is undemocratic, violates the public’s right to know, undermines the principle of public accountability, and hinders the effort to achieve internationally recognized and accepted norms for the control of nuclear weapons. However, even were one to admit the force of these charges, they by no means suffice to identify Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons as any more likely to lead to World War III than the possession of nuclear weapons by other countries, such as Russia, the United States, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—the last three of which are not even signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968–70.
That is not, perhaps, the end of the matter. In 1991, the celebrated Washington-based investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh published a book called The Samson Option, largely based on information supplied by Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who claimed to have worked for Israeli intelligence.10 It explores the idea that Israel might be ready and willing to launch a devastating nuclear strike on an enemy state, possibly Iran, in the event of its suffering an attack so great as to threaten its survival as a Jewish state. The thought expressed in the book’s title is that Israel would in this respect be harking back to the celebration, in the Book of Judges, of Samson’s final act of pulling down the pillars of the temple of Dagon, crushing both himself and all the Philistines.
In 2011, the same idea was explored again by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in a book titled How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.11 The tone and the quality of Rosenbaum’s reasoning can be gauged by the following extract: “A Samson option is made possible by the fact that even if Israel has been obliterated, it can be sure that its dolphin-class nuclear submarines cruising the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, at depths impervious to detection, can carry out a genocidal-scale retaliation virtually anywhere in the world. … [The policy] presupposes a rage on the part of post-second Holocaust survivors in possession of nuclear weapons determined to reduce the entire temple of civilisation to ashes for having complacently allowed two Holocausts to be inflicted on our people.”12
The second half of this passage argues that the policy outlined in the first “presupposes” a willingness to “reduce the entire temple of civilization to ashes,” that in turn can only issue from a rage so great as to be peculiar to those who have survived a Holocaust and hence to be something that only a Jew could possibly feel. This, of course, echoes several themes of antisemitism as a pseudo-explanatory theory: that the Jews are a uniquely vengeful people, that Jews care nothing for the sufferings of non-Jews, and so on.
But this is absurd, because the policy complained of has nothing to do with rage of any kind, let alone the rage, if such there be, peculiar to Holocaust survivors. The possession of some means of ensuring the possibility of delivering a devastating blow to a nuclear aggressor even after a first strike by that aggressor is essential to the policy of mutual assured deterrence, which is why nuclear powers, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Russia, take steps, including the deployment of nuclear-armed submarines, to secure the possibility of such a blow independently of the continued territorial integrity of the nation wielding it. That is just a feature of where we sit in the modern world. If nuclear deterrence is to work, that is how it must be organized. To give a spuriously Jewish tinge to the policy by labeling it a “Samson option” is to employ the most debased kind of political rhetoric to mislead those whose critical powers lag behind their credulity.
Where does that leave Israel’s putative ability to start a World War III, assuming that to be the issue on which the 2003 Eurobarometer poll was endeavoring to test opinion? It leaves it nowhere for a very simple reason. A World War is by definition a war between major powers. Israel, like all the other actors in the continuing drama of Middle Eastern politics, is a very minor power indeed. How, after all, could a nation of seven million, occupying a tiny scrap of land at the far end of the Mediterranean, pose at any time even a threat, let alone the main threat to world peace, if by that phrase one means to invoke the possibility of a World War III? Posing such threats is the privilege of major players in the game of world politics. One needs to be Russia, or China, or the United States to pose in those terms a “threat to world peace.” The minnows of the world order—Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel—while they may be in a position to defend themselves against aggression (as Switzerland and Israel, for example, certainly are) are not in any kind of position to pose a threat to anyone: they simply lack the firepower (and if it comes to that, the resources of cannon fodder) available to more populous nations. The nations of the Middle East have in any case been for two centuries, and are at present, subject to extensive interference by major powers in their tormented affairs. That interference has caused untold suffering to the inhabitants of the region. But it has not led to any major conflict between the major powers concerned—at present the United States and Russia—and shows no sign of doing so.
Once again, in short, we are dealing with a set of implicitly antisemitic claims based, as such claims always appear to be, not merely on factual error but on a rooted inability to distinguish between what is factually possible and what Austin called “not even faintly sensible.” Such claims deal in dreamwork: more specifically, in the dream that the wounds of an imperfect world might suddenly and magically be comprehensively healed, if only the Jews could somehow be got rid of.
A QUALIFIED RECANTATION
In 2017, Hamas issued a new charter13 that contains nothing—or almost nothing—corresponding to Article 22 of the 1988 charter. This matters little for the concerns of the present chapter, since antisemitic theorizing along much the same lines, as we know from the work of Matthias Küntzel and others able to read Arabic- and Farsi-language sources, is nowadays entirely commonplace throughout the Middle East. I chose Article 28 of the 1988 Charter for discussion merely because it offers a convenient English-language source for such thinking. It is interesting, however, that what has replaced it in the 2017 charter corresponds closely to the current discourse of Western “anti-Zionism.” Central to that discourse, as we saw in the introduction, is the idea that hatred of Zionism and Zionists can be sharply distinguished from hatred of Jews and that only the latter constitutes “antisemitism.” Article 16 of the new charter reads: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
The last sentence attempts to shift the blame for any idea that the Jews are responsible for the existence of Israel to the Zionists themselves. The suggestion here is that if there are Jews who accept in its entirety Hamas’s analysis of the origins and nature of Israel and are prepared to agree inter alia that “the Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based in seizing the properties of others” (Article 14), then Hamas has no quarrel with those Jews. This stance, as we shall see later, has been characteristic of Western antisemitism since at least the French Revolution and remains popular on the left today. However, it is clearly an assertion of Jew hatred, not a renunciation of it.
It is not the case, anyway, that the vision of the Jews as secretly in charge of the world, and as capable of employing vast hidden powers to subvert non-Jewish interests, so clearly set out in the 1988 charter, has been entirely expunged from the 2017 version. In Article 15, we learn that “the Zionist project” is not confined to the setting-up of a Jewish state in Palestine but threatens the peace and security, not only of the entire Muslim world but also that of humanity in general. The article reads: “The Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arab and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests. It is also hostile to the Ummah’s aspirations for unity, renaissance and liberation and has been the major source of its troubles. The Zionist project also poses a danger to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability.”
The parallels between this and Article
