Sometimes, reading about the Middle East, or at least about Israel, Iran, and nuclear weapons, feels like your most basic broken-record phenomenon. As New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen reminded readers recently, there’s nothing new about Israeli predictions that Iranian “madmen”– or rather, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of a rather extreme new government, put it recently,“a messianic apocalyptic cult”– would soon have nuclear weapons in their hands. The charges and predictions of the imminent arrival of the Iranian bomb go back well into the 1990s, and yet, despite Iran’s growing nuclear enrichment program, we still don’t know what the true predilections of its leaders are on the basic issue of weaponization.(They might, for instance, be planning to opt for the Japan “solution,” not weaponizing, but simply being capable of doing so relatively quickly.)The other part of that broken-record phenomenon concerns Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which I wrote about at TomDispatch back in 2003, since which time remarkably little has changed. One of the genuinely strange aspects of just about anything you can read here in the U.S. on nuclear weapons and the Middle East is this: all fear and much print (and TV time) is focused on whether the Iranians may someday, in the near or far future, get a nuclear weapon; that is, we’re focused on a weapon that doesn’t yet exist and, for all we know, may never exist. In the meantime, just about no mention is ever made of Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal, which includes city-busting weapons, and leaves that tiny country as perhaps the fifth-largest nuclear power on the planet. In addition, at least some of its nuclear weapons are on submarines in the Mediterranean, which means that the country is invulnerable to the madness of a take-out first strike by any other nation. This is simply reality.
Tom
London, UK
19 hrs ago
The Israelis have long taken a position in which, as Jonathan Schell once put the matter,“They won’t confirm or deny that they have [nuclear weapons], but they have this curious phrase:‘We will not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.’ Evidently, in some abstruse way, possessing them is not introducing them.” Our media has, in essence, accepted the Israeli approach to its arsenal as if it were a reasonable reportorial stance on the subject. It’s from within this distinctly unbalanced world of heightened fear and silence that we read of both the dangers of the Iranian bomb and responses to it, which is in itself, simply put, dangerous.Recently, warnings from Israel about possible future attacks on Iran have multiplied. Roane Carey, managing editor of the Nation magazine and co-editor of The Other Israel, is in Israel at the moment on a journalism fellowship at the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy. As his first piece for this site, I asked him to offer an assessment from that country of just how dangerous the most recent warnings and threats actually are. Tom
John Christopher sunols comments
This I beleive will happen and I will fully support Isreal if and when Iran is attacked by Isreal
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