Mutually Assured & Immediate

The message being sent by Israeli leaders to the West these days goes something like this:

If you fail to stop Iran, understand that its threat to Israel now will surely be followed by similar intentions towards the rest of the free world.

This is like saying: if I catch Ebola today, you will get it tomorrow.

The other guy says: "Okay, I have time. Firstly you haven’t caught it yet. But if you do, I will have at least a day to get as far away from you as I can."

It’s the wrong message.

Now that Bush has decided to abandon the Iraqis to mass slaughter and to allow Iran to go nuclear without the threat of any military intervention, Israel’s message needs changing.

Israel needs to say to the world: If we get Ebola, so do you.

The same day …the same hour … the same horrible death.

America and the EU need to know that any non-conventional strike against Israel will result in an immediate counterstrike of such magnitude that the rest of the world shall not escape.

This is unfortunately the only language world leaders will understand. This is clear from the crisis point in the Yom Kippur War when the Nixon administration was dragging its feet on the airlifting of arms and ammunition to a desperate Israeli army.

It is not widely known that on the night of 8 October 1973 Golda Meir’s war cabinet decided to assemble 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs. The number and in fact the entire story was later leaked by the Israelis as a great psychological warfare tool. Although most probably plutonium devices, one source reports they were enriched uranium bombs. The Jericho missiles at Hirbat Zachariah and the nuclear strike F-4s at Tel Nof were armed and prepared for action against Syrian and Egyptian targets. It is also said that the nuclear missiles were wheeled out of their bunkers the following day, just as America’s spy satellites passed over the Judean hills.

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was notified of this on the morning of 9 October. Nixon immediately opened an aerial resupply pipeline to Israel, and Israeli aircraft began picking up supplies that very same day. Although stockpile depletion remained a concern, the military situation stabilized on October 8th and 9th as Israeli reserves poured into the battle and averted disaster.

Israel’s nuclear capability has long been referred to as The Samson Option. This is because the biblical Samson vowed that if he were killed, he would take the Philistines with him.

That’s precisely the message that needs to be sent to Western leaders who seem to be flirting lately with the notion of Israel’s expendability.