Israel is simply too small to defend in modern mobile warfare. In 1948 that was less of an issue since we fought against Arab militia, but in 1967 and 1973 Israel was invaded by regular Arab armies. Even the most incapable, battered army can gather enough strength for the forty-mile advance that would allow Syria to wipe out the Jewish state.

Lacking tanks and aircraft after the first battles, Syria could still march its 200,000-strong infantry and mammoth conscripted reserves into Israel, and no realistically available amount of Jewish firepower would have helped in a trench war.

Hamas and Hezbollah can easily bring Jewish society to screams by consistent attacks at Israel’s soft underbelly, the foreign Jews. Daily stabbing of Jews throughout the world is a slam-dunk affair, and it wouldn’t even alienate European governments from the terrorists. Faced with such major unrest, the Europeans would press Israel to give in rather than pressing the terrorists to abstain.

Terror bombings are likewise underutilized. The Iraqi insurgency has shown that cargo and van bombs are superior to suicide bombers, but Hamas refrains from using them. Plenty of other options exist to make the confrontation deadlier. Despite the great job done by Israeli intelligence, the current bomber-interception rate of 100 percent reveals that the war is a fiction.

Hezbollah has no reason to hold its rocket fire. It knows Israel won’t dare to occupy Lebanon again and risk exposing her troops to Hezbollah’s guerrilla attacks, as we did two decades ago. Short of occupation, Israeli bombing raids will be promptly quenched by the UN. Iran will cover whatever damage is done there.

For her part, Israel also plays softball. While the American pressure is responsible for Israel’s failure to employ the nuclear option in 1973 to annihilate the surrounded Egyptian Third Army, there was no comparable pressure regarding Syria—yet, IDF did not enter Damascus. Every Israeli politician understands the basic fact that we can get peace with Syria by ending the bombardment of Damascus rather than ceding the Golan Heights; yet, no one suggests bombing Damascus into a peace agreement.

Terrorist targets are well known. Israel can easily destroy Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV station or assassinate Mashaal with a missile strike. Haniye routinely appears before crowds, open to Israeli drones.

The Shalit debacle underscored the problem of mutual restraint. Israel could bring about the corporal’s release by systematic assassination of Hamas and Dughmush leaders or by wholesale killing of Palestinian prisoners. If you think that killing jailed terrorists is unthinkable, the democratic Germans did just that: its jailed RAF terrorists committed suicide. Hamas, for its part, did not retaliate against foreign Jewish targets.

Palestinian grassroots terrorism breaks mutual complacency. Individual, unaffiliated terrorists do not trade mutual safety promises with Jews. Almost all the terrorist attacks in Israel in the last two years were carried out by lone Arabs without support from a terrorist group. Sure, such terror is statistically insignificant, but the media help the terrorists out by trumpeting their deeds.

Syria, Egypt, Hezbollah, and Hamas bolstered their arsenals while they were safe from Israeli preventive strikes. Taken over by reckless—as opposed to radical—Islamists, any group could pull the region into a significant war. Such a war would be larger and more painful than a series of mini-wars; it would consist essentially of mutual strikes aimed at depleting the enemy’s arsenals, and most importantly, eradicating his will to fight. The escalation scenario is likely because everything is set for it: a demagogic Sunni leader might use all the missiles that the Syrian Alawite dynasty accumulated for the sake of bragging. In Egypt, reasonable presidents can run the country for decades, but the Muslim Brotherhood needs just a year in the office to launch a war on Israel.

In the Middle East’s warehouse of powder kegs, someone eventually will break the safety rules.

Few policies are inherently malicious. Most carry a kernel of goodness which is not allowed enough time to develop. The short time-horizon of democratically elected governments coupled with the typical impatience of consumerist societies produces horrible results. The consumers’ demand for “everything and now” is usually scaled down to “something now,” which correlates well with the government’s policies: do a little, then use media to exaggerate the achievements. Democracies hate when nothing happens.

Peacekeeping is a very long, careful process, often without visible results. Breaking a thing or a society is easy: a few months of propaganda can cause a society to erupt in ethnic violence. Restoring a semblance of order with summary punishments is also easy. But silly governments embark on an immensely more problematic, perhaps impossible mission: building states where hostile groups coexist in neighborly fashion. Even when the militias are brought under control and effectively dismantled, pacification takes years—longer than a peacekeeping government’s time-horizon, enough to give its opponents the opportunity to criticize it.

Two viable options exist. One is for peacekeeping operations to be handled exclusively by an international body. That gives them credibility; the international organization has no designs on the pacified territory and clearly has the sole purpose of restoring peace. Two, conduct peacekeeping missions as short violence-quenching raids: brutally bomb all the militias and their supporters to drive into their brains the notion of basic human rights.

In places such as Somalia, the first approach offers a considerable chance of success. Instead of the US Army, which is normally associated with wars and colonial-style expeditions, a peacekeeping force would be more acceptable to local militants. Ostensibly, that was the case in Somalia; American troops participated as a part of the UN force. Locals, however, do not care about the legal small print: Americans dominated the UN peacekeepers. Worse, the UN force employed both of the outlined approaches simultaneously and half-heartedly. Pakistani peacekeepers were quite brutal, often unnecessarily so, but insufficiently brutal to quench the guerrillas. The Americans brought aid as if to excuse themselves for something.

In reality, neither approach works, nor should it. Violence is indispensable to human relations. In order to be credible and efficient, violence is often ugly, directed against civilians. No sane person can like it, but none can decry it either, for we do not decry natural calamities.

When some Chechens rose up against the Russian occupation, whom should the peacekeepers have supported, the attacked Russians or the repressed Chechens? When Palestinian terrorists wage a war against Israel, whom does the international force protect: the attacked Israelis or the Arabs denied a state of their own? Quenching violence is not an option, as it stalls national movements and entrenches outdated regimes.

Peacekeeping, accordingly, becomes hectic, and the affected locals decry its arbitrariness. Of all the nations who conduct mass murders in our time, the Somalis were singled out for prosecution, and they felt themselves to be righteous for fighting back.

The only viable approach is to limit peacekeeping to cases of gross civilian death-tolls that are clearly irrelevant to the professed political objectives. In such cases the militants on one or both sides have to be attacked harshly, and afterwards things have to be left to their own development. Peacekeeping must send a single message to all nations: when fighting, avoid excessive atrocities—and if you don’t heed the message, we’ll bomb you into compliance.

When the Allies respected German human shields, the results were devastating. Though Allied bombers had destroyed much of Germany’s military industry by late 1943, Nazis continued to receive military supplies from factories in Belgium, France, and other occupied territories, which the Allies mostly refrained from bombing, thus endangering their own soldiers and prolonging war and its suffering.

Criticism of Hamas’ use of human shields is hypocritical. Every army does this, often on a much larger scale. In 1940, France hid behind Belgium and thus prompted a German attack on that neutral country. Likewise, British provocations against Norway forced Germany to occupy that country. Britain used Malta to launch intercept attacks on German and Italian convoys to Africa, thus subjecting that island nation to devastating German aerial attacks. By the very act of fighting the war, British generals subjected London to terror bombing campaigns. Military factories were located in London rather than in open-air military bases―a classic case of using a human shield. Any country’s military uses human shields in the sense that they willingly endanger their civilian populations.

Those who condemn Dresden bombing usually do not know that terror bombings were at the time an accepted part of military campaigns. The Germans let the djinn out of the bottle by bombing Guernica, Spain, then Warsaw and Rotterdam. After ten German planes bombed London by mistake instead of military factories there, Britain was free to bomb Berlin. Dresden and Hiroshima were not isolated incidents, but typical military strategy.

This is a wolf’s world: Czechoslovakia stood by while Germany occupied Austria, though the move almost encircled them. When Germany later threatened Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland joined the fray on the Nazi side and made territorial demands on Czechoslovakia; Poland deployed its troops at the border. Britain signed a secret protocol to its defense treaty with Poland which allowed it to declare war only on Germany when the Soviet Union, too, invaded Poland. The Soviet Union offered Britain a pact against Germany in 1937, signed a pact with Germany in 1939, switched back to Britain in 1941, and went back against it in 1946. The Russians were ready to “defend” Czechoslovakia: such an occasion would have allowed them to occupy both Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Hitler’s father unexpectedly took an interest in him and sent him to school. He was not degraded in Vienna during his years as vagabond there. Bravery in WWI did not get him killed. Early riots did not get him jailed, and the beer hall putsch did not get him extradited to Austria. German politicians, a remarkably rational crowd, quarreled among themselves as if to clear the road for the Nazis. The small force of SS troops prevailed over the leadership of SA, a militia twenty-five times the size of the German army, during the Night of Long Knives. The League of Nations which slapped Italy with sanctions over Abyssinia, chose not to react to German breaches of the Versailles Treaty. France did not crush the German army upon the remilitarization of the Rhineland, though France possessed a hundred times more troops at the border. Italy became estranged from France and England, its natural allies, over irrelevant Ethiopia, and did not intervene during the German annexation of Austria, as Mussolini had originally promised to do. Hitler dismissed scores of top commanders who were planning a putsch against him shortly before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, though he did not know about their plans. France disregarded its mutual defense pact with Czechoslovakia. The world stood ready to defeat Germany over Czechoslovakia: France and Czechoslovakia mobilized twice the number of German divisions, the US was ready to support Britain, Britain mobilized its fleet against Germany, Yugoslavia and Romania threatened Hungary with war if it joined Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the USSR offered to defend Czechoslovakia from Germany, German generals were prepared to oust Hitler to avoid war, and the German population was strongly anti-war. In 1938–39, Russia twice offered Britain and France immediate help with joint military action against Germany―which the anti-communists refused. Hitler wouldn’t have been able to attack Poland in 1939 if Stalin had continued his slow-paced negotiations with Germany; by 1940, Britain would probably have signed a treaty with the USSR, making a German attack on Poland impossible. The Polish government made the incredibly stupid position to reject military assistance from Moscow just days before the war. Hitler’s top generals had planned to topple him since 1938, but they backed off every time. The simple step of mining the fjords and territorial waters would have delayed the German invasion of Norway and left the Nazis without Swedish ore. The Nazis could not invade Britain only because radar gave the British a decisive advantage: RAF concentrated its meager number of planes according to the threat. For all their interest in science, the Nazis showed no interest in nuclear development, and by the time they developed fighter jets they did not have fuel for them. More than dozen attempts on Hitler’s life failed: bombs did not explode, suicide bombers could not get close to him, and he sometimes changed his schedule for no reason. Hitler held power despite considerable opposition from his generals, a number of whom actively plotted against him. He survived a bombing attempt in 1944 because someone pushed the briefcase containing the bomb to the other side of the table. In 1945, Hitler ordered an increase in the height of the ventilation pipe which Speer had planned to use to poison his bunker. The list goes on and on, and at every step the Nazi regime could have been dealt a crushing blow.

But there were coincidences on the other side, too. Britain had no reason whatsoever to declare war on Germany, yet it did. America had no reason to enter the war, but was dragged into it by Roosevelt. The Soviet government did not capitulate despite the terrible odds. The Nazis did not stop in France, where they could very well have ended the war, but invaded Russia. Because of the revolt in Yugoslavia and the German attack on that country, the Barbarossa plan was delayed for one month―exactly the month the Germans needed before Russian winter descended on their troops. On the other hand, the month’s delay allowed the Germans to destroy all the weapons the USSR had amassed on its border. The British lost to the Germans in all foreign battles, but survived Rommel’s assault on Palestine because Hitler delayed the airborne invasion of Malta, and the Allies intercepted Rommel’s reinforcements from there.

God does not do miracles by violating the laws of nature. Instead, he twists the odds. And all odds were twisted toward Holocaust.

In the next war, Hamas cannot be so stupid as to let Gazans evacuate their buildings after a “knock on the roof,” when IAF drops a dummy charge as a warning to tell the inhabitants to flee so that only a worthless building will be destroyed, perhaps along with some cheap arsenals. Instead, upon seeing the warning, Hamas will rush many more people into the buildings, expecting correctly that Jews won’t bomb a human shield.

The Goldstone report will be Hamas’ war manual; it will show the guerrillas what Israel will not do. Goldstone condemned the alleged use of human shields by IDF? Hamas will use such shields ever more extensively. After seeing that IDF never shells a civilian crowd, Gazans will flock to provide human shields for their guerrillas: a patriotic and completely safe action. Human shields will protect houses with arsenals and sniper positions. Even the mad Israeli policy of sending her soldiers into urban battles rather than risking the lives of Arab civilians won’t work: regular troops cannot storm houses full of civilian human shields. Fifty such houses with two snipers each would block the army’s advance. Jews might opt to stay in APCs, however humiliating that is for an allegedly victorious army, but that won’t help, either, as active defense does not protect well at so close distance.

Once a regular army accepts responsibility for enemy civilians, it is doomed. Palestinians send their children to Jewish soldiers with imitation guns and shahid belts. What if one child in a hundred gets a real gun or explosives?

A war is a life and death matter on the national level. There is no intermediate solution, only to kill or be killed. Until an enemy population surrenders, every one of its citizens is fair game unless he demonstrates his neutrality beyond doubt. War is prosecuted under the presumption of guilt: even small children are enemies unless proven otherwise.

All that changes with surrender: an occupying army acts as a police force, usually through its MPs, or relegates police matters to a collaborationist government. At that point, civilian rules become applicable again: locals are innocent until proven guilty. For such a situation to stand, the occupier must enjoy unhindered freedom of operation, consistent with surrender, and full cooperation by local authorities in investigating incidents and arresting the culprits―who are now regarded as criminals rather than POWs because they act against a party whom their elected government no longer recognizes as an enemy.

Dissidents exist. It is the collaborationist government’s responsibility to expel or arrest them, just as it is a government’s duty generally to extirpate local criminals. If, as is the case in the West Bank, the local authority cannot eliminate the dissidents who resist the occupier, then it ceases to be an authority, the surrender is nullified, and war resumes.

Generals always prepare for the last war. $10 million tanks can be destroyed with a $2,000 RPG-29 rocket. $60 million planes can be shot down with a $100,000 rocket. One would think that this is the age of rockets, but a million-dollar ballistic missile can be intercepted with a shot from laser cannon―which now costs $200 million dollars, but the cost could quickly be brought down to around $30 million. Commandos can find and destroy the expensive lasers before a missile strike, but cheap lasers would be too numerous to be targeted by commandos.

Losses to Israel’s GDP from conscription exceed $10 billion annually. People of the most productive age spend three senseless years chasing Jewish villagers and Arab criminals. Large armies are no longer useful when a nuclear bomb can evaporate the masses and nerve gases act through the tiniest holes in protective cover. Every weapon made has been used on a grand scale, and nuclear and chemical weapons will be no exception. It is wrong to keep a large standing army; buy weapons instead. Massive armies are immoral: they only exist because generals do not factor in the value of life. If soldiers were officially valued at $10 million a head, a typical life insurance amount, infantry combat would become prohibitively expensive. In mass warfare Israel is doomed, anyway: how many soldiers can we put up against seven-million-strong Egyptian and Syrian forces? Conscription won’t help us against thousands of Syrian SCAD missiles―and neither would Patriots at a million dollars apiece. We need our own lasers and inexpensive Russian S-400. Yes, the Arabs would then receive them, too, but a few ABMs we can always neutralize with commando operations. The Arabs have reasoned, wisely enough, that they can neutralize our expensive planes with cheap missiles; a cheap ABM levels the field. Israel must not play the Arab game of numbers: we cannot amass more infantry, planes, or rockets than they do.

The world is coming back to low-level combat, a sort of terrorist warfare―but this time terrorists have nukes.

The dominance of media in shaping public alliances suggests a yet-underexploited form of warfare: controlling the agents of influence. Today, Israel spends billions on a conventional army which she cannot use because of political constraints. There is little sense in maintaining the world’s fourth-strongest army while still giving up land to insignificant enemies. Muslims enjoy an automatic majority in the UN, leftists run amok in American universities and political bureaucracy, and Israel lacks the universal cultural attraction of the United States, so what can we do?

A lot. For a fraction of Israel’s military budget Jews can win a much more significant war, a war for the public mind. Mossad’s resources are currently wasted: tremendous efforts are invested in spying on the Iranian nuclear program while no political decisions are made.

Consider it: what was the point of the extremely complex spying operations in Natanz in 2006–2009? Everyone knew that the intel would remain non-actionable and expire into worthlessness. Many intelligence operations are conducted either out of pure curiosity or against unworthy targets, Mabhouh being an example of such a misjudgment. Instead, intelligence resources should be employed against Western and Arab public figures: media owners and journalists, politicians, professors in important universities, key bureaucrats, and social activists. Unlike enemy installations, they are unprotected against spying. Their petty tax evasion, extramarital affairs, obnoxious habits, and many other things about them are nearly open and can be put to profitable use through blackmail. Quickly and on the cheap, we can make scores of foreign opinion leaders friendly to Israel. Would there be scandals? Not many. Very few attempts at recruiting spies ever come to light; unprepared civilians are still less likely to accuse Mossad of recruiting them. With national interests at stake, there is no need to be snowy white. Israel could easily have shut up Lewinsky and gotten a much better deal than the Road Map. We know that Putin is personally offended by Jewish oligarchs―a dirty and un-Jewish crowd, indeed. Instead of harboring them in Israel, we can simply render them to Russia in return for assurances on S-300 sales to Iran.

The blackmail opportunities are perfect with the UN representatives of negligible island nations. Their governments know nothing about the Israeli-Arab conflict and have no interest in it, so their ambassadors are free to vote as they wish. Most of them have their dirty secrets, including moral degradation, corruption, and embezzlement, which they wouldn’t like their governments to know. By blackmailing UN ambassadors, Israel can easily assemble a decent voting bloc. More votes can be bought with small development projects in pauper nations: investing a few million in a local president’s pet charity would buy us a lot of goodwill.

It is a wrong policy to befriend all governments. True, we need working relations with important governments, but not all of them. Why do we care about the Japanese government? Instead, Israeli commandos should be helping Western NGOs to end Japanese dolphin and whale hunting―and we should do so openly, especially since the Torah squarely prohibits the eating of sea mammals. Israel can help NGOs in many other situations: for example, against African gangs who ransack food convoys and Brazilian farmers who burn rainforests. The costs would be trivial, and the PR effect huge.

Speaking of the governments, supporting guerrillas makes sense. They are usually well-paying customers for Israeli military suppliers. Moreover, they stand a good chance of winning or at least receiving major political concessions from their governments. Israel must abandon her Old World diplomatic penchant for supporting fellow rulers: more often than not, they do not support us. Instead, win support from the bottom up by working profitably with insurgents.

Israelis lament foreign funding of ultra-left NGOs here. But the amounts in question are ridiculously small. Offer seed financing to foreign NGOs. Amnesty fished for money in Saudi Arabia; Israel’s money is no dirtier. And instead of Amnesty condemning us for Gaza, we would have it condemn Muslim terrorists. Seed financing would work equally well with Internet media, in which the expenses are typically low, but so are the incomes. Influential online journalists can be bought off at a fraction of the cost of running a typical PR campaign.

Jews have all the prerequisites for running a successful influence campaign: excellent security capabilities, sufficient funds, good contacts in foreign media and universities, and smart people capable of prosecuting this new type of war. A government decision is needed.

Nuclear weapons seemed to create an impasse: they can neither be defended from upon explosion, nor intercepted reliably. Slowly, three possibilities have emerged that promise to make nuclear weapons less apocalyptic. Interception works well: an alert country can shoot down almost all enemy aircraft and missiles entering its airspace. Nuclear charges can still be smuggled, but a ground-level explosion is not too destructive.

Another development is decentralization. The United States has created an extensive backup for its infrastructure. A nuclear attack on New York would no longer paralyze communication networks, data banks, or anything else. In a modern economy, knowledge is the ultimate capital. As long as data survives, factories, labs, and universities can be rebuilt within a few years. A nuclear strike can kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps even tens of millions of people―a very small number in terms of American population―but it cannot inflict a decisive blow, nor throw a country back into the Stone Age. The old adage that the Fourth World War will be fought with stone axes is no longer true.

And finally, there is mutual deterrence. There was a time when we could not be sure if it really worked, since it existed only between the United States and the Soviet Union, both countries extremely averse to large-scale wars. Now we have seen Pakistan refrain from a nuclear attack on India even after major escalations. North Korea is afraid to sell its bombs to Iran, a willing and insistent bidder, and Libya abandoned its almost-hot nuclear program. Before that, Israel shrank from nuking Egyptian armies in the face of existential danger. So far, no ruler has been mad enough to use nuclear weapons, thanks in large part to the secret but well-known NATO promise to attack any country which initiates a nuclear war. Authoritarian rulers willing to start an apocalyptic war may arise, but they are more likely to lead Third World countries with small nuclear arsenals, which cannot inflict decisive damage on their opponents.

Affluence and nuclear weapons prevent nations from starting wars, but violence is inherent in international affairs. So what can be the new mode of military operations? Several developments can be noted. Countries are returning to old-fashioned low-level strikes: Egypt sent the fedayeen to conduct terrorist attacks in Israel, and the Americans lobbed ballistic missiles into Tripoli. From Yemen to Pakistan, the CIA replaces the regular army, and drones act in place of troops. I’m waiting for the abandonment of diplomatic immunity: it is a shame that Israel did not shoot down Ahmadinejad’s plane during one of his many foreign travels. Targeted operations by legitimate states are paralleled by terrorism directed against them; terrorism, too, is a low-level mode of warfare.

It would be interesting to see whether this return to the historical norm of predominantly limited military operations affects domestic crime. Historically, massive but low-profile international violence has been paralleled domestically by criminal violence. But mammoth police apparatuses curb criminal violence excellently, especially since the affluent population is largely law-obedient. The opposite trend might develop if domestic criminals began to employ terrorist methods, especially if lone attackers were to gain access to efficient weapons such as automatic rifles or biological agents.

Globalization has made possible the projection of political power without military means, or perhaps with minor guerrilla operations. Germans acquired Austria and part of Czechoslovakia entirely through political action; German military capabilities at the time were insufficient for such bold moves. Iran, a militarily negligible power, made significant inroads into Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. The Soviets established client regimes in the Third World with little or no military action. The United States buys vassals rather than conquering them. On other hand, those examples show that non-military means cannot produce lasting results: without the threat of force, clients switch alliances easily.

Iran will have nuclear weapons regardless of whether Israel attacks. The Iranians can spread uranium plasma enrichment facilities throughout urban areas, or dig centrifuge halls deep into the mountains beyond the reach of bunker-buster bombs. Still simpler, they can procure ready-made bombs from North Korea. The theocratic government is unlikely to last for decades, but Iranian nationalists would hardly abandon their imperialist ambitions. The desire for Middle Eastern dominance has come naturally to Iran for the past three thousand years.

Iran will subsume the Shiite populations of Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi issue may be the most important: Shiites populate the Saudi oilfield region, and Iranian expansion there would automatically transform Saudi Arabia into a pauper Bedouin state. Western reaction to Iranian expansion would greatly depend on the perceived stability of the oil flow. If Iran establishes itself as a respected empire which conducts meaningful diplomacy with the West, the West may turn a blind eye to Iranian endeavors in Saudi Arabia. Heavily armed by the United States, the Saudis may forcibly relocate their Shiites away from the oil fields. Anyway, major unrest is certain in Saudi Arabia, and it will take the form of religious clashes between Wahhabi Sunnis and Shiites.

Faced with such a prospect, Saudi Arabia cannot afford nuclear inferiority to Iran. Having used chemical weapons in the war with Iraq, Iran is very likely to employ nuclear weapons against Saudis. Saudi Arabia is rumored to have a number of nuclear warheads which it received from Pakistan in return for financing Pakistan’s nuclear program. In any case, Saudis won’t miss any opportunity to procure nuclear weapons from a fellow Wahhabite country. For the sake of prestige, Saudis may embark on a nuclear program of their own rather than sitting quietly on their nuclear arsenals. Israel, which hesitated to bomb Iranian nuclear installations, certainly won’t attack Saudi Arabia, an important ally against Iran and an American client.

Pakistan will fall to Islamists. That country is dysfunctional: a multi-ethnic Muslim entity torn among peaceful secularists, Muslim radicals, and anti-Indian nationalists. Corrupt and impoverished, it cannot bribe its population into compliance. Under Western scrutiny for minor abuses of human rights, Pakistani army cannot crack down in force on Islamist strongholds. Pakistan might destroy or export its nuclear bombs before radicals lay their hands on them, but reactors will remain. Pakistani radicals would continue the nuclear cycle, or at the very least engage in proliferation.

Egypt has a military nuclear program of its own, though IAEA tried to ignore numerous traces of weapons-grade uranium it found near Egypt’s ‘laboratory’ reactors. When Iran and Saudi Arabia go nuclear, Egypt cannot afford to lag behind. A covert nuclear program wouldn’t threaten $1.2 billion a year in aid it receives from the United States. Egypt would argue, correctly, that Israel, too, receives American aid despite its covert nuclear activities. In a nuclearized Middle East the United States would want to appear evenhanded, even anti-Israeli. Bound by her peace treaty with Egypt, Israel won’t attack its nuclear installations.

The Syrian nuclear program depends on Syria being protected from Israel. Syria can achieve that by signing a peace treaty with Israel. That would require Syria to abandon its claims to the Lake Kineret and accept long-term demilitarization of the Golan Heights. Neither condition is problematic if the reward for it is a safe nuclear program.

Nuclearized Iran can offer Syria protection against Israeli strikes. Syria might not get a reactor, but several centrifuge halls would suffice for a military nuclear program. The Russians have built a reactor in Iran, and have no reason not to engage in similar construction in Syria―arguably, a less problematic state. Syria would then use its ‘peaceful’ reactor to harvest plutonium. As Israeli relations with Turkey deteriorate and Turkey’s airspace becomes closed to IAF, deep aerial raids inside Syria through Russian air defenses would become problematic. With S-400 deployed on Russian Navy ships in the Syrian port of Tartus, Assad’s nuclear program might be deemed relatively safe from an Israeli strike.

Pushed away by the EU, Turkey would inevitably slip back to Dar al Islam. Decades of nationalist brainwashing, perceived as the alternative to Islamism, has charged Turks with imperialist zeal. Combining this nationalism with Islamic ideology will produce a combustible mix. Russia might come out strongly against Turkey’s nuclearization, especially if Moscow sticks to its current plan for soft annexation of Ukraine. Unlike Israel, Russia will not tolerate a nuclear-armed neighbor in a strategic location. Highly dependent on foreign trade and susceptible to sanctions, Turkey might not risk an overt nuclear program, but it will master most of the nuclear cycle so as to be able to jump into the nuclear club at any moment.

Iraq is unlikely to persist. That Frankenstein of a country will be split between Kurds and Iran, leaving perhaps a small Arab enclave to retain the name, Iraq. The Kurds will be very interested in their own nukes. Intelligent and educated compared to Arabs, flush with oil revenues, they will have no great difficulty developing nuclear weapons. Israel will help them with their nuclear program in order to create trouble for Iran.

Jordan will cease to exist in its present form of a moderate monarchy. Its moderation is really a balancing act: between Syria and Israel, Islam and the West, Palestinians and Bedouins. An apartheid state which oppresses not only its Palestinians―who are three quarters of the population―but also most of its Bedouins, is nonviable. A single Bedouin tribe cannot rule a large country. Jordan lacks any economic potential, and will fall into the orbit of any country which promises to subsidize it. If Israel were smart, she could have bought Jordan’s allegiance for a couple of billion dollars per year. It was once a question whether Jordan would fall to Syria or Iraq. Now that both Syria and Iraq are aligned with Iran, that question is moot.

Lebanon cannot exist as an independent state. Weak and fractious, it naturally belongs to Syria’s sphere of influence. Again, if Israel were smart, she would have annexed and depopulated South Lebanon for a buffer area and created a Christian state between herself and Syria.

Israel’s nuclear weapons will be targeted for IAEA inspections. Faced with Arab-orchestrated condemnation for running a nuclear program, Israel will have to dismantle some nukes; but more importantly, she won’t be able to replenish the expiring nuclear stocks. Moreover, Israeli nukes are not properly tested―there was a single test at most. In all probability, the design is operative, but it may be defective.

In twenty years, Israeli voters will be 34% Arab, some 5% non-Jewish African, and 10–12% other non-Jews. Jews will become a minority. The Galilee and Negev will be fully settled by Arabs, off-limit to Jews except for a few towns. Roads will be dangerous. Arabs will move into hitherto Jewish cities: non-religious districts of Jerusalem, from Yaffo on to Tel Aviv, from Akko on to Haifa. As Arabs become a significant part of any city’s population, Jewish residents will begin to leave.

Productive Jews will continue to emigrate under the burden of unreasonable taxation, insecurity, and political indecisiveness. As emigration becomes socially acceptable, brain drain among scientists will increase from the current level, already a staggering 25 percent. Arabs and haredim constituting a majority of the population, no government would be able to afford to decrease welfare allowances. Post-Zionist education makes warfare destiny of simple-minded. The settlers will take a political beating and cease to be the backbone of IDF combat forces. The national zeal that saved the day in 1948 and 1973 will no longer exist.

Russia’s advanced SAM batteries or their Chinese versions will make their way into Arab hands. The price of US warplanes will keep skyrocketing. IAF generals will be averse to risking $150 million planes by putting them in the way of interceptor missiles. Helicopter and low-altitude fighter flights will be endangered by relatively simple SAM batteries of TOR-1M and SA-22 types. Active defense on tanks will lose to antitank missiles, as any defense loses to offense. For a while, IDF will still be able to destroy SAM batteries with commando raids, but increasing density of air defenses will make this tactic problematic. IDF’s two winning arms, air force and tanks, will effectively be cut off.

The nuclearization of Muslim states will shatter Israeli nuclear deterrence. The Muslims might suspect that a multiple nuclear strike at Israel would produce an equally devastating attack against themselves, but they will nonetheless feel confident that Israel wouldn’t retaliate with nukes for a single nuclear explosion, for fear of escalation. A highly plausible scenario is one in which Syria detonates a single nuclear warhead over Tel Aviv, with Iran threatening a massive nuclear attack if Israel retaliates.

Iran and Hezbollah will renew their claims on former Shiite villages in the Galilee. Protected against most Israeli raids by inexpensive $13 million Greyhound batteries, they will threaten Jews with massive rocket arsenals. Their current stockpile of 50,000 rockets will continue to grow. In Lebanon, Israel lacks the kind of exhaustive intelligence she collected with Fatah’s help before the war in Gaza, and military planners will assume a rocket penetration ratio of no less than 20 percent. Today, that would be 10,000 rockets, or 2.5 times the 2006 number. Intercepting them, if it were possible at all, would cost billions of dollars, an unlikely expenditure for small Israel. Short of a real war, no Israeli government would risk hundreds of civilian deaths, and we should expect Arab Israeli villagers to gradually adopt a pro-Hezbollah stance.

Israeli forays into Gaza and the West Bank will come to a halt, as is almost the case now. Human-rights groups on one hand and anti-aircraft weapons on the other hand will pressure Israel to desist from retaliation for low-scale attacks.

Israel’s alliances remain doubtful. Our natural ally today, as it was twenty-six centuries ago, is Egypt. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power would preclude such an alliance. In any case, it is hard to see any good reason for Egypt to go to war with Iran over its expansion into Syria and Lebanon. Things might change if Iran were to start fomenting Shiite movements in Egypt. Likewise, Turkey could be drawn to Israel if Iran started to subvert its moderately Muslim government with radicals. If Iranian maintains a sensible policy toward its neighbors, Israel will be left alone.

Having taken a heavy beating in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US will be wary of involvement in the nuclearized Middle East. Opening up its own oil reserves and increasingly its reliance on nuclear energy would be preferable alternatives to military expeditions. US public opinion, shaped by continual terrorist attacks on American soil, might be with Israel, and the government might even help us with weapons, but the United States will be powerless in the UN and in the international arena generally. Muslims will align with aggressive empires like Iran and Russia, rather than the benevolent one.

The population explosion in Muslim countries will continue for a generation or two. It is already subsiding in towns, but it continues in rural areas. Half a billion Muslims will oppose five million Jews who remain in Israel. A country with a zealous population and an adventurous military might be able to survive against 100:1 odds, but Israel is no longer prepared for an aggressive, preemptive policy.

Alternative fuels will hold the maximum stable price of oil at about $70 a barrel, and the price will decrease with advances in alternative fuels. Increasing population, and more importantly, increasing demands for welfare distribution will diminish Muslim oil wealth. Their non-oil-related economic output will remain negligible: there is no conceivable way that the Arabs could wrest labor-intensive industries from China, whose population has a much stronger work ethic and enjoys a far better government. Unable to equip large advanced armies, Muslim governments will resort to primitive infantry warfare. To be sure, their military procurement is, and will remain, an order above Israel’s, but lack of training and military discipline will make even the most advanced airplanes useless in the hands of Saudi or UAE pilots. Still, they can march millions of their infantry across the border into Israel; and they may threaten to do so unless Israel offers more and more concessions to her fifth column, the Arabs.

Zeal and training can provide no more than a short-term advantage. Small Rome prevailed over vast territories because of its economic might, but also because there was no conscription, so the armies were small on both sides. Ancient monarchies, in a sense, were less totalitarian than modern nation-states: they rarely conscripted their entire male citizenry and never taxed all businesses for military purposes. Again, Israel could prevail against the Muslims by using extremely aggressive tactics: attacking them mercilessly now, while we have an edge over them, and forcing their disarmament. If this option is allowed to slip away, the decisive factor in the coming war will not be tactics, but rather a competition of staying power in which the Muslims undoubtedly will prevail by virtue of their greater population, territory, and economic resources. Iran and Iraq fought for eight years while Israel was barely able to sustain three weeks of fighting in 1973. Lacking the depth of defense we once had in Sinai and the West Bank, and exposed to tens of thousands of rockets and a nuclear strike, Israel won’t be able to afford any significant war.

It is hard to see any outcome for Israel other than political defeat and gradual acquiescence to Arab demands.