 1967:

As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel.  We shall exercise patience no more.  We shall not complain any more to the UN about Israel.  The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.

Two days later, an enthusiastic echo came from Hafez Assad, then Syria's Defense Minister, who proclaimed:  "Our forces are now entirely ready...to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland.... The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation."   President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq joined the voluptuous chorus of genocidal threats:  "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified.  This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy, which has been with us since 1948.  Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map."  

"...to wipe Israel off the map"? Does this sound familiar, today?

On June 4, Iraq formally joined the military alliance with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Damascus regime's commitment to military final solutions for Israel has been described by scholars Ahmed S. Khalidi and Hussein Agha as stemming from "...an apparently strong conviction that the struggle with Israel is no mere political or territorial dispute, but rather a clash of destinies affecting the fate and future of the Middle East."  Syria's approach to Israel, say Khalidi and Agha, remains "bound up with the view that force, whether active or passive, is the final arbiter of the conflict with Israel, and the ultimate guarantor of any settlement in the area."

Was Israel the aggressor in 1967, as the Arabs and their supporters continue to maintain?  It hardly seems possible.  The jurisprudential correctness of Israel's resort to anticipatory self-defense was well established in longstanding customary international law,  in the "general principles of law recognized by civilized nations," and in the "teachings of the highly-qualified publicists" (all authoritative sources identified at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice).

International law is not a suicide pact.  Israel could not have been expected to wait patiently for its own annihilation.  Indeed, when the Government of Golda Meir decided not to exercise the lawful option of anticipatory self-defense in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria were preparing to launch yet another war of genocidal aggression against the Jewish State,  Israel almost paid for it with its own collective disappearance.  

Although Israel eventually prevailed against the Arab aggressors, it did so at a staggering cost in human life. The Yom Kippur War produced 2326 deaths of  Israeli soldiers, nearly ten thousand injuries, and hundreds of prisoners.  These costs to Israel were the direct results of A'man's (Military Intelligence Branch) failure to predict the Arab attack, a failure still known in Israel's intelligence community as the Mechdal, a Hebrew term meaning "omission," "nonperformance" or "neglect."

The Arabs argue that Israel has no legitimate claim on Jerusalem.  Yet, Jerusalem has long been a Jewish city, and calling for an end to Israel's sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem is simply a call for an end to Israel.  Ironically, when, in 1947, the United Nations called for an international (U.N.-administered) city, it was not the Jews - but the Arabs - who refused.  

When the Jordanian army seized the Old City during its war of aggression against Israel in 1948, it promptly desecrated all Jewish holy sites in the area, turned Jewish cemeteries and synagogues into urinals, and cruelly murdered all Jews who remained on the Jordanian side of the 1948 armistice line.  Of course, Jordanian control over East Jerusalem from 1949 - 1967 was flagrantly unacceptable under international law. This is the case from the standpoints of both the Arab kingdom's illegal method of acquisition, and of its subsequently brutal methods of occupation.

Do President Obama and Israel's own Road Map supporters object to these earlier and egregious violations of international law by the Kingdom of Jordan?  If they do, they are doing it very quietly. To date, they certainly haven't even mentioned them.

The viscerally fashionable statement that "Jerusalem is holy to all three monotheistic religions" is now generally taken as prima facie true. Yet, for Muslims, even for those who regard the city as their own because of its presumed Canaanite origins, it is not Jerusalem, but the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, that is religiously paramount.  It is Mecca, not Jerusalem, to which Muslims must pilgrimage at least once.  

For Christians,  Jerusalem contains some, but not all, of their holiest shrines.  For Jews, all main holy sites are within the post-1967 Jerusalem municipal borders, or in very close proximity.

At prayer anywhere in the world,  Jews face toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  Muslims, even those praying on the Mount, face away from it, towards Mecca.  When they pray on the Mount, Muslims have their backs toward the Dome of the Rock, while those praying in the Al-Aqsa mosque also look away from Jerusalem, and toward Mecca.  

In the Jewish Holy Scriptures, Jerusalem is mentioned 656 times. Jerusalem's well-being is central to all Jewish prayer.  In the Koran, Jerusalem is never mentioned; not even once. With the brief exception of the Crusader period, no conqueror of Jerusalem made the city his capital.  Driven into exile by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., the Jews returned fifty years later, and rebuilt Jerusalem as their capital.  It was the capital of the Jews, yet again, under the Maccabees.

The rights of both Jews and Christians were openly trampled on by the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem.  Churches were made into mosques.  Slaughterhouses were deliberately established near Jewish places of worship.  Mosques were built next to churches and synagogues just so their minarets could literally “overtower” them.
In the 2554 years between 587 B.C.E. and 1967 C.E., Jerusalem was conquered more than twenty times, and, as part of many empires, was ruled from different and distant capital cities.  Only for the Jews (for more than 650 years), for the Crusaders (for 188 years), and for the State of Israel (since 1949) has Jerusalem served as a capital city.

The official map of "Palestine" issued by the Palestine Authority (PA) shows the projected State of Palestine as comprising all of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza, all of the State of Israel, and even a “slice” of the Kingdom of Jordan.  Additionally, it excludes any reference to a Jewish population, listing holy sites of Christians and Muslims only.  An official cartographer, Khalil Tufakji, was commissioned by the PA to design and to locate a proposed Capitol Building. This he drew to be located on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. It would be constructed, he indicated, directly on top of an ancient Jewish cemetery.

From the Oslo Accords’ very beginnings, on September 1, 1993, Yasser Arafat reaffirmed that the "peace" agreements were an intrinsic part of the PLO's 1974 phased plan for Israel's destruction: "The agreement will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestinian National Council resolution issued in 1974....The PNC resolution issued in 1974 calls for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws or which is liberated..." Ominously, on May 29, 1994, Rashid Abu Shbak, a senior PA security official, had remarked:  "The light which has shone over Gaza and Jericho will also reach the Negev and the Galilee."

Speaking of maps, it will be instructive to consider the following:  The Arab world is comprised of 22 states of nearly five million square miles and 150,000,0000 people.  The Islamic world contains 44 states with well over one billion people.  The Islamic states comprise an area 672 times the size of Israel.  Israel, with a population of about six million Jews, is - together with Judea/Samaria - less than half the size of San Bernardino County in California.  The Sinai Desert, which Israel presented to Egypt in the 1979 Treaty, is itself three times larger than the entire State of Israel.

What about the history of  Palestinian compliance with the so-called Peace Process? Incontestably the PA and Hamas  are both guilty of multiple material breaches of the original Oslo Accords.  For example:

1.    PA/Hamas still fail to confiscate arms and to disarm militias.  The Palestinian police (still drawing upon terrorists for recruitment) are legally obligated to disarm all militias acting in areas under its jurisdiction, to confiscate all weapons other than pistols, and to license pistols in accordance with regulations to be established by the two sides (Annex I, Art. II, 1 and art. XI).  In fact, all of the militias which were operating when the PA first assumed control over Gaza and Jericho - Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah - remain armed.  In total violation of the Oslo Accords and the successor Road Map,  Hamas - even after Israel's Operation Cast Lead - is still establishing a thriving military industry in Gaza, still complete with extensive cross-border smuggling from Egypt.  Even before Prime Minister Sharon's ill-fated "disengagement" from Gaza,  Hamas had established multiple factories for manufacturing various kinds of ammunition.  Moreover, and notwithstanding U.S. President Barack Obama's support of the Road Map, Hamas is now actively engaged in assorted and growing collaborations with al Qaeda.  

2.    The PA still refuses to present Israel with lists of Palestinian policemen.  To enable Israel to prevent terrorists from joining the Palestinian police force (an expectation that Israel has consistently been unable to satisfy), the PA is obligated to submit the list of all potential recruits for Israel's approval (Annex I, Art. IV, 4).  This requirement is especially critical regarding those Palestinians who were initially recruited from those areas where Hamas and Islamic Jihad influence has always been particularly strong.  The PA has never submitted any of the names from when it recruited forces for Gaza and Jericho.  The PA repeated its codified commitment concerning recruitment for the additional areas governed by the Interim Agreement, but it has still continued and enlarged  its policy of systematic noncompliance.

3.    The PA has long exceeded the permissible number of policemen.  The early Gaza-Jericho Accords of May 1994 limited the number of Palestinian policemen to 9000 (Annex I, Art. III, 3), but during the period when the PA controlled these two areas they enrolled approximately 20,000 people in their so-called "security forces." The Interim Agreement expanded the PA's jurisdiction to additional parts of Judea/Samaria, and increased the permissible number of policemen to 24,000 in areas A and B, including Gaza (Annex I, Art. IV, 3).  Early on, however, the PA police signed on more than 30,000 men and perhaps as many as 40,000 or even 50,000.  This would suggest that the PA police have always been recruited not as a police agency, but as an army.

4.    The PA still continues to refuse to extradite any suspected terrorists.  The PA is still obligated to turn over to Israel for trial all individuals for whom Israel provides an arrest warrant and proof of terrorist activity (Annex IV, II, 7).  Yet, to date, Israel has requested several hundred suspects in mass murder, murder or attempted murder of Israelis, and not one has been handed over to Israeli authorities.  Leading PA officials have made it perfectly clear that they have absolutely no intention of honoring the extradition provisions of the Oslo Accords, and that they will continue their wholesale illegal intransigence under the Road Map. Reciprocally, it should be pointed out, Israel has absolutely no right under international law to free terrorists – an egregious practice which has been accepted by several successive Israeli governments, and always with deeply regrettable human outcomes.

5.    The PA has failed entirely to use its court system for the punishment of terrorists.  The Palestinian police are obligated to "arrest and prosecute individuals who are suspected of perpetrating acts of terror and violence." (Annex I, Art. II, 1).  Yet, for years, not one of the top leaders of the military wings of PA, Hamas or Islamic Jihad has been sentenced in this regard - a policy of flagrant Palestinian law-violation that continues without apology, and assuredly without any sanctions from the so-called “international community.”

6.    The PA leadership has become more rather than less complicit in its persistent incitement to terror. The Palestinian leadership is obligated to refrain from incitement to terrorism (Art. XXII). Yet, there have been many statements by PA government officials calling stridently for Jihad, and praising those who have brought unspeakable death to Israeli men, women and children.  

The list of PA violations of Oslo goes on and on.  There is the incontestable failure to prevent incitement (codified at Annex 1, Art. II, 35);  harassment of suspected former collaborators (codified at Art. XVI); failure to provide information on Israeli MIAs (codified at Art. XXVIII of the Interim Agreement and at Art. XIX of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement); the failure to change the PLO Covenant (codified at Art. XXXII), a failure that means that the PA (let alone Hamas) has still not renounced its intent to annihilate the Jewish State;  the abuse of human rights and the rule of law (codified at Art. XIX);  the failure to control PA police activity in eastern Jerusalem (codified at Annex I of both agreements - the Gaza-Jericho Accord and the Interim Agreement - which carefully delineate the areas in which the Palestinian security forces may operate).

There are other PA/Hamas violations of Oslo, any one of which could comprise an entire magazine article.  They include unilaterally halting security cooperation with Israel, in contradiction to Art. II(2) of Annex I to the Oslo Accords; failing to coordinate movement of Palestinian police (under Art. V(6) of Annex I to Oslo 2; the movement of Palestinian policemen between Area A and Area B, or in Area C, must be coordinated in advance with Israeli security officials;  detaining Israeli citizens (according to Art. XI (4d) of Annex I to the Oslo Accord:  "Israelis shall under no circumstances be apprehended or placed in custody or prison by Palestinian authorities."); failing to enforce restrictions on Visitor's Permits (under Art. 28 (13b) of Annex III to the Oslo 2 Accords, "The Palestinian side will notify Israel of any extension."); and constructing, without authorization, a Gaza strip sea port and the Dahaniye airport (the first in violation of Art. XIV (4) of Annex I to the Oslo 2 Accords - the second in violation of Art. XIII(3) of Annex I to the Oslo 2 Accords).

Generally, both Israeli and Arab proponents of "peace" feel that, for Israel, the Oslo agreements and Road Map represent a pretty good bargain.  Ignoring the entire history of genocide against Jews that led to Israel's statehood in the first place, they neglect to consider that this "bargain" will ultimately involve nothing less than another Jewish Diaspora.  But there is no more contrived component of the pro-Peace Process argument than this one:  Accommodation (surrender) to the Palestinians opens the way to subsequent peace treaties with Syria and Lebanon. Along with peace treaties already signed with Egypt and Jordan, these new agreements will leave Israel in a state of peace - for the very first time - with all its immediate neighbors. However, looking at (1) the aforementioned map of Palestine (which incorporates the current State of Israel), (2) the aforelisted PA/Hamas violations of Oslo - especially the refusal even to abrogate a codification of genocidal intent - and (3)  the incessant Arab and Islamic calls for Jihad, is there any reason to believe that Israel's enemies will now subordinate their overriding doctrinal and religious expectations to the diametrically opposite expectations of international law?  
There is no greater power in all world politics, especially in the Islamic Middle East,  than power over death.

More precisely, regarding these doctrinal and religious expectations, it will be helpful to consider the following 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:  "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."

Have Israeli and American supporters of the current Road Map forgotten that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had defended his 1979 Treaty with Israel in the Arab world by identifying it as no more than a tactical expedient?  President Sadat claimed that the Treaty was "founded upon Islamic rules, because it arises from a position of strength, after the holy war and victory Egypt achieved on 10th Ramadan 1393"(October 1973). Generally overlooked, the Treaty  provides a legally permissible rationale for abrogation by Egypt.  A minute to Article VI, paragraph 5, of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty stipulates:  "It is agreed to by the Parties that there is no assertion that this Treaty prevails over other Treaties or agreements, or that other Treaties or agreements prevail over this Treaty."   

In keeping with standard practice throughout the Arab/Islamic world, Al Da'wa ,The Mission, a prominent Islamic publication, has identified the status of Israel with the status of the individual Jew.  Here, as we have noted earlier about authoritative Arab/Islamic views in general, Israel is merely rendered as the Jew in macrocosm:  "The race (sic) is corrupt at the root, full of duplicity, and the Muslims have everything to lose in seeking to deal with them; they must be exterminated."   

Following are some earlier statements by senior PA officials, all of which were flagrantly anti-Jewish, and several of which incorporated sordid anti-Jewish stereotypes. They complement the earlier-cited Arab/Islamic quotations about Jews and Judaism: (1) "Five Zionist Jews are running the policy of the United States in the Middle East:  Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Dennis Ross, Miller and Martin Indyk.  It is not possible that the American nation, which consists of 250 million people (sic), can not find anyone other than five Zionist Jews to conduct the peace process with the Palestinians."  PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Middein, Yediot Ahronot,  April 13, 1997  (2)  "We are fighting and struggling with an enemy who is Shylock.  We must know that he is Shylock."  Othman Abu Gharbiya, PA Chairman Arafat's Adviser on National Political Guidance, in a radio interview, Voice of Palestine, March 15, 1997  (3) "The Jewish lobby is working very hard to jeopardize the process."  Former PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, in an interview,  Beirut Daily Star,  March 25, 1997,  Agence France Presse,  March 26, 1997  (4) "Israeli authorities...infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus during the years of the intifada."  Palestinian representative Nabil Ramlawi at a session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva,  Jerusalem Post,  March 17 1997.  

The theme of Palestine as the predestined grave of Israel, and of the Jews in general, is a persistent motif in Arab/Islamic orientations toward Israel.  Here, the following claim, made more than a generation ago by Dr. Yahya al-Rakhawi in Al-Akhbar, the organ of Egypt's Liberal Party,  is still typical:  "When the State of Israel was established and. was recognized by many, in both East and West, one of the reasons for this recognition was the desire of the people in the East and West to get rid of as many as possible of the representatives of that human error known as the Jews.  Behind this motive was another, secret purpose: to concentrate them in one place, so that it would be easier to strike at the right moment."

Neither strategically nor jurisprudentially are war and genocide mutually exclusive. Certain of Israel's Islamic enemies are now making preparations for just such a strike.  Principal among these, of course, is the Islamic Republic of Iran. To assist in these exterminatory preparations, an ongoing war of terror and attrition against the Jewish State is laying the foundations for the eventually planned war of annihilation.  

Although it may no longer be possible for Israel to entirely prevent such a war,  a war that could involve various forms of unconventional weapons, the government of Israel may still diminish expected harms by recalling the true history of Arab-Israeli conflict, and by finally extricating their beleaguered country from the inevitably lethal consequences of Oslo and the Mitchell Plan Road Map. To begin, it ought not to cooperate with the United States in training Fatah “security forces.” In essence, these elements represent little more than the dedicated vanguard of future anti-Israel and anti-American terrorism.

Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.”

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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on Israeli and US foreign and military policies. He was Chair of Project Daniel.

Louis René Beres
26 January 2010

C’est beau, n’est-ce pas, la fin du monde? (“It is beautiful, isn’t it, the end of the world?”)
Jean Giraudoux, Sodome et Gomorrhe

There is a widely unrecognized but still-meaningful irony in the continuing saga of Iranian nuclearization. From the standpoint of President Ahmadinejad and his clerical masters in Tehran , any prospect of hastening the Shiite apocalypse should naturally be welcomed. In the United States and Israel , on the other hand, any conscious encouragement of a Final Battle  between "Good" and "Evil" must be strenuously rejected.

Whatever Scriptural expectations of End Times may be found embedded in Judaism and Christianity, and however seriously they may be accepted among particular American and Israeli populations, these expressly apocalyptic visions are always rejected as plausible policy options.

This is as it should be. There exists, among all the major national players in the   Iran nuclear drama, a more or less acceptable element of eschatology. But this potentially tragic drama is fashioned out of starkly polar opposites. The all-consuming apocalyptic violence that could seem altogether positive and purifying in Tehran , would appear plainly negative and even grievously defiling in both Washington and Jerusalem .

To avoid further acquiescence in the “fate” planned for them in Tehran (economic sanctions clearly and predictably have had no remedial effect on President Ahmadinejad’s nuclear decisional calculus), Israel and/or the United States may ultimately have to take some form of appropriate military action. It is, however,  already very late for any effective preemption against relevant Iranian nuclear assets and infrastructures. It is also very unlikely (perhaps even inconceivable) that now Nobel Peace laureate, U.S. President Barack Obama, would display the extraordinary will needed to undertake such a problematic and controversial (albeit, possibly law-enforcing and life-saving) operation.

President Obama does hint oddly and obliquely at a regrettable military remedy, reprisal, but it is one that could only be ex post. Retaliation, unlike preemption, can come only after the fact. It cannot prevent nuclear aggression; it can merely promise (more or less persuasively) some forms of punishment.

In the case of Ahmadinejad’s Iran , preemption represents a threat that could be disregarded entirely in deference to far more deeply felt religious obligations. Here, acting as the individual suicide bomber in macrocosm, Iran would offer itself as an eager national Shahada, ready and willing to accept a collective Death for Allah. As expressed in the epigraph by the dramatist Jean Giraudoux, the imagined end of the world, for some, can  be “terribly beautiful.”

Sometimes an oxymoron may have a proper place, even in cold and hard matters of military strategy. In this connection, few Iran watchers have paid any serious attention to an utterly critical point: Nuclear deterrence can exist only between fully rational adversaries – that is, between enemies who share an overriding commitment to collective self-preservation. For Israel and/or the United States , any standoff with an already nuclear Iran could thus be very different from what once obtained between America and the Soviet Union . This would not be your father’s Cold War.

Who should conduct a preemptive attack against selected Iranian hard targets if all else fails?  Naturally, the political and operational difficulties for Israel would be much greater than for the United States. Yet, for Israel to do nothing substantial to defend itself from an openly existential assault – to allow a potentially apocalyptic Islamic regime to “go nuclear” – could be suicidal.
Echoing the seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, no state, wrote Thomas Jefferson, ever has the right of national suicide. Rather, every state’s first obligation is always the assurance of protection. Innocent life must be preserved. When Iranian leaders openly proclaim belief in the Shiite apocalypse, a series of final battles presumed indispensable for transforming the profane “world of war” into the sacred “world of Islam,” very far-reaching and possibly problematic measures of self-defense must immediately be considered.

Might “justice” have another face in this particular strategic matter? Some would argue indignantly against any American and/or Israeli preemption on the grounds of a presumed need for nuclear “equity.” Israel already has nuclear weapons, goes this disingenuous argument.

Why, then, should Iran be treated differently? International law speaks repeatedly of “sovereign equality.” Isn’t there an evident lack of “fairness” in denying to Iran what has tacitly been allowed to Israel ?

Consider this: Israel 's nuclear forces remain deliberately ambiguous and undeclared.  Certainly, they have never been brandished in a threatening fashion by Israel 's civilian or military leaders. Nor does Israel ever call for wiping any other state “off the map.”

Israel 's nuclear weapons exist only to protect the Jewish state from extraordinary forms of aggression. Understandably, this includes the prevention of another Jewish genocide and related crimes against humanity.

Israel 's nuclear deterrent force would never be used except in defensive reprisal for massive enemy first strikes. In practice, this now means essentially Iranian attacks involving nuclear and/or certain biological weapons. For the time being, none of Israel 's enemies is nuclear, but – naturally - this could change.

If it should actually have to face nuclear enemies one day, a not-improbable scenario, Israel could choose to rely upon its own nuclear weapons to reduce the risks of unconventional war. But such reliance would make strategic sense only insofar as the newly-nuclear enemy state(s) would (1) remain rational; and (2) remain convinced that Israel would retaliate with nuclear weapons if attacked with nuclear and/or devastating biological weapons.

For Israel and its also imperiled U.S. ally (let’s not forget that American military power is now extremely stretched and limited), there would  be very complex problems to solve if an enemy state such as Iran were ultimately permitted to "go nuclear." These problems would undermine the conceptually neat but decidedly unrealistic notion of any balanced nuclear deterrence in the region, a notion now gaining increasing popularity in both Washington and Jerusalem . The Middle East could not sustain the comforting equilibrium that had once characterized U.S.-Soviet relations. Whether for reasons of miscalculation, accident, unauthorized capacity to fire, outright irrationality or the presumed imperatives of "Jihad," an enemy state in this fevered neighborhood could conceivably opt to launch a nuclear first-strike against Israel in spite of Israel ’s own obvious and forseeably secure nuclear capability.  In short, a Cold War type of  “Mutual Assured Destruction” (a so-called “balance of terror”) could not exist in the present Middle East .

After absorbing any enemy nuclear aggression, Israel would certainly respond with a nuclear retaliatory strike. Although nothing is publicly known about Israel 's precise targeting doctrine, such a reprisal would likely be launched against the aggressor's capital city and/or against similarly high-value urban targets. There would be absolutely no assurances, in response to this sort of aggression, that Israel would limit itself to striking back against exclusively military targets. This point should not be lost on the authoritative decision makers in Tehran .

What if enemy first strikes were to involve "only" chemical and/or "minor" biological weapons? In this case, Israel might still launch a presumptively proportionate nuclear reprisal, but this would depend largely upon Israel 's calculated expectations of follow-on aggression, and on its associated determinations of comparative damage-limitation. Should Israel absorb a massive conventional first-strike, a nuclear retaliation could not necessarily be ruled out. This is plausible if: (1) the aggressor were perceived to hold nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction in reserve; and/or (2) Israel's leaders were to believe that non-nuclear retaliations could not prevent national annihilation.

Recognizing Israel 's exceptionally small size, the calculated threshold of existential harms would be determinably lower than Israel ’s total physical devastation.

Facing imminent existential attacks, Israel, even if it had delayed too long, could still decide to preempt enemy aggression with conventional forces. The targeted state's response would then determine Israel 's subsequent moves. If this response were in any way nuclear, Israel would undertake nuclear counter-retaliation.

If this enemy retaliation were to involve chemical and/or biological weapons, Israel might also plan to take a quantum escalatory initiative. This sort of initiative is known in military parlance as "escalation dominance.” It could be necessary (even indispensable) to Israel ’s preservation of intra-war deterrence. Here we need to bear in mind that deterrence does not necessarily cease functioning immediately upon the commencement of hostilities. It can continue to play a different but still more or less productive role during the ensuing conflict.

If an enemy state's response to an Israeli preemption were limited to hard-target conventional strikes, it is improbable that Israel would resort to nuclear counter-retaliation. But if the enemy state's conventional retaliation were an all-out strike directed toward Israel 's civilian populations as well as to Israeli military targets, an Israeli nuclear counter-retaliation could not be excluded. Such a counter-retaliation could be ruled out only if the enemy state's conventional retaliations were entirely proportionate to Israel 's preemption; confined entirely to Israeli military targets; circumscribed by the legal limits of "military necessity"; and accompanied by explicit and verifiable assurances of no further escalation.

It is almost inconceivable that Israel would ever decide to preempt any enemy state aggression with a nuclear defensive strike. While particular circumstances could arise where such a defensive strike would be completely rational, and also be entirely lawful according to the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (which refused to prohibit certain residual resorts to nuclear weapons that are deemed essential to national survival), it is unreasonable that Israel would ever permit itself to reach such all-or-nothing circumstances.  Also worth mentioning is that Israel remains pledged to the “purity of arms” (Tohar HaNeshek), and to incomparably strict compliance with humanitarian international law, especially the minimization of collateral (non-combatant) harms.

An Israeli nuclear preemption is highly improbable, and could conceivably be expected only if: (1) Israel’s enemy or enemies had unexpectedly acquired nuclear or other unconventional weapons presumed capable of destroying the Jewish State; (2) this enemy state had been forthright that its genocidal intentions paralleled its capabilities; (3) this state was reliably believed ready to begin a final countdown-to-launch; and (4) Israel believed that non-nuclear preemptions could not possibly achieve levels of damage-limitation consistent with its own national survival.  To reject altogether this particular argument on Israeli nuclear preemption as impossible or implausible, however,  would require an antecedent assumption that national self-preservation is not Israel ’s highest priority. This assumption would be incorrect.

The primary point of Israel's nuclear forces must always be deterrence ex ante, not preemption or reprisal ex post. If, however, nuclear weapons should ever be introduced into a conflict between Israel and one or more of the several states that still wish to destroy it, some form of nuclear war fighting could ensue. This would be the case so long as: (a) enemy state first-strikes against Israel would not destroy the Jewish State's second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel's nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) Israeli preemptive strikes involving nuclear weapons would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capabilities; and (d) Israeli retaliation for enemy state conventional first-strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capability.

From the standpoint of protecting its security and survival, this means that Israel should now take prompt and immediate steps to ensure the likelihood of (a) and (b) above, and the unlikelihood of (c) and (d). As was clarified by Project Daniel’s final report, Israel’s Strategic Future, it is always in Israel’s interest to avoid nuclear war fighting wherever possible.

For Israel , both nuclear and non-nuclear preemptions of enemy unconventional aggressions could lead to nuclear exchanges. This would depend, in part, upon the effectiveness and breadth of Israeli targeting, the surviving number of enemy nuclear weapons, and the willingness of enemy leaders to risk Israeli nuclear counter-retaliations. Significantly, the likelihood of nuclear exchanges would be greatest where potential state aggressors were allowed to deploy ever-larger numbers of certain unconventional weapons without eliciting appropriate and effective Israeli preemptions. This point is frequently overlooked by all those who would oppose any pertinent forms of anticipatory self-defense by Israel .

Should any enemy nuclear deployments be allowed, Israel could then forfeit the non-nuclear preemption option.  Its only remaining alternatives to nuclear preemption would then be: (1) a no-longer viable conventional preemption; or (2) a decision to do nothing, thereby relying for security on the increasingly doubtful logic of nuclear deterrence, and the always inherently limited protections of ballistic missile defense. This means that the risks of an Israeli nuclear preemption, of nuclear exchanges with an enemy state, and of enemy nuclear first strikes could all still be reduced by certain Israeli non-nuclear preemptions.

While still completely unrecognized in Washington, there is no greater power in world politics than the power over death. In this connection, the idea of an apocalypse figures scripturally in both Judaism and Christianity, but it very likely appeared for the very first time among the Zoroastrians in ancient Persia . This is basically the same region as modern day Iran .

For  President Ahmadinejad, still deeply concerned with power over death, there would be recognizably great beauty in transforming the “World of War” into the “World of Islam.” Indeed, this observation is incontestable. For this Iranian president, and more importantly, for his clerical masters, any “end of the world” struggle spawned by such transformation could enticingly open the way, for believers, to a life everlasting. It should come as no surprise, then, that these Iranian decision-makers might still uncover a terrible beauty in their end-of-the-world imaginings.