To deliver its most powerful weapons, Israel can rely on its 100 land-based missile launchers, 200 aircraft armed with cruise missiles, and (according to "repeated press reports") cruise-missile-armed submarines. The subs are key, of course, since they ensure that no future blow delivered to Israel would ever lack payback.
Israel spends far more on its military than any of the neighbors it claims to fear, largely because it gets more military aid from the U.S. than any other Mideast nation -- $3 billion a year is the official figure, although no one is likely to know the full amount.
The Obama administration has continued a long tradition of guaranteeing Israel's massive military superiority in the region. Israel will, for example, be the first foreign country to get the U.S.'s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35 joint strike fighter. In fact, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently complained that 20 of the promised planes aren't enough, though he admitted that his country "faces no imminent threat" that would justify upping the numbers. Israel is also beginning to deploy its Iron Dome mobile air-defense system, with the U.S. funding at least half its cost.
In sum, none of the nations that Israel casts as a threat to its very existence can pose an existential military danger. Of course, that doesn't mean all Jewish Israelis are safe from harm, which brings us to...
Myth Number 2: The personal safety of every Jewish Israeli is threatened daily by the possibility of violent attack. In fact, according to Israeli government statistics, since the beginning of 2009 only one Israeli civilian (and two non-Israelis) have been killed by politically motivated attacks inside the green line (Israel's pre-1967 border). Israelis who live inside that line go about their daily lives virtually free from such worry.
As a result, the insecurity myth has come to focus on rockets -- the real ones launched from Gaza and the imaginary ones that supposedly could be launched from a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. Purveyors of the insecurity myth, including the American media, portray such rocket attacks as bolts from the blue, with no other motive than an irrational desire to kill and maim innocent Jews. As it happens, most of the rockets from Gaza have been fired in response to Israeli attacks that often broke ceasefires declared by the Palestinians.
Those rockets are part of an ongoing war in which each side uses the best weapons it has. The Palestinians, of course, have access to none of the high-tech Israeli guidance systems. Their weaponry tends to be crude and often homemade. They shoot their rockets, most of them unguided, and let them fall where they may (which means the vast majority harm no one).
Israel's weapons actually do far more harm. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008, killed far more civilians than all the rockets Palestinians have ever launched at Israel. Despite (or perhaps because of) its grievous losses, the Hamas government in Gaza has generally tried to minimize the rocket fire. When Hamas calls for all factions in Gaza to observe a ceasefire, however, the Israelis often ramp up their attacks.
Jewish civilians do run some risk when they live in the West Bank settlements. In the most recent horrific incident, a Jewish family of five was slaughtered at the Itamar settlement. In response, Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon showed clearly how the deaths of individual settlers are woven into the myth of Israel's "existential insecurity." "This murder," he declared, "reminds everyone that the struggle and conflict is not about Israel's borders or about independence of a repressed nation but a struggle for our existence."
The logic of the myth goes back to the premise of the earliest Zionists: All gentiles are implacably and eternally anti-semitic. By this logic, any attack on one Jew, no matter how random, becomes evidence that all Jews are permanently threatened with extinction.
Most Zionists have been unable to see that once they founded a state committed to regional military superiority, they were bound to be on the receiving as well as the giving end of acts of war. It is the absence of peace far more than the presence of anti-semitism that renders Israelis who live near Gaza or in the West Bank insecure.
However, according to the myth, it's not only physical violence that threatens Israel's existence. In the last two years, right-wing Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have learned to lie awake at night worrying about another threat...
Myth Number 3: Israel's existence is threatened by worldwide efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Early in 2010, Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin told the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that the country was not "suffering from terror or from an immediate military threat" -- only to warn of a new peril: "The Palestinian Authority is encouraging the international arena to challenge Israel's legitimacy."
The "delegitimization" alarm was first sounded by an influential Israeli think tank and then spread like wildfire through the nation's political and media ranks.
There are shreds of truth in it. There have always been people who saw the Jewish state, imposed on indigenous Palestinians, as illegitimate. Until recently, however, Israelis seemed to pay them little heed. Now, they are deemed an "existential threat," as Yadlin explained, only because the old claims of "existential threat" via violence have grown unbelievable even to the Israeli military (though not to the government's American supporters).
It's also true that challenges to Israel's legitimacy are growing rapidly around the world and that the specter of becoming a "pariah state" does pose a danger. The head of that think tank got it half-right when he warned that Israel's "survival and prosperity" depend on its relations with the world, "all of which rely on its legitimacy." Survival? No. After all, being a pariah state doesn't have to be existence threatening, as North Korea and Burma have proved.
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