Atomic weapons, in fact, became an obsession with Hussein. When a journalist once asked his son Udai what he wanted to be when he grew up, Udai had answered, “a nuclear scientist,” eliciting an approving chuckle from his father. For Saddam, nuclear power was the ultimate symbol of the world player, a prerequisite for regional hegemony, and, of utmost importance, the “great equalizer” to finally match Israel’s power.
In a little-known historical irony, the man who planted the seed of Hussein’s fixation on atomic weapons was none other than Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. By 1970 the Palestinian intelligentsia had become the leading scholars of Baghdad. Palestinian refugees had flooded into Baghdad, along with most of the militia and their leadership, in the wake of Black September, when Jordan’s King Hussein, thwarting a plot by the PLO to overthrow him, unleashed a bloodbath to drive the terrorist refugee camps from Jordan. Traditionally, Arab émigrés were desperate to disappear into their adoptive cultures, anxious to leave behind the bad memories of oppressive dictatorships. But the Palestinians, especially the educated classes, bound together as a minority, recruiting and fomenting the fight for the liberation of their homeland. This circle of energized scholars, educators, and propagandists became the hub of Baghdad’s intellectual life, its café society.
One of the most talked-about books in the Arab universe in 1970 was The Israeli Bomb, written by a Palestinian-American academic named Fouad Jabir. Rumors had circulated for years that Israel had secretly produced an atomic bomb, but nothing had been proved. Not even United States intelligence knew for sure. Jabir’s premise was that not only did Israel already have the “bomb,” within ten years it would have a hundred atomic bombs. As long as Israel had this nuclear superiority, the Arab world would face a bleak future. Without a Muslim bomb and a “balance of terror,” Jabir argued, Arabs would always be treated like second-class citizens, subservient to Zionists.
Eager to spread anything anti-Israeli, the PLO flooded the Middle East’s urban centers with the book, and Arafat made sure the tome was brought to the attention of Hussein and the Ba’this through PLO operatives in Baghdad. For months Hamza saw stacks of the book piled in the Nuclear Research Center offices. The Israeli Bomb became a popular topic of debate throughout Iraq, where its message was tailor-made for Ba’thists like Saddam, whose dream was to lead the Arab nations to destroy Israel. Even more important, the book had provided Hussein with a blueprint on how to join the nuclear club. Ironically, as Israel would soon discover to its chagrin, he would do so by following, step by step, Israel’s own model.
For Fouad Jabir, as it turned out, had been right all along—he had just been too conservative. Israel not only had an atomic bomb—it already had close to one hundred of them.
The year was 1956, and Israel’s beloved “old man,” David Ben-Gurion, had been unable to connect with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The white-maned founder and leader of Israel for a quarter century embodied the passion of the freedom fighter with the soul of a rabbi, but his charms had eluded the U.S. president. Eisenhower had refused to form a security agreement with Israel. He had steadfastly adhered to a status quo policy in the Middle East, despite continuing signs of Arab aggression. He and the suite of Wall Street lawyers surrounding him seemed, if anything, to Ben-Gurion, more predisposed to the sheikhs who supplied the U.S. with oil, which drove its economy, than to Israel, which offered friendship and moral arguments.
The rebuff only deepened Ben-Gurion’s continual sense of being alone. American journalist Seymour Hersh recalled a Ben-Gurion aide confiding to him once that the prime minister would sometimes cry out, “What is Israel? Only a small spot. One dot! How can it survive in this Arab world?”
As many an Israeli would note, to the West, Israel looked like David; to the Arabs, the nation looked like Goliath. But to the Israelis themselves, they felt more like Job. It was true that Israel had vanquished the combined armies of Jordan (then TransJordan), Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and even a token force from Iraq in its War for Independence in 1948, an event the Arabs call al-Nakbah, “the disaster.” There was a sense of invincibility about the Israel Defense Forces, whose soldiers and pilots were among the best trained in the world, but, ironically, there existed an almost equal sense of vulnerability. Like many of his generation, Ben-Gurion could not escape a feeling of doom, the conviction of ein brera, “no alternative,” that his nation was surrounded by enemies who would never change and would never accept them, thus forcing the Israelis to do anything to protect themselves or face a second Holocaust, an Arab version.