Nuclear weapons have been in the Middle East for decades – not in Iran, but in Israel

Irish Times

5 hours ago

Donald Trump
's
decision to go
to war
against
Iran
will not stop the spread of nuclear weapons. On the contrary, it has taught every dictator a simple lesson: get yourself a H-bomb fast or you will be bombed whenever we feel like it.
Trump once threatened to unleash 'fire and fury' on
North Korea
. He didn't do it because North Korea has 50 nuclear warheads. But the Iranian regime is fair game, not because it was
probably developing its own nuclear weapons
, but because it had not actually done so. This is the grotesque irony of this war – if the mullahs had been more reckless, they would be safe.
Ostensibly, the American and
Israeli
war on Iran has a laudable aim: to keep nuclear weapons out of the combustible Middle East. Fine – until we remember that nuclear weapons have been in the Middle East for decades – specifically in Israel.
Israel's nuclear doomsday plan is called the
Samson Option
, after the biblical hero who pulled down the temple in Gaza, killing himself but also all the Philistines. With Trump in harness, it is pulling the temple of international order down on all our heads.
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Israel's possession of about
90 nuclear warheads
('A-bombs and H-bombs, low yield and high yield, nuclear artillery shells and nuclear mines,' writes
Ari Shavit
in My Promised Land) is almost the definition of cognitive dissonance. For the Samson threat to be effective, everybody has to know it exists. Yet Israel does not acknowledge that existence and punishes those who do so.
In 1986,
Mordechai Vanunu
, who worked at Israel's nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, revealed details of the programme to the Sunday Times. He was kidnapped in Italy by Mossad agents, drugged and flown back to Israel. There, he was tried in secret and sentenced to 18 years in prison, much of which he served in solitary confinement. The point of Vanunu's punishment was to sustain at all costs what has been called Israel's policy of 'implausible deniability'.
This cognitive conjuring trick has worked. As
Shavit
puts it in his essential book about Israel in his lifetime: 'the international community accepted and adopted Israel's policy of opacity regarding [the] existence' of Dimona. It did so at least in part because the Samson Option was developed with active assistance from France while the United States (from the Eisenhower presidency onwards) turned an appropriately blind eye.
Thus the presence of a major nuclear arsenal in the most inflammable part of the world has been an unknown known. The fear of nuclear weapons in the Middle East is focused on a country where they do not exist (Iran). It cannot be placed in the country where they do exist. Israel successfully created a reality distortion field in which the possible (Iran might get nuclear weapons) obscures the actual (Israel already has them).
Even when, in November 2023,
Amihai Eliyahu
, a minister in the Israeli government, suggested in a radio interview that Israel could consider dropping an atomic bomb on
Gaza
, the EU and the US stuck their fingers in their ears and pretended not to hear.
This great cloud of deliberate unknowing shrouds an obvious truth – the inevitability that, since Israel has been allowed to become a nuclear power, its regional rivals will eventually do the same. Many senior figures in Israel opposed the creation of the Samson Option because they feared, in Shavit's phrase, that it would 'open the gates of a future hell'.
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Nuclear threat is more real than at any time since second World War
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Writing in 2013, Shavit predicted: 'Sooner or later, the Israeli monopoly will be broken. First one hostile state will go nuclear, then a second hostile state, then a third. In the first half of the 21st century, the Middle East is bound to be nuclearised. The world's first multi-rival nuclear arena might emerge in the world's most unstable region.'
When Shavit put this to one of the main architects of Israel's nuclear programme, the unnamed 'engineer' did not demur. 'He can definitely foresee a Middle East glowing in radioactive green ... As far as the engineer is concerned, there is only one answer: a pre-emptive strike.' Nuke them before they nuke us. This is the nihilistic logic set in train when the West gave the green light to a nuclear-armed Israel.
In choosing to ignore this reality, the democratic world implicitly accepted that Israel exists in a twilight zone where the normal rules do not apply. It allowed Isreal to become a black hole of accountability. The problem with black holes is that they suck in everything that approaches them.
Once you exempt Israel from the principle of nuclear non-proliferation, you also give it licence to ignore every other norm of behaviour. As we saw last week, Iran hitting a hospital in Israel with a rocket is an outrage (and yes it really is) but Israel launching 700 attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities in Gaza is a regrettable necessity.
A double standard is worse than no standard at all. It makes those who practice it look like liars, not just to the outside world but to their own citizens. When a war crime is merely an act of violence against civilians committed by people we don't like, all moral pronouncements become hollow. The US called Vladimir Putin's attacks on 'heat, water, electricity' in Ukraine 'barbaric'. But that word loses all meaning when it cannot be uttered in relation to Gaza.
What's pulled down in this destruction of principles is any sense that democratic politicians believe what they say. As citizens watch their leaders switch their outrage on and off and collude in the atrocities they have so recently condemned, they become ever more deeply cynical. And cynicism corrodes democracy.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn't just disastrous for the people of that country. It poisoned the wells of public trust on which democracy depends. The attack on Iran combined with the continuing slaughter in Gaza will be equally toxic. More voters will exercise their own Samson Option – pull the whole damn thing down on all our heads.