This op-ed piece was published in the German daily DIE WELT (in German) on
January 6, 2007 http://www.welt.de/data/2007/01/06/1165992.html

"Benny Morris believes that the Iranian regime will annihilate Israel with
nuclear weapons, and nobody will stop it in doing so. Morris used to have the
reputation of being an Anti-Zionist, but he rejects the accusation that he
questions Israel's right of existence. In this article written for DIE WELT,
Morris explains why he is convinced that sometime in the future millions of
Israelis will be murdered." (DIE WELT, translated by Ursula Duba)

The following is the original text in English provided by Benny Morris.
-------------------------------------
The second Holocaust will not be like the first.

By Benny Morris

The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators
had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them, over
months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual
killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes in tactile
contact, with their victims. The Germans, along with their non-German helpers,
had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat
them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them
on cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where 'Work makes Free',
separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into 'shower'
halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the
bodies and prepare the 'showers' for the next batch.

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five
or ten years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a
day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in
Qom will covoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah
Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then in his second or third term,
the go ahead. The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will
take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some
military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile
bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple
warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical
agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile
batteries and Home Guard units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 8,000 square
miles), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or
more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas, will die
immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven
million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite
impersonal.

Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab. 1.3 million of Israel's citizens
are Arab and another 3.5 million additional Arabs live in the semi-occupied West
Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa have substantial Arab
minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately around Jerusalem
(in Ramallah-El Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem), and outside Haifa. Here, too, many
will die, immediately or by and by.
It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble
Ahmedinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs,
especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries.
And they have an especial contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians, who, after all,
though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1, failed during the
long conflict to prevent the Jews from establishing their state or taking over
all of Palestine. Besides, the Iranian leadership sees the destruction of Israel
as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the Second Coming, and the Muslims
dispatched collaterally as so many shuhada (martyrs) in the noble cause. Anyway,
the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around the globe, will survive as a
people, as will the greater Arab Nation, of which they are part. And surely, to
be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices.
In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be worth the candle.

A question may nevertheless arise in the Iranian councils: What about
Jerusalem? After all, the city contains Islam's third holiest shrines (after
Mecca and Medina), Al Aksa Mosque and the Mosque of Omar. But Ali Khamenei, the
supreme spiritual leader, and Ahmedinejad most likely would reply much as they
would to the wider question regarding the destruction and radioactive pollution
of Palestine as a whole: The city, like the land, by God's grace, in twenty or
fifty years' time, will recover. And it will be restored to Islam (and the
Arabs). And the deeper pollution will have been eradicated.
To judge from Ahmedinejad's continuous reference to Palestine and the need
to destroy Israel, and his denial of the first Holocaust, he is a man obsessed.
He shares this with the mullahs: All were brought up on the teachings of
Khomeini, a prolific anti-Semite who often fulminated against 'the Little
Satan'. To judge from Ahmedinejad's organisation of the Holocaust cartoons
competition and the (current) Holocaust denial conference, the Iranian
president's hatreds are deep (and, of course, shameless).
He is willing to gamble - the future of Iran or even of the whole Muslim
Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction. No doubt he believes that
Allah, somehow, will protect Iran from an Israeli nuclear response or an
American counterstrike. Allah aside, he may well believe that his missiles will
so pulverize the Jewish state, knock out its leadership and its land-based
nuclear bases, and demoralize or confuse its nuclear-armed submarine commanders
that it will be unable to respond. And, with his deep contempt for the
weak-kneed West, he is unlikely to take seriously the threat of American nuclear
retaliation.

Or he may well take into account a counter-strike and simply, irrationally
(to our way of thinking), be willing to pay the price. As his mentor, Khomeini,
put it in a speech in Qom in 1980: 'We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah … I
say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided
Islam emerges triumphant …' For these worshipers at the cult of death, even the
sacrifice of the homeland is acceptable if the outcome is the demise of Israel.

Israel's deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, has suggested that Iran
doesn't even have to use the Bomb to destroy Israel. Simply, the nuclearization
of Iran will so overawe and depress Israelis that they will lose hope and
gradually flee emigrate, and potential foreign investors and immigrants will shy
away from the mortally threatened Jewish State. These, together, will bring
about the State's demise. But my feeling is that Ahmedinejad and his allies lack
the patience for such a drawn-out denouement; they seek Israel's annihilation in
the here and now, in the immediate future, in their lifetime. They won't want to
leave anything up to the vagaries of history.

As with the first, the second Holocaust will have been preceded by decades of
preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western
intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different
audiences - but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of
Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: 'The Zionists\the Jews are the
embodiment of evil' and 'Israel must be destroyed.' And Westeners, more subtly,
were instructed: 'Israel is a racist oppressor state' and 'Israel, in this age
of multi-culturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous'. Generations of Muslims
and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these
catechisms.

The build-up to the second Holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will
probably claim roughly the same number of lives as did the first) has seen an
international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites -
Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France, with Arab oil - and the
United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has
been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran, to face off
alone.

But an ultimately isolated Israel will prove unequal to the task, like a
rabbit caught in the headlights of an onrushing car. Last summer, led by a party
hack of a prime minister and a small-time trade unionist as defense minister,
and deploying an army trained for quelling incompetent and poorly-armed
Palestinians gangs in the occupied territories and overly concerned about both
sustaining and inflicting casualties, Israel failed in a 34-day mini-war against
a small Iran-backed guerrilla army of Lebanese fundamentalists (albeit highly
motivated, well-trained and well-armed). That mini-war thoroughly demoralized
the Israeli political and military leaderships.

Since then, the ministers and generals, like their counterparts in the
West, have looked on glumly as Hizbullah's patrons have been arming with
doomsday weapons. Perversely, the Israeli leaders may even have been happy with
Western pressures urging restraint. Most likely they deeply wished to believe
Western assurances that somebody, somehow - the UN, G-7 - would pull the
radioactive chestnuts out of the fire. There are even those who fell for the
outlandish idea that a regime-change in Teheran, driven by a reputedly secular
middle class, would ultimately stymie the mad mullahs.

But even more to the point, the Iranian program presented an infinitely
complex challenge for a country with Israel's limited conventional military
resources. Taking their cue from the successful Israel Air Force's destruction
in 1981 of Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor, the Iranians duplicated and dispersed
their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian targets are
about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out with conventional
weapons the known Iranian facilities would take an American-size air force
working round-the-clock for more than a month. At best, Israel's air force,
commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components of the Iranian
project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact - and the
Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to reach the Bomb as soon
as possible. (It would also, without doubt, immediately result in a
world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly its
Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated by
Ahmedinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to
peaceful purposes.). At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the
Iranians by a year or two.
In short order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would
soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally
effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a pre-emptive
nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components
were in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their
determination to save Israel extend to pre-emptively killing millions of
Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general: Israel's
nuclear armory was unusable. It could only be used 'too early or 'too late.'
There would never be a "right" time. Use it 'too early,' meaning before Iran
acquired similar weapons, and Israel would be cast in the role of international
pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend in the world;
'too late' would mean using its nuclear weapons after the Iranians had struck.
What purpose would that serve?

So Israel's leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will
turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will
behave 'rationally'?

But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their
rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do
nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the
1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do
nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will send rescue ships and medical
aid for the lightly charred. It will not nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what
cost? An American nuclear response would lastingly alienate the whole of the
Muslim world, deepening and universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations.
And, of course, it would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial muderer
bring back his victims?) So what would be the point?

Still, the second Holocaust will be different in the sense that Ahmedinejad will
not actually see and touch those he so wishes dead (and, one may speculate,
this might cause him disappointment as, in his years of service in Iranian death
squads in Europe, he may have acquired a taste for actual blood). And, indeed,
there will be no scenes like the following, quoted in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent
'The Lost, A Search for Six of Six Million,' in which is described the second
Nazi Aktion in Bolechow, Poland, in September 1942:

'A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans,
who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and
entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in a
nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There … she
was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of
Ukraininans present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of
childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from
her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown - It was trampled by the crowd
and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits
hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall,
afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded
her into a carriage in a train to Belzec [extermination camp].'

In the next Holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes, of
perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions can be fairly
unpleasant).

But it will be a Holocaust nonetheless.
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