The vast majority of Israelis say they are not troubled by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza, a new poll released by the Israel Democracy Institute shows.
The survey shows that 79 percent of Jews in Israel were not troubled, or troubled at all, whereas 86 percent of “Arab” respondents were somewhat or very troubled by the reports about the war on Gaza.
The survey was conducted between 27-31 July.
Sure, it would include countries which threaten them directly, but it is not limited to that. As per the quoted section, Israel’s government has already threatened to nuke the USA if we did not continue supplying them with military aid. There is a reason this policy is not just called MAD. It’s something entirely different.
I would interpret that paragraph as a threat to nuke Arab countries (13 times, maybe), which would be bad, and would also have major political and economic fallout for Nixon. Threatening the use of nukes against a non-nuclear country is questionable, but I think it’s also the US policy if invaded.
I had assumed it was just called that for the Jewishness. The story of Samson is pretty MAD-ish, except that I don’t think his captors were warned - killing a bunch of Philistines was the point, because it was the bad old days.
Come to think of it, did/do they even have a way of delivering nukes outside the region?
Here’s another article which contains more quotes from the same book Wikipedia cites:
https://the307.substack.com/p/the-samson-option-how-israel-not
Edit regarding your question: Yes, Isreal has multiple delivery options.
Officials confirm that the nation can now launch atomic weapons from land, sea and air.
Hmm, a bit of a suspect source. And I can’t find the primary source of this quote.
It does look like some of their boats and ships have global range, at least. If the Martin van Creveld quote is authentic, that would imply Rome is the edge of their missile range, which would make sense. I’m guessing Iran is just about as far.
They absolutely have the capability. Even without their many aircraft capable of carrying nuclear bombs and fleet of nuclear-missile-carrying submarines, their Jericho III missiles have a range of 11,500 km. From that wiki page:
Regarding the Martin van Creveld quote, check this out.
That one is in the Wikipedia article as well, and is sourced. I can’t find him talking about nuking Europe anywhere else.
It honestly doesn’t pass the sniff test, either. Nobody likes being threatened, and Israel is heavily dependent on the goodwill of the West (or just the US, now that it’s split off). It’s way too easy just to bandy around regional chaos and then play as nice and holy as possible with us.
I only put a portion of the quote in the search text to not exclude variations in punctuation between sentences. I wasn’t pointing to the string of characters in the search bar, but the results it yielded. The full quote is in the search results, including the threat on European capitals.
I’m not sure how you can continue to say this policy doesn’t pass the sniff test. The only context in which I have heard Samson option discussed is in regards to Israel taking out everyone with them. There’s been literally books written on the subject, showing Israel’s intent and capability (see the sources in the Samson option wiki page for the books).