Falling Towers

by Louis René Beres (January 2016)

Falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens/  Alexandria Vienna London/ Unreal (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

Already, in 1991 and 2014, Dimona came under missile and rocket fire from Iraqi and Hamas aggressions, respectively.[2]

Escalation dominance

In the more usual strategic military parlance, this means that Jerusalem must always seek to preserve a conspicuously viable posture of escalation dominance.

Every state’s first obligation is the assurance of protection. Always, following Hugo Grotius, the seventeenth-century founder of modern international law, innocent civilian life must be preserved.[6] From the moment that Iranian leaders first proclaimed their unwavering belief in a Shiite apocalypse, a series of final battles believed to be a sine qua non for transforming the profane “world of war” (Dar al-Harb) into the sacred “world of Islam,” (Dar al-Islam), Jerusalem has had to affirm and confront every conceivable military peril, and, reciprocally, to consider every conceivably purposeful remedy.

Bombs in the basement

Quite literally, these nuclear weapons serve only to prevent another Jewish genocide,[7] and also various corollary crimes against humanity.[8] Should Israel ever yield to intermittently incessant pressures to join the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it might as well sign its own collective death warrant.[9]

If the day comes

If this enemy retaliation were to involve chemical and/or biological weapons, Israel might also plan a quantum escalatory initiative. This particular sort of escalation dominance could be required for the secure preservation of Israel’s intra-war deterrent.

From the standpoint of protecting its security and survival, this means that Israel should now take needed steps to ensure the high likelihood of (a) and (b) above, and the high unlikelihood of (c) and (d). In any event, it is always in Israel’s cumulative interest to avoid nuclear war fighting, wherever possible.

For Israel, both nuclear and non-nuclear preemptions of enemy unconventional aggressions could lead to nuclear exchanges. This would depend, in part, upon the effectiveness and breadth of Israeli targeting, the surviving number of enemy nuclear weapons, and the willingness of enemy leaders to risk Israeli nuclear counter-retaliations. The likelihood of nuclear exchanges would be greatest where potential Arab and/or Iranian aggressors had been allowed to deploy ever-larger numbers of certain unconventional weapons with impunity, that is, without eliciting any appropriate and effective Israeli preemptions, or, preferably, any meaningful global treaty impediments.

The situation today

At times, strategic truth can emerge through paradox. For Israel, now facing a challenging future of both terrorism and war, these are already such bewildering times. Discovering its most durable metaphor in the distressingly stark dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, Israel must always do whatever is needed to side with the former.

Palestinian National Covenant. Calling officially for sustained Arab violence against Israel, this document was adopted in 1964, three years before the 1967 Six Day War. This means, significantly, that the PLO’s core guidance on terror was first published – together with its markedly explicit references to the annihilation of Israel – three years before there were any “occupied territories,.” For the Palestinian Authority, which until October, 2015, had still officially agreed to accept a “Two-State Solution,” this inherently lawless position was part of a much broader strategy of incorporating all of Israel into “Palestine.” This irredentist incorporation, moreover, was already codified on all PA maps. Formally, the most unambiguous Palestinian call for the utter removal of Israel remains the PLO’s “Phased Plan” of June 9, 1974. This Plan represents an unhidden commitment to carrying out certifiable crimes against humanity.

The Art of War: “If there is no place to go, it is fatal terrain” (Chapter 11, “Nine Terrains”).

The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1962), 109 pp.

Inquiry and Analysis Series Report, No. 1107. To get a wider view of geostrategic balance in the region, the Arab world (still pre-“Palestine”) is comprised of twenty-two separately sovereign states, nearly five-million square miles, and almost 200 million people. The larger Islamic world, which includes Iran, contains forty-four states, with well over one billion people. The Islamic world comprises an area 672 times greater than the state of Israel. The Jewish state, with a population of 6.2 million Jews, is, even together with West Bank (Judea/Samaria), less than half the size of San Bernardino County, California.

[8] For definition of Crimes Against Humanity, see: Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis Powers and Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Done at London, August 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279 (entered into force, August 8, 1945).

First published in Israel National News.
 

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