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Notes -
I doubt Israel's chances of survival will increase if they start lobbing nukes at Arab states. If anything, this might trigger a full-scale invasion of Israel by the whole Arab League to prevent them from detonating another one.
The point of strategic nukes is not to get advantage in the situations where you use them. The point is to decrease the probability that it comes to that point, to ensure that the need for their use remains counterfactual.
A general policy of "when faced with an existential threat, such as an invasion, we will nuke cities of the aggressor" will do fuck-all to stop an invasion. However, if you credibly pre-commit to following through on it, the chances that you get invaded in the first place will be much smaller because most countries do not consider the glassing of their cities an acceptable price for waging war.
Also, you can not invade to stop a country from using nukes. The time scales for launching nukes are in the minutes, the time scales for invasion are on the order of days.
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But if the alternative is “Israel no longer exists, Jews get exiled again to face pogroms and potentially genocide,” the nuclear option is much more on the table and the consequences of it seem much less important.
And honestly I expect Israel to get more brutal, not less, as the world turns against them. A lot of the reason that Israel was willing to tolerate Palestinians and the chanting of “death to Israel” followed by rocket attacks is that Americans had their backs and they had access to American weapons. Now, there’s a move to basically treat Israel like South Africa to recognize the state of Palestine (which is less of a state than many American Indian reservations), and to divest and potentially sanction them. This backs them into a scenario in which they can no longer tolerate things that they would have before, and cannot assume that if something happens to them that they’d be allowed to respond. I think that world opinion on Palestine has made the response much more brutal than it would have been otherwise. This is their last chance to destroy the threat, and anything and anyone left is going to be untouchable in the future because the world won’t allow another invasion of “Palestinian” territory. So bomb the shit out of everything and hope you’ve given yourself a long enough head start to get ahead of the blowback.
With proxy wars like Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations, again, they aren’t given the right to invade to root out those things with conventional means, and the sponsors have spent millions to create these groups and arm them and give them intelligence, etc.
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Is there a reason why Israel can't nuke the Arab League faster than they prevent them from doing so?
They don't have enough nukes. And if they nuke Cairo or Mecca, they will lose the last of their remaining goodwill.
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