Israel - A Nuclear Power: US Intelligence Leak Ends the Deafening Silence of SWANA’s Longest Unspoken Secret

On October 1st, 2024 Ex-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet wrote on X: “Israel has now its greatest opportunity in 50 years, to change the face of the Middle East. The leadership of Iran, which used to be good at chess, made a terrible mistake this evening. We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime.” 

Former US President Donald Trump echoed his support, agreeing that Israel should “hit nuclear first and worry about rest after.” Meanwhile, the Biden administration worries about the effects such retaliatory strikes can have in the region, warning of the risk of plunging into a full-scale war. 

These statements came in the wake of Iranian missile attacks on Israel at the beginning of the month. This incident reignited longstanding debates surrounding Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, the perceived threat it poses to regional “stability” and the role Israel should have in ensuring Iran never gets nuclear weapons. For the past 15 years, Israel has attempted to cripple Iran’s nuclear facilities and hinder their production, demanding US support at every step of the process. 

Israel’s plans to strike Iran were leaked on Telegram from US Intelligence sources sharing documents including information indicating that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. This is the first time there has been confirmation about Israel’s nuclear capabilities, although suspicions about an Israeli nuclear program date back to the beginning of the Cold War. This piece of information, despite being unsurprising, has implications for regional strategic planning and prompts questions about Israel’s future role in nuclear politics. 

When addressing Congress in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an “existential threat” to Israel even in the case of Iran’s acquisition of a small nuclear arsenal. If Netanyahu argues that a small nuclear arsenal would pose an “existential threat” to a settler-colonial state — equipped with some of the most advanced weaponry globally, backed by the U.S., and financially and militarily supported by Western powers, which has conducted indiscriminate bombings with genocidal intent over the past year—then what implications could Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons have for Palestine and the broader region? Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons not only intensifies regional instability and heightens existential threats to neighbouring states but also solidifies power imbalances, advancing the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine and increasing the death toll in surrounding countries. 

More importantly, it makes us wonder, are nuclear weapons only considered dangerous when in the hands of “fundamentalist terrorists?” If we were to accept this to be true, then the Zionist entity known as Israel should be the first considered a danger. It is a regime that is fundamentalist in its essence, creating an identity through instrumentalizing a religion to justify a settler colonial project that has stolen Indigenous Palestinians’ right to their ancestral land. 

Israel has often treated all its neighbours as one united block whose sole mission is their destruction. Groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi are treated synonymously and as interchangeable terms despite their different goals, strategies, ideologies, and areas of activity.

Given this fact and historical precedent, we can assume that in light of the recent leak, Israel may use this information as leverage, issuing new threats and alluding to possible attacks. In other words, is this leak so bad for the Zionist entity? The cat is now out of the bag, it is now common knowledge that the Zionist government has nuclear weapons, and they might use this to their advantage, exerting additional pressure on both regional neighbours and Western allies. Despite a stated Western desire to avoid further escalation, these allies have historically redrawn established red lines in response to Israel’s actions. Most recently, Israel crossed yet another “red line” when it launched missiles at Tehran on October 27, 2024, a clear violation of Iranian sovereignty. 

We also know that a couple of months ago, a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander stated that Iran could review its “Nuclear Doctrine” amid rising threats from Israel. While Iran denies ever having a nuclear weapons program, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said that if Iran chose to develop such weapons “world leaders wouldn't be able to stop us." Intelligence estimates suggest that weaponisation could take Iran between several months and a year. This reconsideration appears increasingly plausible in light of Israel’s recent attacks on Iran's capital and its confirmed possession of nuclear weapons. Such developments could, therefore, embolden Iran to pursue the production of nuclear weapons as a means of countering and deterring potential future attacks from Israel. 

To conclude, what implication does Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons have on the possibility of regional war? What is certain is that this newfound piece of evidence does not significantly alter already existing predictions of an impending full-scale war. The common belief that nuclear weapons serve as the “ultimate deterrent” seems unlikely to hold in the current geopolitical climate, given the escalating tensions in the region. What is most likely to happen is that this will only encourage aggression under the limited conditions described by the stability-instability paradox: nuclear-armed states are more likely to engage in aggressive military behaviour when both view each other as existential threats. Typically, the leaders of two nuclear-armed states understand the unthinkable costs of full-scale nuclear war and are motivated to keep their relations from deteriorating to that level, creating a "red-line" model of restraint. However, most state-based theories and hypotheses do not apply to Israel, as it is nothing but a colonial project of the West where ‘Israel’ was thought of as a proxy territory to take over West Asia. “Israel” consists of claimed territories that were militarily and violently stolen from Palestinian inhabitants in Palestine. By definition, a colonial state is unsustainable and eventually collapses. Thus, the only true existential threat to Israel is Zionism itself. If history has taught us anything, it is that colonialism always meets its end and that historical Palestine is bound to prevail. 

Sources: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/us/politics/israel-iran-nuclear-facilities-strikes.html "The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu's Address to Congress," Washington Post, March 3, 2015, 

<www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/03/03/full-text-netanyahus-address-to-c ongress/?utm_ term=.30af9f5058d2>.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/explainer-how-close-is-iran-having-nuclear-weapons -2024-04-18/ 

https://x.com/naftalibennett/status/1841222685638177225?s=61&t=UUgNDkfY0Qq5ZaXtoLRC 3w 

https://www.adnkronos.com/internazionale/esteri/israele-piano-attacco-contro-iran_2ldPGKxdT RqQod8BJBZ2fu?refresh_ce 

Bryan R. Early & Victor Asal (2018) Nuclear weapons, existential threats, and the stability–instability paradox, The Nonproliferation Review, 25:3-4, 223-247, DOI: 10.1080/10736700.2018.1518757