Long before he met with his overdue death last week, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, offered a theological explanation for why Israel had come into existence. “The Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine,” he said in a 2002 speech, of which there is an audio recording. “Not in order to bring about the Antichrist and the end of the world but rather that Allah the glorified and most high wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place — they have gathered in one place — and there the final and decisive battle will take place.
” In other words, Israel was one-stop shopping for killing all Jews. I thought of Nasrallah’s words Tuesday while watching images of Iranian ballistic missiles raining down on Israel, fortunately causing only slight damage, thanks mainly to Israeli and American air defenses. What if one of those missiles had been tipped with a nuclear warhead — a warhead whose construction Western intelligence agencies, even Mossad, had somehow missed? If nothing else, it would have fulfilled Nasrallah’s prophecy and his fondest hopes.
That possibility is no longer far off. This year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. Even with the requisite fissile material, it takes time and expertise to fashion a nuclear weapon, particularly one small enough to be del.