The Samson Option
The Biblical Samson, of course, brought down a temple that killed himself and his enemies. According to the namebase.org "The title of Hersh's book comes from Israel's notion that once they have the Bomb, they are in a position to bring it all down on everyone if ever they feel cornered. It's the ultimate in Israeli security as a nation-state, if not for the security of humankind…The Bomb has been a hidden factor in U.S.-Israeli relations ever since the Eisenhower administration, but this is the first book [to] deal with Israeli relations from this perspective.
The Samson Option : Israel's Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy by Seymour M. Hersh
“It [Israel]
must be in a position to threaten another Hiroshima to prevent
another Holocaust.”
-Avner Cohen
...Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability." Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining momentum (and the) next war will not be conventional." Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been a major (if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (Since launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli nukes aimed at the Russian heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war.
Seymour Hersh sites other threats in The Samson Option. Referring to the U.S. failure to support Israel's invasion of Egypt in 1956, including in the face of nuclear threats from the Soviet Union, one unnamed former Israeli official told Hersh in the late 1980s: "You Americans screwed us...We got the message. We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we'll take all of you with us."
Israeli Nuclear Threats and Blackmail
Israel's Nuclear Posture: The Samson Option
THE THIRD TEMPLE'S HOLY OF HOLIES: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS
"Every morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding, There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it."
-Robert Fisk
"Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches."
-Ariel Sharon
Palestinians hit by sonic boom air raids
UN condemns night noise attacks as indiscriminate
Agencies say they cause trauma and miscarriages
Israel
is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in
the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening "sound bombs" that cause
widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children.
The
removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for the
military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms by
breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves across
the territory, often at night. Palestinians liken the sound to an
earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a
wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds
and "leaving you shaking inside".
The
Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to
miscarriages and heart problems. The United Nations has demanded an end
to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children. The
shockwaves have also damaged buildings by cracking walls and smashing
thousands of windows.
"I have never heard such a
loud explosion. I thought it was right over the top of my building,"
said the owner, Tareq Dayyeh. "Sometimes you hear the rockets the
Israelis fire but this was different. I felt like I was in the middle
of a bomb. When I ran out the door I thought I might find the rest of
the street was gone."
Over the past week, Israeli jets created
28 sonic booms by flying at high speed and low altitude over the Gaza
Strip, sometimes as little as an hour apart through the night. During
five days in late September, the air force caused 29 sonic booms.
A
senior Israeli army intelligence source, who the military would not
permit to be named, said the tactic is intended to break civilian
support for armed Palestinian groups. "We are trying to send a message
in a way that doesn't harm people. We want to encourage the Palestinian
public to do something about the terror situation," he said. "What are
the alternatives? We are not like the terrorists who shoot civilians.
We are cautious. We make sure nobody is really hurt."
Yesterday,
two medical human rights groups asked the Tel Aviv high court to outlaw
the use of sound bombs on the grounds it amounts to illegal collective
punishment and is detrimental to health.
"The stress is
phenomenal," said Eyad El Sarraj, a psychologist and director of Gaza
Community Mental Health Programme, one of the groups filing the
petition. "The Israelis do it after midnight and then every one or two
hours. You try to go to sleep and then there's another one. When it
happens night after night you become exhausted. You get a heightened
sense of alert, waiting continuously for it to happen. People suffer
hypertension, fatigue, sleeplessness.
"For
children, the loud noise means danger. Adults may know it's only a
sound but small children feel threatened. They are crying and clinging
to their parents. Afterwards they are dazed and fearful, waiting for
something to happen."
The UN Palestinian refugee agency
said a majority of the patients seen at its clinics as a result of the
sonic booms were under 16 and suffering from symptoms such as anxiety
attacks, bedwetting, muscle spasms, temporary loss of hearing and
breathing difficulties.
Although the
Israelis say the shockwaves do not cause casualties, doctors at Gaza's
Shifa hospital said the overflights had forced women to miscarry. The
number of miscarriages had increased by 40%, according to Jumaa Saqqa,
a surgeon and hospital spokesman. "There were no other symptoms and the
rise happened after the sonic booms. We can see no other explanation.
The number of patients admitted to the cardiac care unit doubled. Some
of them proved to have suffered serious harm."
Dr Saqqa
said one overflight occurred while he was operating. The Palestinian
health ministry estimates the sonic booms have caused at least 20
miscarriages.
The UN's Middle East envoy, Alvaro de Soto, wrote
to the Israeli high command this week saying he was "deeply concerned
at the impact on children, particularly infants, of the use of sonic
booms".
Mr de Soto said he did not accept that the tactic was a
legitimate response to Islamic Jihad and Hamas firing rockets into
Israeli towns. "Sonic booms are an indiscriminate instrument, the use
of which punishes the population collectively. We ask therefore that
their use be stopped without delay," the letter said.
The
military was forced to apologise after one sonic boom was
unintentionally heard hundreds of kilometres inside Israel last week.
Maariv newspaper described it as sounding "like a heavy bombardment.
The noise that shook the Israeli skies was frightening. Thousands of
citizens leapt in panic from their beds, and many of them placed
worried calls to the police and the fire department. The Tel Aviv and
central district police switchboards crashed."
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