Iranian Nuclear Weapons and ‘Palestine’: Dangers for Israel
Israeli planners may soon have to understand that the efficacy or credibility of their country’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary inversely with enemy views of Israeli nuclear destructiveness. However ironic or counter-intuitive, enemy perceptions of a too-large or too-destructive Israeli nuclear deterrent force, or of an Israeli force that is not sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks, could undermine this deterrence posture.
Also critical, of course, is that Israel’s current and prospective adversaries see the Jewish state’s nuclear retaliatory forces as “penetration capable” — meaning they are capable of penetrating any Arab or Iranian aggressor’s active defenses. Naturally, a new state of Palestine would be non-nuclear itself, but it could still present a new “nuclear danger” to Israel by its impact upon the more generally regional “correlation of forces.” Thereby, Palestine could represent an indirect but nonetheless markedly serious nuclear threat to Israel.
There is still more to be done. Israel should continue to strengthen its active defenses, but Jerusalem must also do everything possible to improve each critical and interpenetrating component of its nuanced deterrence posture. The Israeli task may also require more incrementally explicit disclosures of nuclear targeting doctrine, and, accordingly, a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war. And even before undertaking such delicately important refinements, Israel will need to more systematically differentiate between adversaries that are presumably rational, irrational, or “mad.”
Overall, the success of Israel’s national deterrence strategies will be contingent upon an informed prior awareness of enemy preference and of specific enemy hierarchies of preferences. Altogether new and open-minded attention will need to be focused on the seeming emergence of a “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States. This time around, the relationship between Jerusalem and Moscow could prove helpful rather than adversarial. For Jerusalem, it may even be reasonable to explore whether this once hostile relationship could turn out to be more strategically gainful for Israel than its traditionally historic ties to the United States. At this transitional moment in geostrategic time, when Donald Trump’s often incoherent alignments could multiply or escalate, virtually anything is possible.
In any event, it is essential that Israeli planners approach all prospective enemy threats as potentially interactive or even synergistic. If a formalized state of Palestine does not readily find itself in the same ideological orbit as Iran — now an increasingly plausible conclusion in view of still-accelerating Shiite-Sunni fissions in the Middle East — the net threat to Israel could become more perilous than the mere additive result of its pertinent area enemies. All things considered, in approaching the possible simultaneity of Iranian nuclear weapons and Palestinian statehood, Jerusalem must consistently bear in mind that the adversarial “whole” could prove palpably greater than the calculable sum of its belligerent “parts.”
For 2019, there could be no more important security consideration.
Thank heaven we're done with UNESCO
Thank God, it's over. When 2018 ended, Israel's withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization took effect. Don't feel bad. Under existing conditions, there was no reason to keep our place at the table with the gang of hypocritical liars that every few months rewrote another chapter of the history of the land of Israel and the Jewish people, and coopted it for the Palestinians. Rather than thrilling at the glorious cultural, religious, historic, and archaeological legacy of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, the organization chose time and again to adopt "fake history" and give its seal of approval to more fabrications from the Palestinian pack of lies.Maybe UNESCO Will ‘Learn a Lesson’ From US and Israeli Withdrawals, Ex-Envoy Says
UNESCO questioned Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. It treated us as if we were occupiers in our own capital, even though Jerusalem in all its holiness was never a capital – in terms of either politics or conscience – for any Arab or Muslim ruling entity. Even the Jordanians, who together with the Palestinians prompted UNESCO to pass resolutions hostile to Israel – never used Jerusalem as their capital in the years in which they occupied the city. They desecrated the places that are holy to Jews, and in violation of agreements we signed with them, even denied us access to those places. Back then, the Jordanians and the Palestinians – before they invented themselves as a "people" – cited the Temple Mount as the location of Solomon's Temple on their maps and in their writings. Today, they boldly deny ever doing so and UNESCO is helping them by partly adopting their denial.
But UNESCO has more than Jerusalem in its sights. Rachel's Tomb, which UNESCO decided to call, as the Palestinians term it, Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque, was never traditionally called that. Ibn Rabah, of Ethiopian descent, was one of the first muezzins who served the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed in Syria and buried in Aleppo or Damascus. Only when the Palestinian Authority realized it had failed to capture the site from Israel during the Second Intifada did they link Ibn Rabah to "Kubat Rachel," the Arabic name for the site that had been used for generations. In the case of Rachel's Tomb, UNESCO supported an attempt to take over people's minds in place of a physical occupation of the site which failed.
“Maybe they will learn a lesson,” a former Israeli ambassador to UNESCO told The Algemeiner on Tuesday as the Jewish state officially left the global cultural institution.
David Kornbluth — who served as Israel’s UNESCO envoy from 2005-2009 — said the country was pulling out of the body now largely because the US had scheduled to leave by the end of 2018.
“It’s completely in coordination with the United States,” he noted. “This is part of the reason also why it’s being done. Politically, it didn’t seem that we could stay in it if the United States is going, on our behalf as it were. Part of the reason they’re going is because of Israel.”
Israel and the US stayed in UNESCO for so long, he stated, “because they believed that once you leave these organizations, it’s much more difficult for Israel to get back in than the United States to get back in,” but the worsening situation had finally forced their hand.
“It was bad then,” Kornbluth said of his tenure. “It’s really nasty being attacked all the time, but was more manageable. But things got worse and worse, it just goes on and on and on, and politically it becomes just a bit disgusting.”
Asked whether the withdrawals will force UNESCO to change its attitude toward Israel, Kornbluth responded, “Hard to tell. The Israel-bashing thing has been going on forever, but the United States is staunchly with Israel and it’s quite true for many many decades already that Israel relies on the United States in UNESCO for the air it breathes. So I can’t tell if it will have a positive effect. It will have some effect. Since the United States and Israel came out two years ago with the intention to withdraw, UNESCO has moderated itself a bit towards Israel, but not sufficiently.”
This is the reason the Israeli Defense Forces @IDF IS the most moral army in the world: not because it fights with flowers (it doesn't), not because Jews have a unique moral DNA (no people does), but because the IDF is forced to carry out its missions under unparalleled scrutiny: https://t.co/fo2kH2mH5t
— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EWilf) January 1, 2019