Haggai Apr 25 2008 - 10:11am
Are you really sure about the cause-and-effect there? The following factors, none of them nuclear, heavily contributed to the shift within the Arab-Israeli conflict over time from state vs. state to state vs. non-state actors:
1) Israel's overwhelming victory in 1967, which relegated its destruction by conventional Arab military action into the realm of permanent fantasy.
2) The increasing salience of the Palestinians as a separate issue from the Arab states vs. Israel conflict, which largely resulted from Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza in '67. Being more on their own than ever before, the Palestinians turned more to guerrilla and terrorist attacks instead of relying on the failed military power of the Arab states.
3) Sadat's decision to make peace, which removed the most powerful Arab state from the conflict and thus made a conventional attack by any of Israel's neighbors far less likely.
You could see the effects of 3), in particular, in Israel's invasion of Lebanon in '82. Having safely concluded the peace treaty with Egypt, Menachem Begin felt he had a freer hand to launch a massive intervention into Lebanon, which would have been seen as a much riskier proposition when Egypt was either still poised to attack Israel, or engaged in negotiations towards peace. And then the rise of Hezbollah shifted the overall Arab-Israeli conflict more into the state vs. non-state realm--that came from a combination of the instability of the Lebanese civil war, external support from the new Iranian regime, and the further destabilizing effects of the Israeli invasion.
But all of this has a lot more to do with Israel's huge superiority vis-a-vis its neighbors in the conventional realm than with its nukes. I admit to knowing very little about nuclear weapons and their effect on international relations, but I know plenty about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I think you guys are forgetting about a lot of things that have been far more significant than Israel's nuclear arsenal.