Further evidence of Israel’s crisis of Iegitimacy can be read in a Realist/Israel-chauvinist piece at Foreign Affairs arguing that Israel is in danger of losing its aura of military invincibility; and when that happens no Arab country will have any realistic incentive to accept its existence. So it had better find another modus-vivendi than threat and invasion, and soon. Writes Ariel Ilan Roth:
The development of nuclear weapons by Egypt or Saudi Arabia would pose a grave danger to the Jewish state, despite the fact that Egypt has signed a peace treaty with Israel. This is because leaders who have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence — including those of Egypt, Jordan, and certain segments of the Palestinian national movement — have done so because they believed Israel was strong but unlikely to endure in the long term. (Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, for example, justified his pursuit of a peace process with Israel by comparing the Israelis to crusaders: strong today, gone tomorrow.) More broadly, as the Palestinian-American political scientist Hilal Khashan’s work on Arab attitudes toward peace has shown, the willingness of Arabs to make peace with Israel is a direct function of their perception of Israel’s invincibility. Just as an Iranian nuclear capability would imply a nuclear guarantee for anti-Zionist proxies, an Egyptian or Saudi nuclear capability would reduce incentives for other Arab states to make peace with Israel because, shielded under an Arab nuclear umbrella, they would no longer fear catastrophic defeat or further loss of territory.
Such developments would shatter the perception of Israeli invincibility on which successive Israeli governments have pinned their hopes for eventual peace in the region. As a result, Israel’s security would be dependent on maintaining a state of perpetual armed readiness and hair-trigger alert that could counter immediate threats but only in an inconclusive manner, as displayed recently in Lebanon and Gaza…
The possibility that Israel may no longer be capable of forcing peace upon those who deny its right to exist is beginning to dawn on many Israelis. Whether Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or not, the time has come for Israel’s defense community to develop a strategic doctrine for long-term coexistence that does not rely on a posture of invincibility. But, given that widespread Arab acceptance of Israel’s right to exist does not appear to be on the horizon, most Israelis, including the current prime minister, insist that Israel’s most urgent strategic objective is to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Doing so would temporarily remove the threat of a regional nuclear cascade and maintain Israel’s superiority of arms. More important, it would hold at bay the suspicion that Israel may never attain true peace. This increasingly widespread fear has a toxic effect on national morale, is an existential threat to the Jewish state, and lies at the root of Israel’s obsession with the Iranian bomb.
A friend writes that Roth’s realist analysis has disturbed neocons, who love permanent war and strategic advantage: Realism is a dirty word to them because, for them, "realists" are all anti-semites. The knucklehead commenters on Roth here actually thought he was an "anti-Israel fanatic." The site, "Just one minute," is a popular conservative blog. The comments are dominated by neocons, who present slanted views to the sheep. I believe at least some of them do so knowingly. Roth is basically a Zionist, and what he says makes excellent sense from within that mentality. I think what he’s trying to do is to speak, not to true believers, but to the outside world of well intentioned but ill informed people who, in a mushy kind of way, are sympathetic to Israel but not keen on nuclear strikes in general–not even against Iran. Roth knows that sooner or later Israel will have to find a way to live in a world in which they no longer control all the variables. He knows that neocon fantasies will not carry the day for much longer.The neocons are enraged by this.
