This column was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on June 19, 2025. Click here to read it on the Journal’s website.
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The world owes a debt of gratitude to Israel’s prime minister—not Benjamin Netanyahu but Menachem Begin, who conceived Israel’s nuclear nonproliferation strategy.
Begin served as Israel’s first right-wing prime minister, from 1977 to 1983. Three years into his tenure, he learned that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was building a nuclear reactor. “I am tormented by this,” Begin told Parliament. “I see before my eyes my two young nephews murdered in the Holocaust, and all the children of Israel. Back then it was gas; now it’s radioactive poison.”
Begin was tormented, but he wasn’t paralyzed. In June 1981, he sent eight Israeli pilots to destroy the reactor, then thought to be beyond the range of Israel’s U.S.-made F-16 jets. The next day, international condemnation focused not on the dictator seeking nuclear weapons but on the democracy attempting to stop him. President Reagan, generally friendly toward Israel, was furious with Begin for using defensive weapons offensively. Reagan imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and joined a United Nations resolution condemning the attack. Begin was undeterred: “Even if a resolution is passed, and even if the Americans vote for it, we will survive. If that reactor had survived, we would not.”
The Begin doctrine was born. Israel would never allow hostile nations to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel is a small, “one-bomb country,” in the words of Iran’s former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Nuclear nonproliferation is of existential importance. The doctrine has since been a boon to Israel’s friends. During the 1991 Gulf War, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sent a letter of gratitude to Israel for destroying Iraq’s reactor in 1981. Without Israel’s actions, no one could have saved Kuwait from Saddam’s grasp.
The doctrine faced another test in 2007, when Syria was secretly building a nuclear reactor deep in the desert. Mossad agents discovered it almost accidentally, through the laptop of a senior Syrian official visiting a Vienna hotel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked President George W. Bush to strike, but Mr. Bush refused. So Mr. Olmert ordered Israeli airstrikes. Imagine if last year’s Syrian uprising had erupted while Bashar al-Assad possessed atomic weapons.
The greatest test came for Mr. Netanyahu. Iran’s ayatollahs learned from previous Israeli strikes and scattered their nuclear program across the country. President Obama signed a nuclear agreement that left Iran’s facilities intact, and President Biden openly opposed an Israeli strike. Despite these difficulties, Mr. Netanyahu passed the “Begin test” with distinction. Persuading the Trump administration to support the attack was a historic diplomatic success. The ayatollahs spread their tentacles throughout the Middle East, but now Iran stands completely vulnerable.
If only the free world had adopted its own Begin doctrine against countries like North Korea and Pakistan, so that a dictator’s temper tantrum couldn’t lead to nuclear winter. At least Israel has become the world’s bomb squad, a stroke of good fortune for which we can thank Menachem Begin.
