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Dangerous Intersections: Palestinian Statehood and Regional Nuclear War
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran, June 21, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA via Reuters
When Israel completes its obligatory counter-terrorism war in Gaza, the issue of Palestinian statehood will insistently be raised. This perilous resurrection is foreseeable even though any de facto reward for Hamas criminality would be unconscionable.
Still, if Israel could be convinced that an inherently flawed “two-state solution” would be preferable to a future of protracted warfare against terrorism, Jerusalem will have to take certain arguments for Palestinian statehood seriously.
The true intent of Palestinian statehood arguments could prove irrelevant to Israeli acceptance. Israeli reasoning would be strategy-driven whether the two-state argument were offered maliciously or in good faith. A prominent example of the well-intentioned alternative would be US President Joe Biden’s current calls for a two-state remedy.
For the long-beleaguered State of Israel, accepting or rejecting a state of Palestine would involve only injurious choices, but acceptance would be more injurious and more plainly an existential peril. At a minimum, any Palestinian state would be irredentist, seeking incremental control over Israel in its entirety. This signifies control over what Israel’s Islamic foes call “occupied Palestine.” In a worst-case scenario, Israel’s post-Gaza War efforts at self-defense would involve Iran as a direct enemy belligerent. Conceivably, Turkey could join forces with Iran against Israel, though that scenario would likely be “overruled” by Turkey’s membership in NATO.
What would Iranian involvement mean for Israel’s security and regional stability? Ultimately, even if Iran were not yet nuclear, a widening conventional or unconventional war with Israel could still elicit Israeli escalations to low-yield nuclear weapons. Such escalations would become increasingly realistic if Iran were to use “only” radiation-dispersal weapons against Israel. If Iran were already a fully nuclear power, however (i.e., in possession of chain reaction-based nuclear explosives), the Middle East could become the world’s first (and possibly last) venue for a nuclear war.
There is one more important nuance to consider regarding escalation prospects between Israel and Iran. Because North Korea has ongoing weapons-related ties to both Iran and Syria, even a pre-nuclear Iran might be able to draw upon nuclear support from an already nuclear North Korea. Here a non-nuclear Iran could act against Israel as if it were already a nuclear power. In effect, though perhaps difficult to imagine, a more advanced North Korea would act as surrogate of a less advanced Iran. Apropos of this worrisome scenario for Israel, even a North Korea that shares “only” its advanced ballistic missile technologies with Iran (not its explosive nuclear warheads) could trigger an unpredictable nuclear war.
There is an overriding message here for Israel. Issues of Palestinian statehood and nuclear war with Iran ought never to be treated as separate. Rather, these matters of existential security are potentially intersecting and “force multiplying.” For Israel, either an already-nuclear or still-nuclearizing Iran could vastly enlarge the plausible threat posed by a Palestinian state. Reciprocally, Palestinian statehood could vastly expand the existential risks to Israel of a pre-nuclear or nuclear war with Iran.
The holistic relationship between Palestinian statehood and nuclear war is apt to be synergistic and not merely intersectional. It follows that the whole of this core relationship’s injurious effect upon Israel could eventually prove greater than the sum of its parts. But what could usefully represent measurable correlates of this foreseeably catastrophic “whole?”
From the standpoint of science-based prediction, nothing accurate can be said about the likelihood of a nuclear war between Israel and Iran. Israel would nevertheless have no reasonable alternative to offering best-possible estimations. The reason why it is not possible to offer reassuringly scientific assessments of probability is that any such assessments would need to be based on the determinable frequency of relevant past events. Because there has never been a nuclear war, there can be no meaningful estimations of nuclear war’s probability.
Since 2012, the Palestinian National Authority has been recognized by the UN as a “Nonmember Observer State.” Looking beyond the Gaza War, if the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas are ever able to restore a functional level of cooperation, a fully sovereign Palestine could emerge. In short order, this furiously adversarial Arab state would become a jihadist platform for continuous war and terror against Israel.
Israel should remain keenly attentive to force multipliers in its struggles against terror-state patron Iran. Virulent synergies between Iranian nuclearization and Palestinian statehood could spawn unique threats to the Jewish State. Though Iranian and Palestinian annihilationist threats are entirely out in the open, they remain largely unacknowledged. Most worrisome are the myriad ways in which a Palestinian state could change the correlation of military forces in the region and the circumstances whereby Iran would be drawn into direct hostilities with Israel.
Understandably, nuclear weapons are generally regarded as destabilizing. In the special case of Israel, however, possession of such weapons could become all that protects the state’s civilian population from catastrophic international aggression. Maintaining stable nuclear deterrence, whether deliberately ambiguous or disclosed, could ultimately prove indispensable to Israel’s survival. But this conclusion makes sense only if those nuclear weapons are used for war avoidance or war mitigation, not for the fighting of nuclear war.
Iran is adding to its arsenal of cruise missiles. Even without nuclear warheads, such “fully smart” weapons could lead to accelerated Israel-Iran competition in risk-taking and a corresponding search for escalation dominance. To succeed in this competition, Israel should prepare to move beyond a policy of deliberate nuclear ambiguity to one of selective nuclear disclosure. The reason would not be to validate Israel’s military nuclear capacity (that capacity is already well recognized in Tehran), but to convince Iranian leaders that an Israeli resort to the use of nuclear weapons could be rational.
Ironically, the credibility of Israel’s nuclear deterrent could vary inversely with that deterrent’s perceived destructiveness. Though counterintuitive, a seemingly too destructive Israeli nuclear force could undermine Israel’s deterrent effectiveness.
There are associated matters of law. In its landmark Advisory Opinion of 8 July 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled: “The Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense…” Where the very survival of a state would be at stake, concluded the ICJ ruling, even a tangible use of nuclear weapons could be permissible.
Israel’s existential vulnerability to a fully nuclear Iran is manifest. On its face, Israel’s small size precludes tolerance of any Iranian nuclear attack. In 2015, this point was made openly by a senior Iranian official: “Israel is a one-bomb state.” This means that Israel’s annihilation would require only a single Iranian nuclear bomb.
For Israel, it is time for analytic clarity and absolute candor. From a regional or world security standpoint, Israel’s nuclear weapons are not the problem. In the Middle East, the most persistent source of war and terror remains a genocidal Arab/Islamist commitment to “excise the Jewish cancer.” Faced with the threat of a Palestine that is “free from the River to the Sea” – that is, a Palestine that has completely destroyed and replaced Israel – the Jewish State will need to acknowledge that Palestinian statehood is not just another tactical enemy expedient. Indeed, a cartographic genocide has already been inflicted upon Israel. All official Palestinian maps describe Israel as “Occupied Palestine”. The Jewish State has already been eliminated.
With a selectively revealed nuclear weapons posture, Israel could more reliably deter a rational Iranian enemy’s unconventional attacks and perhaps most of its large conventional aggressions. Additionally, with such an updated deterrence posture, Israel could, if necessary, launch non-nuclear preemptive strikes against Iranian hard targets and against associated counterforce capabilities.
Left in place, these assets could threaten Israel’s physical survival with impunity. In the absence of acknowledging possession of certain survivable and penetration-capable nuclear weapons, therefore, Israel’s lawful acts of preemption (“anticipatory self-defense”) could trigger the onset of a much wider war. The reason is straightforward: There would then remain no convincing threat of an unacceptable Israeli counter-retaliation.
The decision to bring Israel’s “bomb” out of the “basement” (that is, Israel’s calculated end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity”) would not be easy. But the stark realities of facing not only a nuclear-capable Iran but also assorted other nuclear aspirants – sometimes in synergy with anti-Israel terrorists – obligate immediate reconsideration of “deliberate nuclear ambiguity.” As a corollary, Jerusalem will need to clarify that its multi-level active defenses would operate in tandem with Israel’s counterforce nuclear retaliations, not in their stead.
All of this suggests that Israeli security assessments of Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization should be undertaken together, and with due regard for complex synergistic intersections. For Israel, the cumulative impact of Palestinian statehood and Iranian nuclearization would be substantially greater than the sum of their parts. The poet Auden’s words should ring as a galvanizing prophecy: “Defenseless under the night; our world in stupor lies.”
Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1986). His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Dangerous Intersections: Palestinian Statehood and Regional Nuclear War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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As Gaza War Continues, Hamas Calls for Global Protests While Israel Marks Breakthroughs in Medical Innovation
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
As the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas calls for global protests amid stalled Gaza ceasefire talks, Israel has broken new ground despite the ongoing conflict, achieving a major medical breakthrough in synthetic human kidney development.
The contrast illustrates a stark contrast between the priorities of Hamas, an international designated terrorist group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, and Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East that has long been a leader in tech and medical innovation.
On Wednesday, Hamas urged worldwide protests in support of Palestinians, calling on the international community “to denounce Israel’s genocidal war and starvation policy in Gaza.”
“We call for continuing and escalating the popular pressure in all cities and squares on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday … through rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins outside the embassies of the Israeli regime and its allies, particularly in the US,” the statement read.
The Palestinian terrorist group also called to expose what it described as “the terrorism of the Zio-Nazi occupation against defenseless civilians.”
Hamas’s latest move against Israel comes amid stalled indirect negotiations over a proposed 60-day ceasefire and hostage release deal, which collapsed last month after the group vowed it would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state is established — rejecting a key Israeli demand to end the war in Gaza.
In its statement, Hamas demanded the opening of all border crossings to allow immediate aid into the war-torn enclave and urged a global condemnation of “the international community’s inaction on the Israeli crimes.”
Amid mounting international pressure to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel announced new measures to facilitate the delivery of aid, including temporary pauses in fighting in certain areas and the creation of protected routes for aid convoys.
Israeli officials have previously accused Hamas of diverting aid for terrorist activities and selling supplies at inflated prices to civilians, while also blaming the United Nations and other foreign organizations for enabling this diversion.
Hamas’s statement also emphasized that the “global resistance movement must continue until Israeli aggression on Gaza ends and the siege on the coastal strip is lifted.”
Meanwhile, as Israel faces escalating hostilities and the heavy toll of war, the Jewish state continues to push the boundaries of innovation and resilience, achieving new medical breakthroughs while confronting ongoing challenges.
In a major medical breakthrough, scientists at Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University have successfully grown a synthetic 3D miniature human kidney in a lab using specialized stem cells derived from kidney tissue — one of the most promising advances in regenerative medicine.
Dr. Dror Harats, chairman of Sheba’s Research Authority, described this achievement as a reflection of Israel’s leading role in global medical innovation.
“Despite growing efforts to isolate Israel from international science, breakthroughs like this prove our impact is both lasting and essential,” he said.
In a landmark study, a team from Sheba’s Safra Children’s Hospital and Tel Aviv University’s Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine created synthetic kidney organs that matured and remained stable for 34 weeks — the longest-lasting and most refined kidney organoids developed to date.
Nearly a decade ago, the research team became the first to successfully isolate human kidney tissue stem cells — the cells responsible for the organ’s development and growth.
Previous attempts to grow kidneys in a lab using general-purpose stem cells were short-lived, typically lasting only a few weeks and often producing unwanted cell types that compromised research accuracy.
However, this Israeli research team used stem cells taken directly from kidney tissue — cells that naturally develop into kidney parts — allowing them to create a much purer and more stable model with key features found in real kidneys.
This medical breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, redefining the current understanding of kidney diseases and advancing the development of innovative treatments.
Researchers believe the model could help assess how medications impact fetal kidneys during pregnancy and move science closer to repairing or replacing damaged kidney tissue with lab-grown cells.
The discovery came days after researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and international partners discovered a way to boost the immune system’s cancer-fighting ability by reprogramming how T cells, which are white blood cells critical to the immune system, produce energy.
The researchers explained in a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications that disabling a protein known as Ant2 in T cells greatly enhances their effectiveness against tumors.
“By disabling Ant2, we triggered a complete shift in how T cells produce and use energy,” Prof. Michael Berger of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine, who co-led the study with doctorate student Omri Yosef, told the Tazpit Press Service. “This reprogramming made them significantly better at recognizing and killing cancer cells.”
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Netherlands to Push EU to Suspend Israel Trade Deal but Won’t Recognize Palestinian State ‘At This Time’
Netherlands Foreign Affairs Minister Caspar Veldkamp addresses a press conference, in New Delhi on April 1, 2025. Photo: ANI Photo/Sanjay Sharma via Reuters Connect
The Netherlands is spearheading efforts to suspend the European Union-Israel trade agreement amid rising EU criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, while simultaneously refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, contrasting with other member states as international pressure mounts.
On Thursday, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp announced that the Netherlands will push the EU to suspend the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement — a pact governing the EU’s political and economic ties with the Jewish state.
This latest anti-Israel initiative follows a recent EU-commissioned report accusing Israel of committing “indiscriminate attacks … starvation … torture … [and] apartheid” against Palestinians in Gaza during its military campaign against Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
Following calls from a majority of EU member states for a formal investigation, this report built on Belgium’s recent decision to review Israel’s compliance with the trade agreement, a process initiated by the Netherlands and led by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas.
According to the report, “there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations” under the 25-year-old EU-Israel Association Agreement.
While the document acknowledges the reality of violence by Hamas, it states that this issue lies outside its scope — failing to address the Palestinian terrorist group’s role in sparking the current war with its bloody rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israeli officials have slammed the report as factually incorrect and morally flawed, noting that Hamas embeds its military infrastructure within civilian targets and Israel’s army takes extensive precautions to try and avoid civilian casualties.
In a Dutch parliamentary debate on Gaza on Thursday, Veldkamp also announced that the government would not recognize a Palestinian state for now — a position that stands in sharp contrast to the recent moves by several other EU member states to extend recognition.
“The Netherlands is not planning to recognize a Palestinian state at this time,” the Dutch diplomat said.
“This war has ceased to be a just war and is now leading to the erosion of Israel’s own security and identity,” he continued.
This latest decision goes against the position of several EU member states, including France, which has committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood in September.
The United Kingdom has likewise indicated it will do so unless Israel acts to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and agrees to a ceasefire.
For its part, Germany said it was not planning to recognize a Palestinian state in the short term, and Italy argued that recognition must occur simultaneously with the recognition of Israel by the new entity.
Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia all recognized a Palestinian state last year.
Israel has been facing growing pressure from several EU member states seeking to undermine its defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
On Thursday, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera strongly condemned Israel’s actions in the war-torn enclave, describing the situation as a “grave violation of human dignity.”
“What we are seeing is a concrete population being targeted, killed and condemned to starve to death,” Ribera told Politico. “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”
Until now, the European Commission has refrained from accusing Israel of genocide, but Ribera’s comments mark one of the strongest European condemnations since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
She also called on the EU to take decisive action by considering the suspension of its trade agreement with Israel and the implementation of sanctions, while emphasizing that such measures would require unanimous approval from all member states.
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Graduate Student Unions Promoting Antisemitism, Reform Group Says
Students listen to a speech at a protest encampment at Stanford University in Stanford, California US, on April 26, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
Higher-education-based unions controlled by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) are rife with antisemitism and anti-Zionist discrimination, according to a new letter imploring the US Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce to address the matter.
“Tracing its roots to communism in the 1930s, the UE is a radical, pro-Hamas labor union that has a long history of antisemitism,” the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), one of the US’s leading labor reform groups, wrote on July 30 in a message obtained by The Algemeiner. “The UE openly supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple and destroy Israel economically. Today, the UE furthers its antisemitic agenda by unionizing graduate students on college campuses and using its exclusive representation powers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students. The hostile environment includes demanding compulsory dues to fund the UE’s abhorrent activities.”
NRTW went on to describe a litany of alleged injustices to which UE members subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University. At MIT, the letter said, “union officers” aided a riotous group which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the BDS movement. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
The situation requires federal oversight and intervention, NRTW said, including Congress’s possibly clarifying that student-employees are not traditional employees and are therefore afforded protections under sections of the Civil Rights Act which apply to the campus.
“These continuing patterns of antisemitism are illegal, immoral, and must be stopped,” the letter continued. “We encourage you to do all that is in your power to investigate and help bring an end to the UE and its affiliates’ nonstop harassment and intimidation of Jewish students … The Trump administration can also use tools available to it under Title VI and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against colleges who work with unions to create a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
July’s letter is not the first time NRTW has publicized alleged antisemitic abuse in unions representing higher education employees.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.