The world felt a bit of a heave in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria crossed into the Israeli-held Sinai and Golan Heights, and the Yom Kippur war began. Israel was taken by surprise, despite ample warnings of an impending attack. The Egyptians’ and Syrians’ stated aim was to recover the territory Israel had gained and held in the 1967 Six-Day War. But who knew? Would Israel be partially or entirely overrun? What then?
The Arab leaders had said a lot of things about Zionism being the target, not Jews (after earlier careers in which Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and others were public and noxious anti-Semites). But who can control an occupying army? Though there was much bluff and bravado among the pro-Palestinian left of the time, there was an intake of breath too.
The result of the war was the beginnings of a peace process that would result in the Egypt-Israel peace accords of 1978-79, and a de facto recognition that any notion of overcoming Zionism could not be done by the military abolition of Israel, for any number of reasons, both moral and strategic. The period that had begun in 1948 (or 1936, or 1917, or 1896 as some prefer) was, in one aspect, concluded.
We now have a situation where Israel’s actions in Gaza forfeit the moral part of that right. The current strategy surely fulfils the conditions for genocide in that the means of all life, no matter how bare or basic, are being denied, including food, fresh drinking water and the most basic medical care, while capricious bombing kills civilians and wounds civilians in their hundreds daily.
The moral conditions of national existential risk have not been met to justify such an action, as I’ve noted before. Concluding that, it seems reasonable to say that other powers would have a right to attack Israel, if such an attack would draw the IDF’s focus away from Gaza. Attacks on “green line” Israel are surely now justified by the degree of indiscriminate death being dealt out by the IDF in the south.
That is not going to occur of course. Or rather, it is not going to come from any state actor with the power to constitute a real threat. Non-state actors have already weighed in, with the Yemeni Houthis having fired a ballistic missile at Israel, and the Arrow missile defense system intercepting it above the atmosphere — now said to be the first military encounter to occur in space.
And missiles and border attacks from Hezbollah and inside Syria might well occur, but they would be as equally non-threatening in any existential sense as the initial October 7 raid.
The obvious reason why Israel feels no threat, and is not in fact threatened, is because it is a nuclear power. Although there is no one authoritative account, and Israel neither confirms nor denies its existence, dozens of reports suggest that Israel has between 80 and 400 nuclear warheads, many as submarine-mounted missiles, capable of annihilating multiple states. It may also have tactical nuclear weapons, including nuclear artillery shells, nuclear mines and even suitcase bombs.
Israel appears to have developed its first nuclear weapons by 1966, but it had only a dozen or so available by the time of the Yom Kippur War. Steady construction of more had changed the equation by the 1980s, with most of the many estimates suggesting more than 100 missiles. The arsenal has had the desired effect. The only people who talk of wiping Israel off the map are non-state groups and Columbia University undergrads, the latter unlikely to acquire a nuclear capability.
The arsenal has bought Israel short to mid-term (i.e decades) of security, but it has had a deforming effect on its politics. With a reduced need to come to a stabilised settlement with the Palestinians and its neighbours, the Israeli electorate is freed from thinking about how peace might be guaranteed through negotiation and affirming of peace partners, and allowed for an increasingly unilateral and hyper-nationalistic politics to develop.
Israel would not be conducting an operation like the current Gaza destruction if it did not have nuclear weapons. But then, it would never have propped up an exterminatory enemy such as Hamas if it did not have nuclear weapons either. Without nukes, Hamas might have constituted something of a genuine threat — or one part of it — rather than being the provisional and dependent group they currently are, making absurd claims that more October 7-style massacres would somehow “abolish” Israel.
Under the protection of that nuclear dome, Israeli politics has been free to mutate from a rational politics of survival into an expressive politics of identity. As Israel’s nuclear arsenal grew, the country’s social democratic economic base — which had materially anchored solidarity between the Jewish population — was neoliberalised.
The resulting inequality wore away the material solidarity, which had to be replaced by symbolic means, invoking not only occupied territory Palestinians but Israeli Arabs as an “other” with “Jewish state” kitsch, loyalty oaths, etc, designed to engineer false collectivity in relation to Arab Israelis’ increasing resistance to such framings of their life. The country’s political system which allowed for multiple parties created a political market in identity extremism, spawning multiple parties to the right of Likud.
With the large influx of settlers professing literalist Biblical beliefs over the past two decades, the nation’s politics was increasingly dragged towards utter intransigence — which occurred at the same time as the Palestinian Authority abandoned its objection to Israel’s existence, accepted the possibility of a two-state solution and discontinued its own guerrilla/terror campaigns.
And so these two tracks of Israeli state development — nuclearisation, and political identity extremism — met a few days ago when Heritage (!) Minister Amichai Eliyahu remarked that using nuclear weapons on Gaza might be an option. Eliyahu was merely suspended from cabinet, for what is clearly an exterminatory remark, because Benjamin Netanyahu needs Eliyahu’s Otzma Yehudit party’s support to stay in power.
As I noted yesterday, Eliyahu’s remarks have a certain muted effect because they sound cartoonish, involving the idea of “wanting to drop a bomb” on someone. But the documented likelihood that Israeli has tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons, including low-radiation neutron devices, makes this a real possibility.
It is a measure of the degree of absolute depravity that has been created in the West, the banality of evil of indifference, that this remark has not been met with outright moral condemnation by world leaders. Their cowardice is strategic. Having backed Israel as a moral agent, they are now beholden to it, just as Netanyahu is beholden to extremist parties within his political coalition. Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, the same minister who protected Eliyahu, is now, as police minister, arming settlers in the West Bank, as self-protection squads. This is preparation for widespread violence against West Bank Palestinians, a new frontier war.
So, the paradox. Any state, it seems to me, would be justified in launching a missile attack on Tel Aviv tomorrow, if its express purpose was to blackmail a stop to the Gaza operation. But no state will, and that is why the Gaza operation has occurred in the manner that it has. In the medium term, Israel’s “Samson option” guarantees its impunity.
But in a mid-longer term of several decades, this is a dead end. Israel missed its chance to normalise relations with the Palestinians when it started the settlement programs in the 1980s. Had a contiguous Palestinian state been possible to offer, it would by now have been grabbed with both hands. The right of return demand would have died away with the passing of those expelled by the Nakba, and the next generation.
Now, the country appears to be mounting a second Nakba in both Gaza and the West Bank, in a region whose regime stability and political currents, over coming decades, are utterly unpredictable. It is a recipe for a permanent Sparta, and the steady fascisation of its politics.
It may have forestalled large-scale attacks against it for the present, but it has ensured that those attacks that do occur are morally justifiable.
