200,000 missiles aimed at Israel. None fired. Why?

Larry Derfner By Larry Derfner February 2, 2012 | Edit

At any given time, about 200,000 missiles are aimed at Israel, Aviv Cochavi, chief of army intelligence, told the VIPs today at the Herzliya Conference.

Two-hundred thousand missiles – another important fact that will go in one ear of the Israeli public and out the other. It plays havoc with a basic national conviction, so it will be discarded.

It’s a basic national conviction that if “the Arabs” could annihilate this country, they would, no matter the cost to themselves. That’s why we bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the Syrian nuclear reactor, and why we’re probably going to bomb the Iranian reactors, or some of them anyway, later this year – because we believe that if “the Arabs” get the means to destroy us, they will. They hate us so much and they’re such fanatics that they don’t care if they die, just so they can kill us.

Well, what does 200,000 missiles aimed full-time at Israel tell you? That “the Arabs” have the power to effectively destroy the country right now. And this is without even mentioning the chemical and/or biological weapons that some Muslim countries are likely to have.

Yet they don’t use that power. Not because they don’t want to. I have no doubt that at the very least, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan would love to fire missiles at Israel. They don’t because they’re deterred by Israel’s power – by all those missiles and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons we’ve got aimed at them. They’re afraid of us. Everybody in the world knows this except Israelis. (The only Arab territory that fires missiles at us is Palestine, which is also the only Arab territory occupied by us. There may be a connection.)

This belief about Arabs is why we attack our neighbors’ nuclear installations, even while we’ve got hundreds of nukes ourselves – because we think of Arabs as scorpions, as killing machines that aren’t afraid, that can’t be deterred.

Two-hundred thousand missiles pointed our way at any given time, and nobody fires them. In one ear and out the other. There’s another war of survival that needs starting.

CORRECTION: Thanks to Alex Kane for tweeting the reminder that Palestine isn’t the only Israeli-occupied territory; the Golan Heights is, too, of course. So why doesn’t Syria fire missiles at us? I’d say because the Golan amounts to only about one-half percent of Syrian land, so it’s not such a pressing issue. But it’s obviously still a sore point; it may come back to haunt us one day.

Larry Derfner

I was a columnist and feature writer for The Jerusalem Post, as well as the correspondent in Israel for the U.S. News and World Report, for many years. I wrote feature articles for the Sunday Times of London during the second intifada, and have been writing for American Jewish publications since 1990. Politically, I would describe myself as an ultra-liberal Zionist; as journalist Bradley Burston put it, I’m “probably as far left as a centrist can be.” I was born in New York, grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Israel in 1985.

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