1,489 words / 11:11

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What if the world were to end in a thermonuclear firestorm ignited by the only nuclear power on Earth that’s too dishonest to admit it has nuclear weapons?

And what if that country was disproportionately populated with people who have such an overwrought persecution complex that they wrangle even the slightest sign of disrespect into a mortal threat to their very existence?

Israel’s first Prime Minister, an odd-looking duck named David Ben-Gurion, was said to be “nearly obsessed” with the idea that Israel needed nuclear bombs to prevent another Holocaust from happening. In 1956 he wrote, “What Einstein, Oppenheimer and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States could also be done by scientists in Israel for their own people.” In an April 1963 letter to John F. Kennedy, Ben-Gurion insisted that ongoing regional hostilities in the Middle East meant that Israel potentially faced “another Holocaust.”

According to Seymour Hersh, author of 1991’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, legend has it that the words “Never Again” were welded in both English and Hebrew onto the first nuclear warhead that Israel produced.

In case you aren’t up to snuff on your biblical lore, Samson was the Israelite judge who, even though the Philistines had captured him, gouged out his eyes, and bound him with chains to the pillars of their temple, decided that if he had to die in such an ignominious fashion, he was also going to topple the temple’s pillars and kill all the Philistines along with him.

The term “Samson Option” refers to Israel’s unofficial policy — it can’t be official, since Israel has never officially admitted it has nuclear weapons, although several of its high-ranking officials have slipped up and blurted it out at various junctures — that if God’s Chosen Nation were to find itself on the brink of military annihilation, it would, in the words of Ron Rosenbaum in his 2o11 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, “bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance) . . . [and] the holy places of Islam.”

In other words, “If we can’t have the world, neither can any of you!”

In a 2002 editorial for the Los Angeles Times, David Perlmutter wrote:

Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow — it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Samson in Gaza? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter? Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens?

For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away — unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans — have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?

A year later, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld was quoted in the book The Sword and the Olive as saying:

We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.

I hope you won’t call me an anti-Semite for saying this all sounds paranoid, psychotic, and dangerous. It also sounds like more of a “Final Solution” than anything the Nazis were ever accused of plotting.

And pardon me in advance for thinking that blowing up the planet out of spite sounds sooooo immature.

Even though in the grand scheme of things, ending all life as we know it is probably a smidgen worse than being hypocritical, it’s difficult not to raise the demon specter of hypocrisy when the United States has been dragged into war after war after war on the pretense that, for reasons that are never clearly elucidated, its solemn and sacred duty is to defend Israel against other Middle Eastern nations who are suspected of plotting to perchance, at some time in the future, produce a little nuclear bomb of their own.

It is generally agreed that Israel possesses anywhere from 75 to 400 nuclear warheads, and yet it’s the only nation on Earth that the rest of the nations on Earth are too timid to pin to the mat and force to admit that they have nukes.

Since the United States officially bans funding countries that have weapons of mass destruction, Israel would lose two to three billion dollars a year in US aid if it merely ’fessed up and said, “Yes, we have nukes, too.”

The consensus is that Israel has had nuclear weapons since at least the mid-1960s and planned to detonate a nuclear device in the Sinai Desert during 1967’s Six-Day War merely to scare the poo-stuffin’s out of its Muslim enemies, but it won the conflict so rapidly and handily that there was no need for such a vulgar display of raw power

In a May 1973 interview for the BBC with reporter Alan Hart, the unspeakably homely Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir intimated that Israel was sitting on some kind of Doomsday Machine. According to Hart:

At a point during an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme, I interrupted her to say: “Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you’re saying. . . . You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?” . . . Golda replied, without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

A few months later during the Yom Kippur War, Meir allegedly threatened to attach 13 atomic bombs to Israeli missiles and planes if the US failed to immediately airlift military supplies to Israel. President Richard Nixon swiftly and dutifully complied, acting like the “pitiful, helpless giant” he’d predicted “the world’s most powerful nation” might one day become if it bowed to “the forces of totalitarianism.”

In context, though, Nixon had been referring to totalitarian Communists rather than Zionists who vowed to take the whole world down with them. I’m not sure if the Communists ever threatened to get that totalitarian.

During Nixon’s first term in office, his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger — an apparently indestructible Jew who still lives among us at the age of 100 — suggested that the US adopt a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” regarding Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. In other words, just close your eyes and pretend you know nothing about how this minuscule nation that emerged in the wake of the Second World War and is surrounded by hostile Muslims whose holy book disdains All Things Jewy possesses nuclear weapons and sees absolutely nothing wrong with using them to destroy the entire world in the event that it should one day find itself suddenly going verklempt.

Sounds like a foolproof plan for global peace and stability! It doesn’t sound at all like s0me demented script Sylvester Stallone wrote as a sequel to the Second World War.

In a memo dated July 19, 1969, Kissinger warned:

The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons.

This mess is far too scary for us to all continue living in fearful silence.

In the interests of securing a future for all peoples — yes, even the Israelis — I urge the entire world to roll up a hot, wet towel, stick it in one ear until it pokes out the other ear, and use it like dental floss to purge our brains of all the crusty post-war residue about “hate” and “anti-Semitism.”

Then, after a right proper round of brain-flossing when we finally feel free to speak without fear of massive retaliation, we need to address the fact that Israel stands alone among all nations in that it’s permitted to dangle its nukes over everyone else’s heads like invisible Swords of Damocles.

No country — especially one so tiny – should be that privileged.

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