Israel Outed by Peanut; Pictures at Eleven

In a startling and -- some would say -- ironic turn of events, former president Jimmy Carter has been indicted by an Israeli court for high treason, and the process of deportation is already under way. Mr. Carter can expect to get a fair trial in Israel, officials say -- or at least one as fair as the one Saddam Hussein got in Baghdad -- after which time he will be incarcerated in a penitentiary set aside for "the unrighteous among the Gentiles". His alleged crime? -- revealing that, as of around 1980 when he was last privy to this sort of information, Israel had "150 or more" nuclear weapons. (He made this revelation at a literary festival in Wales, by the way. His next stop will be a nuclear disarmament conference in Switzerland where he is expected to hold forth on the works of Harold Pinter.)

Well, OK, The Peanut isn't really being indicted for treason by Israel -- but I'll bet they'd like to, if they thought they could get away with it. Apparently hard data on the actual nuclear holdings of Israel have been virtually impossible to come by for the last... well, for however many years Israel has had nukes, which is itself top secret. According to the news item in question, "While the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is widely assumed, Israeli officials have never admitted their existence, and U.S. officials have stuck to that line in public for years." Now, the question that always occurs to me is why Israel, out of all the nuclear powers, is so coy and secretive about revealing the size of their nuclear arsenal? Every other country in the nuclear club brags from the rooftops, providing detailed -- if possibly inflated -- figures as to their capability for inflicting grievous damage on unfriendly neighbors. But Israel holds its nuclear cards close to its chest. Why? If the idea is to intimidate, and deter any hostile neighbors from starting a serious conflict, wouldn't you think they would want the facts widely known? Surely they aren't ashamed of having "only" 150 nukes -- I mean, that's 75 times the number we used on Japan and it ended the entire Pacific War! Think what 150 nukes could do for the Arab world -- create so many martyrs that all of Islam would be lifted up in one great wave, leaving the Near East -- finally! -- as a "land without a people". So again I say, what is the problem? It surely can't be the fact that the only hostile use of nukes to date served to end the war with Japan, since they were allies of Germany, and Israel certainly has no torch to carry in that department. Could it be, possibly, the obvious question, if they have 150 nukes, where did they get them? I.e., did they build them all by themselves or did they have some small amount of assitance from us? And if the latter, would the fact inflame feelings among the militant Islamists any more than they are already inflamed? Highly doubtful. Is it possible that they see the American use of the atomic bombs on Japan as having had a distinctly racist element? Could be, except for the awkward fact that most of the prominent atomic scientists who developed the bomb were themselves Jewish. Or maybe that's the rub; maybe they have been having second thoughts all along, the way Oppenheimer did -- not to mention Einstein. Perhaps the Atomic Genie with the Jewish parentage has turned out to be a kind of embarrassment. Well, it's true that the Jews have always taken pride in being the moral standard-bearers for the world; this began way back in Moses' time, and the advent of Christianity did nothing to alter this basic element of their self image. Israel, then, presents itself as the moral standard bearer for the Near East (since you certainly couldn't trust those filthy Arabs to have any sound moral ideas) -- and by extension the rest of Asia, and Africa, and Europe, and on occasion the Western Hemisphere as well. Not to mention which -- and I know I'm getting close to a nerve here -- the sufferings of the Jews under the Nazis and their allies more or less placed them in a uniquely morally superior position, which cannot be questioned, for... well forever, basically. (This was stated explicitly by Golda Meir, by the way.) So I guess after being set in the judgment seat over the rest of humanity, it's a bit awkward to also have to admit to having 150 or whatever number (let's assume a lot _more_ now than in 1980) of those nasty, indiscriminate, cruel, and at least semi-racist "nukes". It's like... oh... it's like finding a nun wearing a diaphragm; it just adds a sour note to the whole thing, and might even, if one were so inclined, call into question the authenticity of Israel's claim to be _the_ morally untouchable nation on earth.

So what am I saying here? That Israel's sensitivity to revelations -- at this ridiculously late date -- about its nuclear arsenal is because those revelations reveal some sort of strategic threat? No, not at all. The threat has always been there, and the Arabs have known it. Then is it about what one former Israeli official claimed, that "there are those who can use these statements when it comes to discussing the international effort to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons"? This is another way of saying that the argument would be, "The Israelis have nukes, why can't we?" Well, this argument could have been made any time in the last... however many years. Just having a number attached to the idea doesn't make it any more compelling.

The argument, by the way, is not a bad one, but if logically extended we would wind up with Israel's 150 versus a few thousand held by a couple dozen hostile neighbors. And that could be seen as having tilted the playing field a bit. As it is, it's Israel's nukes versus the Arab world's human wave tactics -- and we know how effective those have been in all the wars Israel has fought _without_ the use of nukes. In other words, if they can kick Arab ass all over the map without them, why do they need them? Well, to prevent the other guys from getting them, basically. As strategies go it isn't half bad. The last thing anyone wants is for the Arabs to get hold of a bunch of "equalizers", to compensate for their blatant military incompetence.

But having said this, and dismissed it as the reason for Israel's hypersensitivity on this issue, and having also dismissed the political arguments, it seems to me that only the moral argument -- i.e. the moral ambiguity -- is left. And I suppose we should be thankful for at least this much. If Israel is so squirrelly about _talking_ about its nukes, it has to be even more ambivalent about actually using them. This, of course, is one reason they send George Bush out there at high noon to call the baddies out of the saloon -- clearly, the U.S. has far fewer inhibitions about using nukes, since we've already used them. And aren't the Arabs (or the Iranians, or anyone else over there with a decent tan) just as nasty as the Japs? You can be sure that they will be pictured that way if push ever comes to shove. Ah yes... when you have moral superiority, life is good. But the "etiquette burden" is a bitch.