Listen to this article:

Chandigarh: Whenever Israel confronts major military, multi-front crises like the ongoing war it has started with Iran and Hezbollah, the spectre of its so-called ‘Samson Doctrine’ envisaging unilateral nuclear use if its survival was supposedly threatened, inevitably resurfaces in strategic discussions.

This doctrine draws its name from the biblical figure Samson, a Hebrew judge of ancient Israel renowned for his superhuman strength who, according to ancient scriptures, was captured and blinded by the Philistines, but brought down the pillars of their temple, killing himself and his captors.

Translated into present-day strategic terms, the metaphor is stark: if Israel were ever pushed to the brink of destruction – or what it perceives as destruction, which might conceivably also mean being forced to end its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – it would respond with overwhelming nuclear retaliation, rather than submit to this.

The term itself was not coined by Israeli officials but popularised by the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – himself Jewish – in his influential 1991 book The Samson Option. Drawing on biblical imagery, Hersh described what he argued was the implicit logic behind Israel’s nuclear capability, developed in the 1960s, but never officially acknowledged: an ultimate deterrent intended to guarantee the state’s survival against existential threats. While Hersh coined the phrase, Israel quietly embraced it within its strategic circles as shorthand for a doctrine affirming that its survival would be defended at all and, any cost however apocalyptic.

Hersh’s work also helped crystallise in public discourse an idea long assumed within the small, close-knit world of nuclear strategists and intelligence analysts who study Israel’s opaque, but formidable deterrent developed at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre at Dimona, some 30 km from the Dead Sea. This understanding takes on added urgency against the historical backdrop of the Iranian clergy, which assumed power in 1979 and has consistently vowed the elimination of Israel, framing the Jewish state as its principal ideological and civilisational adversary.

Decades later, that hostility continues to shape regional dynamics, with Israel presently attacking Iran and Lebanon with US help. Far from succeeding to bring Iran to its knees, the latest Israeli war has invited Iranian retaliation via missiles on its cities. Against this backdrop, the question of Israel’s ultimate threat the Samson Doctrine – looms quietly but unmistakably.

And while no immediate existential........

© The Wire