ABSTRACT
At the annual state memorial ceremony for Israel’s father–founder, David Ben-Gurion, on December 6, 2016 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made the following comment about Ben-Gurion’s legacy and beyond:
Our military force must be strong enough to repel any foe. It must be capable of taking the war to the enemy’s territory, as was done in 1956 and in other wars, and it must be capable of threatening the annihilation of whoever threatens to annihilate us.
He went on:To this end, today we are continuing to cultivate, more than ever, our military and intelligence forces, which in a certain sense, are unrecognizable from what they were in Ben-Gurion’s time but, I must say, directly follow the strengthening that he began, and which has continued until the present.
[italics AC] Netanyahu’s statement is extraordinary in more than one sense. While his predecessors had always talked in public about nuclear matters with caution and circumspection, Netanyahu here speaks the unspeakable: Israel’s ability to threaten annihilation. Technically, Netanyahu may still be complying with the language of opacity, making no explicit reference to nuclear weapons, yet everybody intuitively understands his statement is about nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Netanyahu presents himself as if adding a new nuclear pillar to Ben-Gurion’s old security doctrine: Israel must be able to threaten annihilation to those who would dare contemplate annihilating Israel.