Benny Morris is one of Israel’s most respected historians, having written extensively on the question of the foundation of Israel and Palestinian refugees. As Solomonia (via whom) says, he’s the “anti-Zionist Left’s favorite out of context quoted historian”. See here for an interview from 2004 (scroll down). So when he writes about the second holocaust, it’s worth taking notice:
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. […]
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.
Mick Hartley 
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