The following excerpt, taken from the end of Chapter Seven of William P. Dunhardt's History of The Twenty-First Century, briefly relates the events of the morning of Sept. 7, 2014, the fourth day of the Last Arab-Israeli War. This war broke out after a series of developments culminated with Israel's rejection of an Arab ultimatum to agree immediately to the return of one million Palestinian refugees and cede the heavily Arab Galilee to the new Islamic Republic of Jordan and Palestine (IRJP).

By the early hours of that morning, the Israeli military position had grown hopeless. In the north, reinforced by three Iraqi divisions, Syrian troops, sweeping down from a supposedly demilitarized Golan Heights returned by Israel as part of the 2010 Syrian-Israeli peace treaty, had cut the Tiberias-Kiryat Shmoneh highway and encircled Safed, isolating much of the Galilee.

In the central region, the army of the IRJP, having beaten Israeli troops to the Jordan River, from which Israel withdrew in the wake of its interim agreement with Hamas in 2012, was engaged in a major battle near Jericho. Further south, the Egyptian Second Army, attacking from southern Sinai after its lightning reoccupation of the peninsula, had reached the IRJP border north of Eilat, which was about to fall, while the First Army had entered a cheering Gaza Strip and was poised to strike at Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Tel Aviv.

Outmanned on all fronts, Israel's army, its morale never fully recovered from the botched 2006 war against Hezbollah, seemed paralyzed, uncertain which threat to concentrate on most. Meanwhile, the country's rear lines were devastated. Heavy destruction and loss of life had been wreaked on Israel's cities by hundreds of long- range missiles that had overpowered the country's anti-missile defences. The Haifa oil refinery was in flames. Ben-Gurion airport was partly out of commission, its control tower down. Parts of central Tel Aviv had been reduced to rubble. Casualties were great. Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon continued day and night, and over a dozen Israeli West Bank settlements that had not yet been evacuated in the wake of the 2012 agreement had been overrun by Palestinian irregulars, their inhabitants reportedly slaughtered.

Israel's air force, too, had taken heavy losses, both from the latest Soviet air-to-ground missiles and from new American combat planes flown by the Egyptians and the Saudis, who joined the fighting on its third day. Although the Israeli Air Force had so far kept Israeli air space relatively free of enemy planes and had inflicted heavy damage on enemy troops, installations and civilian populations, it could no longer cope with the situation.

Worse yet for Israel, its atomic deterrent, which it had traditionally counted on to ward off disaster in such worst-case scenarios, had been neutralized by Iran's going nuclear, as was officially announced to the world by the Iranian regime in late 2010. Now, with a reported stockpile of several dozen nuclear- tipped ballistic missiles, the Iranian government had declared on Sept. 5 that it would launch them immediately if Israel used its own atomic arsenal against Syria, Iraq, Egypt or the IRJP. Convinced that an Iranian nuclear umbrella would protect them, the four Arab countries pressed on with their ground attack.

It was under these circumstances that Israel's cabinet and general staff, presided over by Likud Prime Minister Yuval Shteinitz, convened for a fateful meeting in an underground bunker on the morning of Sept. 7. After a report by the chief-of-staff on the deteriorating military situation, those gathered debated what to do.

Three options stood before them: 1) Surrender. 2) Prolonging the fighting as long as possible in the hope of bringing about American or European military intervention on Israel's behalf, or alternately, heavy enough diplomatic pressure to cause the four Arab countries to stop their offensive. 3) Issuing a 12-hour ultimatum to these countries to cease their fire and withdraw to the pre-war lines or else face immediate nuclear attack.

Option 1 was supported by only one Arab and two ultra-Orthodox cabinet ministers. As every other participant in the debate pointed out, a defeated Israel occupied by Arab armies would be an Israel

that ceased to exist. Flooded by jubilant Palestinian refugees demanding to recover their lost homes and property, its Jews at the mercy of the occupying forces, it would be a country that no Jew could possibly want to live in even if allowed to remain.

The rest of those present divided evenly between Option 2 and Option 3. The supporters of Option 3 argued that Option 2 was unrealistic. Neither America nor Europe, they maintained, had available ground troops that could be introduced into the military theatre quickly enough; neither was prepared to commence massive air bombardments of Arab countries; and neither had the diplomatic means to pressure the Arabs into stopping their attack, a Security Council resolution condemning which had already been vetoed by China.

The threat of an Arab-Iranian oil embargo, plus the fact that opinion polls showed 84% of Europeans and 63% of Americans opposed to their countries' military involvement, also ruled out all these possibilities. The most that could be hoped for was that, Israel having been defeated, Europe and the U.S. would agree to accept its millions of Jews as refugees --and in that case, why not go directly to Option 1?

The supporters of Option 2 argued back that, as unrealistic at it might seem, Option 3 was simply unthinkable. Even if Israel dropped only one atomic bomb on an Arab city in the hope that it would be enough, hundreds of thousands or millions would be killed or fatally injured, and an Iranian counterattack would kill millions of Israelis in turn and effectively obliterate the Jewish state. True, Israel would still have the capacity for a devastating last-gasp second strike -- but what would be the point of levelling Teheran and much of the rest of Iran, and creating tens of millions of additional nuclear victims, if Israel were doomed anyway? What moral right did Israel have to inflict such carnage as a mere act of revenge?

To this, the supporters of Option 2 had two answers. The first was that a people who had been through one Holocaust that the world had done nothing to stop, and was now facing another, had a moral right to do anything; moral laws simply no longer applied to it. The second was that the certainty of Israeli retaliation might, at the last moment, cause Iran's rulers to back down -- and since there was no way of knowing if this would happen or not, the only logical course was to hit the Arabs with nuclear weapons first and pray that the Iranians were bluffing.

Needless to say, Iran was aware of this logic too. Already on the evening of Sept. 6, its diplomats had informed the European Union and the United States that they would be held responsible if Israel, the nuclear aggressor, retaliated against Iran for coming to the Arabs' aid. In that case, Teheran proclaimed, the entire Western world would be considered a legitimate target.

Throughout the night of Sept. 6-7, diplomatic activity had been frantic. It was now all too obvious what folly it had been to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons when this could have been relatively easily prevented. (Strangely enough, it had occurred to almost no one that such weapons were most likely to end up being used as the result of an Arab-Israel war fought by conventional means.) But it was far from obvious what needed to be done now. The government of the United States leaned toward threatening Iran with total annihilation should it launch a nuclear attack on Israel. The European Union, in turn, accused the U.S. of contemplating such a risk only because it believed itself to be safely beyond the range of Iranian missiles that could easily hit Europe. Surely Israel was not so important that it was worth trying to save at the possible price of sacrificing Paris, Rome and London.

All of this was discussed at the Israeli cabinet/general staff meeting on Sept. 7. At 11:30 a.m. a first vote was taken. The results were three votes for Option 1, 14 votes for Option 2, and 14 for Option 3. A tie-breaking ballot was then scheduled for one p.m., after a break for lunch.

The remainder of Dunhardt's account can be found in Chapter Twelve. - Hillel Halkin, who lives in Israel, is the author of A Strange Death. He is a columnist for the New York Sun.

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