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South Africa's nukes didn't help much. France lost Algeria despite having been there longer than israel has existed despite France having nukes. Turns out nukes aren't that great at subjugating a population, especially when your country is tiny and the people you subjugate are your neighbours. The Palestinians don't have to defeat Israel in a big war, they just have to put Israel in the same position as Rhodesians were in. There aren't even six million non ultra orthodox Israeli jews. Populationwise Israel is roughly equal to Slovakia. In terms of land, they are smaller than Belize. The Palestinian population is now a quarter of the size of the population of Iraq when the US, Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands invaded. They left because it turned into a hopeless quagmire. Palestinians are more united against an enemy than the Iraqis were.
South Africa was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
France was not facing existential threat from invading armies.
Israel doesn't need (or use) nukes to subjugate a population. It can use nukes to mitigate existential threat from invading armies.
Unlike Rhodesia, the Israelis have nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
Unlike Slovakia, Israel has nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
Unlike Belize, Israel has nukes that can be used to mitigate existential threats from invading armies.
None of which mitigates them from being nuked if they pose an existential threat as an invading army.
If the refrain seems repetitive, it's because every argument you are making is a matter of the power of other states to create invading armies, or the risk to a small state from invading armies. Despite the claim, Israel is not an apartheid state in which a minority is attempting to rule over a much larger majority that dominates the demographics of the interior of the state. It has coherent borders and sufficient strategic depth that a military sufficient to overwhelm it will also give it time to use it's capabilities to prepare a nuclear retaliation.
Now, if you want to argue that doesn't matter because the Palestinians / Arabs / choose your protagonist here are willing to get nuked anyway, we can work with that... but now we are stepping decisively away from any Crusader State metaphors, which were not MAD contexts.
How effective would nuclear weapons by a relatively small nation be against an invading army? It’s not a scenario we’ve ever seen play out.
The standard nuclear war scenario involves a 3-prong nuclear strike combined with standard missles to assist with saturation and eliminate all enemy industrial and military centers approximately simultaneously. Does Israel have the capacity to hit so many targets at once? Or is it more of a tactical-use scenario? Or maybe just a “whoever attacks first gets their political capital eliminated” scenario?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, I’m just genuinely not sure, and I feel like smaller scale one-sided nuclear warfare looks very different than the Cold War images most people think of.
I do think a lot would come down to how competent the Arab alliance could become in the lead up to an invasion. Even a comparatively old-fashioned but reasonably equipped army should be able to win by sheer numbers in this matchup, but they’d have to get the corruption under control and actually build a lot of equipment.
The last couple wars seem to show a severe lack of competence, but I don’t think that’s inherent or will always be true. After all there have been some very effective Arab conquests in the past.
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I agree that nuclear weapons are a straightforward answer to existential invasion threats by external powers, and for that reason I don’t put much stock in arguments about Israel’s population vs that of its neighbours.
Internal threats on the other hand are potentially more serious. To switch to another case for illustration, consider France. France need never again worry about Paris being occupied by Germany, but nuclear weapons are irrelevant to Houellebecq-style cultural outvoting. No French President would be willing to nuke the 19th Arrondisement to stop Islamist parties from gaining the Élysée. It’s questionable whether they’d even put up much of a fight if the votes were really against them.
Similarly, the greatest threats to Israel’s long-term existence surely come from within. To be clear, I’m certainly not saying that Arab-Israelis are all 5th columnists for Hamas. However, the nearby possible worlds in which Israel collapses are those in which some combination of internal forces — nationalist, anti-nationalist, Islamist, Haredi, opportunist, millenarian — leads to prolonged political instability and ultimate state collapse, all in a process that doesn’t present opportunities for nuclear deterrence.
I don't mind or quibble with your broader point about internal threats or other forms of state failure. There are interesting discussions to be had on what can cause state failure, and also how resilient states can be when they choose to be, but my position here is on the non-applicability of the historical metaphor.
If the Israelis fall for other internal reasons, it will still be a bad metaphor. The Crusader States did not fall to Saladin because of internal political identity/ideological shifts- the Crusader States fell because external armies marched on and overwhelmed them. Anything short of Israel being conquered by conventional armies would not be a meaningful historical reoccurence.
There is a separate point to be made that no insurgency has actually overthrown a state per see. The closest historical example of this was the Chinese communist takeover of China- a success the hinged on external armies (Japanese) devastating the Nationalists, even as the Communists formed (and were supported in forming) forces to wage a conventional war as opposed to an insurgency. Otherwise, insurgencies may drive a state to leave, or a state's leaders to concede as a political decision, but the actual ability to remove them from the field if they are willing to continue cracking down is basically nill. States may remove state armies... but States are precisely what nuclear deterrence works against, as states are- by necessity- centralized and static.
Haiti? (Though you can quibble on what "a state" means since France still existed).
Haiti was more a slave revolt, not an insurgency, which quickly formed a large (if not well equipped) army and established exclusive territorial control. While the war had it's shifts in relative power, particularly the suppression in 1802 with the capture of Toussaint which coincided with the defeat/defection of much of the initial Haitian army. However, the polish defection later in 1802 helped re-form the rebel army, and so the majority of the war was by organized forces rather than through insurgency.
(This does bring up the distinction between guerilla warfare- where organized forces exist but seek to avoid direct engagements against superior forces- and insurgencies- where there is no real organized field force- but in the case of Haiti the balance was away from insurgency.)
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The Boer who have lived there for 400 years are effectively second class citizens.
They lost a part of France with a million ethnic French people that had been French for over a century.
There won't be any, it will be death by a thousand cuts.
There was no vast army of tanks that rolled into Rhodesia. Rhodesia fell because it was being hit constantly by endless insurgency.
Over two million Palestinian citizens. Also much of Israel is within range of being engaged by Palestine. Even Houthis have hit Israel twice from 2000 km away. Thinking that Israel can just ignore a large group of people 10s of km away is naive.
West bank to the sea is 20+ km. That is minimal strategic depth.
Israel isn't going to nuclearly destroy the west bank.
And yet still exist, and were not facing existential risk from invading armies.
And yet still exist, and were not facing existential risk from invading armies.
States don't face existential threat from a thousand cuts.
When overwhelming damage approaches existential threats, the polities responsible remain vulnerable to nuclear weapons.
Supported by states that would have been vulnerable to nuclear weapons.
The ethnic Arab citizens of Israel are neither Palestinians in the political sense of the Palestinian movement, nor are they an occupied or suppressed majority population.
Being 10s of kms outside the state is still outside the state, which continues to invalidate your attempted analogies to African majority-suppression states contexts.
Minimal is not a rebuttal of sufficient.
Why not, if the alternative is existential end? What's the punishment supposed to be- death?
Nor does that change that the Crusades were not a MAD context.
Israel could probably get a peacedeal with Hamas under the conditions the Boer were forced to accept. A large portion of white south africans were forced to leave.
Yes, that is what happened to Rhodesia and South Africa. It simply becomes impossible to have a functioning country in a constant state of war. Israel has a larger portion of its population mobilized than Ukraine, is deeply politically divided and is in a deep economic crisis.
Again, Israel isn't going to go nuclear for giving weapons. See Russia's response to Ukraine aid for example.
They are second class citizens in their own home.
Having two million people in the state and having the rest next door doesn't help more than gated communities in South Africa.
Moving somewhere else. They are effectively a nomadic homeless people anyway. It is a far better end than having this endless conflict.
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