“No I can’t” Obama says
Israel possesses nuclear weapons not because Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and others believed they were needed to enable Israel to maintain its military superiority. (In passing it’s worth noting that Ariel Sharon was one of Israel’s military hawks who opposed the idea of going nuclear for weapons. He believed that Israel would always be able to defeat the Arabs with conventional weapons and superior manpower; and he feared that if Israel did develop nuclear weapons, the Arabs would one day follow, and that if they did possess nuclear weapons of their own, Israel’s ability to impose its will on the region would be neutralized).
According to what Dayan (Israel’s one-eyed warlord) inferred to me in a private conversation in 1969 and to which I refer in my book, Israel’s decision to go nuclear for weapons was driven by the need to have a blackmail card in addition to that of the Nazi holocaust.
Dayan said, explicitly, that Ben-Gurion and others including himself were not stupid. He meant and said that from the moment of Israel’s birth they took it for granted that a day would come when even its best friends (he meant America in particular) would say to Israel’s leaders: “Enough is enough, You have become a liability for us. Now you must do what we ask.” I then said to Dayan, “We both know you don’t need nuclear weapons for defense against the Arabs… You need them to be able to say to an American president, if necessary, something like, ‘If you push us further than we are prepared to go, we’ll use these things‘” Dayan’s initial response to my speculation was a thin smile. He didn’t deny it or in any way challenge it. As I recalled the conversation years later, he eventually said something to this effect: “Those were your words, not mine, but you are understanding our situation.”
There are some who believe (and perhaps they are right) that Obama deserves praise for daring to say some things that Netanyahu would not have wanted Israeli and other Jews to hear, not from the lips of the President of America on the ground in Jerusalem.
For example: “It’s not fair that a Palestinian child lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. Put yourselves in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes.… Given the frustration of the international community, Israel must reverse an undertow of isolation.”
But most significant of all was Obama’s warning that the only way Israel can survive as a Jewish and democratic state is by ending its occupation in order to create the space for a viable Palestinian state.
The audience of young Israelis to whom he made that statement applauded him, but many of those in power with Netanyahu do not see withdrawal to the 1967 lines (perhaps with minor and mutually agreed land swaps) as the “only” way of defusing the demographic time of occupation. They favour “transfer”, which is a euphemism for a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
And there are still some who cling to the idea of the “Jordan option” – de-stabilizing that kingdom, getting rid of the Hashemite monarchy and saying to the Palestinians of the West Bank: “There’s your state. Go. Take it.” (That was, in fact, the end-game Sharon had in mind when he masterminded Israel’s invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut in the summer of 1982 for the initial purpose of exterminating the entire PLO leadership and destroying the organization’s infrastructure).
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