Max Fisher of the Washington Post has now taken on the elephant in the room with regard to Middle Eastern instability: why does Israel have nuclear weapons?
While the rest of the world worries over an Islamist state with a declared intent to commit a second Holocaust gaining nuclear arms, Fisher worries about the region’s only democracy having nuclear weapons – even though Israel has never used them despite having them for over four decades.
According to Fisher, it’s Israel’s fault that Iran wants nukes: “ironically, Israel’s nuclear arsenal may itself be one of the factors driving Iran’s program in the first place.”
That’s ridiculous, of course; Iran would be seeking nuclear weapons, if only to use against its other regional enemies. But that doesn’t stop Fisher, who believes the world community is hypocritical for not coming down harder on Israel:
Is there something hypocritical about the world tolerating Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which the country does not officially acknowledge but has been publicly known for decades, and yet punishing Iran with severe economic sanctions just for its suspected steps toward a weapons program? Even Saudi Arabia, which sees Iran as its implacable enemy and made its accommodations with Israel long ago, often joins Tehran’s calls for a ‘nuclear-free region.’ And anyone not closely versed in Middle East issues might naturally wonder why the United States would accept Israeli warheads but not an Iranian program.
Fisher details Israel’s development of nuclear weapons, stating that it was a based on the “obsessive fear” of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Today, Fisher says, since Israel is so militarily powerful and since President Obama has obviously solved the Iranian nuclear development, Israel has lost its reason for maintaining its arsenal:
Israel’s conventional military forces are now far more powerful than all of its neighbors’ militaries combined. Anyway, those neighbors have made peace with Israel save Syria, which has held out mostly for political reasons. From Israel’s view, there is only one potentially existential military threat left: the Iranian nuclear program. But that program has not produced a warhead and, with Tehran now seeking to reach an agreement on the program, it may never.
Israel is the only country in the region that is Jewish; it is tremendously outnumbered in numerical terms, and though its conventional military is strong, Israel would undoubtedly be in a war for its life with its neighbors were it to lack nuclear weapons (as it was no less than three times between 1947 and 1967). The real danger, of course, is Iran. But in its quest to save President Obama’s Iran deal from Israeli protests and the protests of pro-Israel people everywhere, the Post now has its new villain: those intransigent, dangerous Jews.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.