Israel's fight-or-flight response.

• Author: Mueller, John
• Position: Immigration

Israel, obsessed with the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian leadership, may inadvertently destroy itself--that is, cease to exist as a coherent Jewish state--without a single shot being fired or bomb blowing up. In particular, overwrought and underexamined fears that Iran simply might obtain a bomb could lead to substantial Jewish emigration from Israel. When this is coupled with the potentially disastrous consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, there is a danger that Israel's future could be imperiled.

In spite of its remarkable successes, Israel faces several key hurdles. It is surrounded by countries filled with hostile people, some of whom continue to present a persistent terrorism threat; it has followed a program, almost universally considered illegal, of erecting settlements in occupied territories and seems incapable of reversing this process; it is confronted by an ominous demographic dilemma in which Jews, already a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, may eventually become an uncomfortably narrow majority within Israel proper, a dilemma that in turn is creating heavy pressures to protect Jewish control of the government by sacrificing democracy; prospects for any kind of negotiated peace are diminishing; and the country faces pariah status in the international community. It is against this backdrop that Israel confronts the prospect of a potentially nuclear-armed Iran.

Judicious and balanced concerns about that danger are, of course, justified. But rather than confronting that prospect with sober assessment, Israelis view it as an existential threat akin to the Holocaust. Israeli reactions to the possibility of a nuclear-capable Iran have been dominated by panic and even despair, and by loss of hope for the future. Israeli politicians and commentators from the political left as well as right persistently draw analogies with the 1930s and Hitler's Germany. The influential Israeli historian, Benny Morris, warns of the "danger of extinction in the short term from an Iranian nuclear bomb." As Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren noted in a New Republic article last year, apocalyptic thinking abounds in the Israeli defense establishment and "military men suddenly sound like theologians when explaining the Iranian threat." Some inside Israel spookily point out that according to the ravings of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Shia savior, the Hidden Imam, will return in 2009 to defeat evil once and for all--the same year Israel believes Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. In private conversations with Israeli leaders, the link between this kind of thinking and the psychological threats to Israel's future is made clear. As one former Likud minister told one of the authors recently, it is not the idea that Iran will actually use nuclear weapons against Israel that is terrifying. Instead, the real problem is the prospect that Israeli Jews will be unable to tolerate images of the destruction that could be wrought in some undefined future by an Iranian atomic capability.

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The existential danger for Israel in all this arises not so much from Iran's capacity or potential capacity to do harm. It comes rather from the consequences of Israeli fears and Israeli hype, at once apoplectic and apocalyptic.

Creating this climate of fear leads to two problems that could imperil or even destroy the Israeli state: demoralizing levels of emigration and a...