ABSTRACT
Steven David contends that Israel is unique among all countries in facing explicit threats of physical annihilation. A nuclear-armed Iran would represent the foremost of those threats. Yet, would Iran truly choose to destroy Israel even if it could? David examines three scenarios in which Iran might be postulated to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. The first assumes that Iran becomes convinced it has an overwhelming first-strike capability that would extinguish the Jewish state. However, even the almost instantaneous destruction of Israeli cities, government, and society would still leave Israeli submarines capable of launching a return barrage of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, ensuring that Iran’s attack would result in “national suicide.” But suppose national suicide were not a deterrent for a religiously fanatic Iranian leadership. Volatile rhetoric aside, Iranian behavior has consistently been “relatively pragmatic and conservative” and has shown no signs of embracing cataclysmic martyrdom. Iran even chose to stand idly by as its presumed cat’s-paws, Hezbollah and Hamas, battled Israel in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Iran—Shiite and non-Arab as it is—moderates its actions to avoid direct conflict with its Sunni Arab neighbors. David observes that Iran soberly weighs its own survival more heavily than either religious dogma or hatred of Israel. A third possibility would be for Iran to transfer nuclear weapons to proxy militant groups, such as Hezbollah or Hamas. But Iran could not afford to place its survival in the hands of groups it cannot control. That the Iranian source of the weapons would be knowable, or merely suspected, would be cause for nuclear retaliation from Israel. Conversely, although possible Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are currently much discussed, even a “successful” attack would “unleash tens of thousands of missiles against Israel” from Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas allies. Concludes David, “In the end, the likelihood remains that Israel will allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.”
