Masada Complex

IN CHESS, THE BEST PLAYERS ARE ABLE to think ahead, recognizing the consequences that their next move could have 10, 20 or 30 moves later. Both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict urgently need to consult with the geopolitical equivalent of such chess grandmasters.

The apparent goal of Palestinian extremists, for example, is to push Israel into the sea and take back 100 percent of its land. We can infer this because Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 95 percent of everything the Palestinian leader demanded, but an uncompromising Arafat rejected this and re-ignited Intifada violence against the Jewish state.

What are the chances of Palestinians and the Arab nations winning by such violent tactics and all-or-nothing strategy? Zero, a chess master ought to tell them, and here is why.

If pushed to the sea’s edge, millions of Israelis would indeed flee to nations such as the United States wise enough to welcome those with their talents and intelligence.

But millions of Israelis would remain, and in a last-ditch stand they would fight to the death. This happened almost 2,000 years ago atop Masada, the Dead Sea mountaintop fortress where Jews took their own lives (technically not by suicide, but killed by a few who by lot had been picked to carry this sin) rather than surrender to Roman soldiers.

Today Israeli paratroopers and other soldiers go to this fortress and take an oath: "Masada shall not fall again." Psychologists describe the determination never to surrender of many Israelis as the "Masada Complex."

These remaining Jews, if pushed to the brink of annihilation, could and perhaps would take steps that would make today’s Palestinian "suicide bombers" look trivial by comparison.

If Israel loses, neither the Palestinians nor any unfriendly nation within 2,000 miles would "win." Israel could take them all down with it. Israel could turn the entire Middle East into a smoking, radioactive hole in the ground. Israel could blast fertility out of the Fertile Crescent and leave the barren region clicking hot for hundreds of years. This might not be Biblical Armageddon, but it would be a reasonable facsimile.

At its Dimona 150-Megawatt heavy-water nuclear reactor, Israel for more than three decades has been creating and reprocessing Plutonium. Israel on July 13, 1998, acknowledged that it has "built a nuclear option not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo [Peace Accord]."

Most defense analysts estimate the number of Israeli nuclear weapons at up to 200, and one calculates that the Jewish State might possess up to 400 such weapons. Israel might also have manufactured a small number of H-bombs, thermonuclear explosives.

Israel has many delivery systems for these nuclear weapons. To mention only a few: 50 or so home-made Jericho-2 missiles reportedly can deliver a 2,200 pound payload to targets at least 900 miles away. Israel has been developing a Jericho-3 missile using space rocket Shavit technologies that can strike 2,900 miles away with the same 2,200 pound nuclear payload.

Israel already, according to MSNBC, possesses "25 nuclear capable F-15Es [and] about 80 older F-4 Phantoms." To understand what this means, an F-15E or Israel’s variant F-15I has a ferry range of up to 3,450 miles without refueling and can carry a payload weighing 23,000 pounds. The aging F-4E (not to mention Israel’s F-4/2000s) has a ferry range of about 1,550 miles and can carry a 16,000-pound payload.

Combat capability calculations are not based on the ferry range of aircraft, which replaces some weapon payload with extra fuel tanks. We instead assume that pilots fly out to a target and need fuel to return. But Israeli Kamikazis flying a one-way doomsday mission can expend all their fuel to reach a target. They could reach targets 80-90 percent of ferry range away with a compact nuclear weapon. Israel also can use FAST packs and other techniques to boost potential range, speed or payload.

In such a doomsday scenario, in fact, almost any of Israel’s hundreds and hundreds of aircraft could be used to deliver nuclear weapons if pilots were willing to become martyrs for their Jewish faith or nation.

Americans come from a big country. Those who have never visited the Middle East usually fail to understand its smaller scale. To envision the above doomsday scenario, consider some distances.

From the hills of Jerusalem at night, you see the skyglow from nearby Amman, Jordan.

To the north, Damascus in Syria and Beirut in Lebanon are both only about 150 miles away and could be struck by near-supersonic Israeli jets less than 10 minutes after they cross northern Israel’s border.

The Suez Canal is only about 200 miles from Jerusalem and far less distance from Israeli airfields. Cairo is about 250 miles from Jerusalem. But the real doomsday target in Egypt is the Aswan High Dam only 550 miles from King David’s city. If blown open with nuclear weapons, it would release the immense reservoir of Lake Nasser and unleash a flood of biblical proportions that would destroy almost everything and everyone in Cairo and all along Egypt’s Nile Valley.

Tripoli on the far side of madman Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi’s Libya is 1,300 miles from Jerusalem. But the Israeli Air Force has already demonstrated its ability, as Aharon Lapidot puts it, to "strike silent, strike far" by rescuing hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, and by hitting PLO headquarters in Tunisia, just over 1,500 miles west of Jerusalem on the North African coastline beyond the shores of Tripoli.

Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein rules Iraq deluded by his belief that he is the Nebuchadnezzar of a new Babylonian Empire, is less than 600 miles from Jerusalem. In 1981 Israeli aircraft preemptively destroyed the Osirak reactor being built near Baghdad, thereby keeping nuclear weapons out of this madman’s hands. Israelis could easily strike Baghdad again, this time with nuclear weapons of their own.

Even distant Tehran and the Ayatollahs of Iran sit less than 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, scarcely more than the distance from Los Angeles to Denver. Jericho-2 missiles could be goosed to get there within minutes, and at full throttle Israeli jets could have mushroom clouds sprouting above Tehran in little more than an hour….or maybe less.

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is about 850 miles from Jerusalem and could be destroyed before its princes got into their holes, if Israel so desired. All Persian Gulf oilfields could also be sent to heaven in glowing smoke and radioactive flame, thereby turning whatever Arabs survived back into the Bedouin goatherds they had been before oil was discovered or needed by a modern world.

But the ultimate doomsday target, of course, would be Mecca – the mystical center of Islam towards which devout Muslims bow in prayer five times each day. Come doomsday, as a last gesture Israel could vaporize the Black Stone, the Kaaba, the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed and all of Mecca. Thereafter Muslims could bow daily towards a place resembling Arizona’s Meteor Crater.

The moral of this story: ultimately the Palestinians can never win everything they want. They need to compromise and make peace. Even if they could destroy Israel, to do so would destroy them, too, as well as the surrounding Islamic nations that support them.

But Israel also needs to recognize that, sooner or later, Muslim nations will acquire their own weapons of mass destruction. Unless a way to peace can be found, one morning 20 or 30 years from now Israelis will awaken to 50,000 nuclear cruise missiles saturating their defenses and eradicating the Jewish State. What looked like stalemate will within minutes of retaliation then turn into mutual checkmate, mutual assured destruction. As the saying goes: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.