Israel and Samson: Biblical Lessons for Israeli Strategy in the Nuclear Age

Abstract

Although Israel's strategic posture of nuclear ambiguity has assuredly not led to any serious doubts about its overall nuclear capacity, there is no necessary correlation between such a capacity and enemy perceptions of usable nuclear power. Before Israel's nuclear arsenal can purposefully enhance that country's security, it will first have to contribute recognizably to Israeli nuclear deterrence and to Israel's perceived ability to undertake certain vital preemptions. With these points in mind, this article seeks to draw certain timely strategic lessons for Israel from the hero of the post-Pentateuchal Book, JUDGES. Looking to Samson, Israel can learn new ways to enhance its nuclear deterrence, preemption and warfighting options. Here, Scripture can inform strategy-and in surprisingly imaginative and generally unanticipated ways. The article explicitly identifies six important lessons from Samson: (1) Perceived willingness to take some existential risks can strengthen Israel's deterrence, preemption and warfighting postures; (2) Israel, like Samson, possesses great strength, but that strength can be blunted if it is not properly understood and exploited; (3) Israel must soon understand from Samson that all things move in the midst of death, and that such an understanding is altogether critical to defeating its Arab/Islamic enemies; (4) Israel can benefit from Samson's very concrete and palpable sense of catastrophe; from learning that its physical survival is never assured; (5) Samson can teach Israel that there is great and mortal danger in wishful thinking; and (6) Along similar lines, Israel can learn from Samson that self-delusion is a threat on several different levels, including the nurturance of erroneous presumptions about the stability of the state system itself-a decentralized system of world politics that came into being in 1648, after the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia.