Many things are hidden behind the walls of nuclear proliferation debates in the Middle East. It is too often framed in realistic terms of mutual deterrence, cost-benefit assessment, and the allegedly unjustifiable state irrationality in a world of textbook normativity and symmetrical reciprocity. Nothing could be further from the Middle East truth where one single state has long enjoyed overwhelming conventional military superiority whilst still ‘irrationally’ accumulating unnecessary yet untouchable and unscrutinized nuclear stockpiles off the radar of international non-proliferation system.
Any serious reappraisal of Israel’s regional adversaries getting nuclear must start from uncovering the Israeli nuclear exceptionalism and questioning its realistic, put aside ethical, oddities. Israel already possesses irresistible conventional deterrent power, both qualitatively and quantitatively, versus all neighboring militaries combined. Securing that superiority has been an Israeli statecraft doctrine unmitigated since the 1950s, and fed by continuous superpowers’ political, economic, military, and institutional support across the aisles of Cold War rivalries and ideological blocs. Israeli hypothetical superiority was repeatedly tested and validated in multiple battlefields with the Arab states. Over time, the gap widened almost exponentially in technology, organization, operationality, intelligence, logistics, and combat experience. Even the single classical Arab comparative advantage, demography, was effectively neutralized from the onset.
Take the 1948 war itself. Despite Zionist and Western propaganda about tiny Jewish David facing huge Arab Goliaths marching to cast him into the sea, the reality was more complex. Israeli forces succeeded in mobilizing a larger and more cohesive fighting force than the combined Arab armies opposing them: the Egyptian and Iraqi royal armies, the Jordanian Arab Legion, and the Syrian republican army, the Arab League-affiliated Arab Salvation Army, Palestinian AL-Quds volunteers army, and other Arab volunteer formations. They also possessed superior systems of training, reserve mobilization, command structure and cohesion, not to mention significant advantages in arms acquisition and WWII operational and combat experience.
This pattern did not disappear with Arab regime changes afterwards. Whether monarchies, military republics, nationalist states, Gulf dynasties, or the fragmented post-Cold War order, the underlying imbalance endured and furthermore deepened. In short, Israel has enjoyed conventional deterrence from the outset in ample and reassuring form, with no realistic prospect that its adversaries could neutralize it, let alone surpass it.
And yet, nonetheless, Israel’s nuclear program remained a strategic article of faith from the 1950s onward. It persisted under governments often described as pragmatic, restrained, or moderate, including those led by Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, and Yitzhak Rabin twice. With decisive French assistance, the program entered a successful phase in the 1960s, possibly outpacing China, one of the great powers.
Precise information remains scarce because Israel has never been subjected to any meaningful international inspection regimes whatsoever. “Peace-loving Israel” was among the four counties that didn’t sign the 1968 landmark Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons. The world looked the other side. Before that, tentative efforts by John F. Kennedy’s administration in the early 1960s were swiftly abandoned and unspoken. For decades, the issue was a taboo in diplomatic or media circles. The rare major breach came when Mordechai Vanunu revealed details to The Sunday Times in 1986, after which he paid a heavy personal price. Again, the world order held its tongue.
So we are left with a striking paradox: Israel already possessed secure conventional superiority and no pressing need for non-conventional deterrence. Yet it pursued nuclear weapons as an existential project with unanimous consensus across left and right, secular and religious, tactical and strategic aisles, from its founding fathers to its present hawks.
That suggests the logic at work is not simply deterrence in the narrow spreadsheet sense beloved by many realist international relations theorists. It implies instead a doctrine of enduring hegemony and belligerency. And once ideological, doctrinal, and theological motives are taken seriously, factors often overlooked in analytical state-of-art, that conclusion becomes even harder to avoid.
In such a context, it becomes difficult to pronounce clean judgments about the “rationality” or “prudence” of the choices made by other regional powers, or even to assume that such categories do exist in the first place. When one actor monopolizes overwhelming force at every level while exempting itself from any external restraint, then strategic symmetry is castles in the sky.
The question is not whether regional rivals behave according to a textbook rationality, but whether rationality can exist amid hierarchy, fear, and historical asymmetry. Where one actor is conventionally hegemonic, nuclearly weaponized, and accountable to none, others will inevitably act insecurely and at loggerheads with its unendurable settings. The world order made its bed, now lie in it.
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