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Notes -
States are made out of individual humans which make their decisions, not some abstract grand strategy player. For example, 9/11 was only a papercut for the US, something on the level of an animal killing a villager in Age of Empires, perhaps. But it still ended up shaping a decade of US politics, because people care more about this kind of things than deaths from traffic.
Getting nuked would be like 9/11, but worse. Normally, this is the place where I would say that there is no way Netanyahu would survive this politically, but given him doing just fine after the Hamas attacks suggests I do not have a working model of Israeli politics.
Politicians pay attention to tail risks, and try to avoid them. For a conventional Iran, the 1% most unfavorable outcome for Israel of an Israeli airstrike is that Iranian rockets fired in retaliation kill a couple of hundred Israeli. For a nuclear Iran, the 1% outcome is that they nuke a few Israeli cities, killing tens or hundreds of thousands.
The other thing to remember is that there is an escalation ladder even once the nukes start flying. For example, a nuclear Iran might nuke an Israeli airbase in retaliation to a conventional bombing. In this situation, Israel would not get a pass for whatever retaliation they might visit on Iran. Glassing Tehran would not be an option, at most they could nuke an Iranian base. Even if things get to the point where cities are nuked, Israel might get away with killing 10x as many Iranians as they kill Israelis, but not with 100x. If they glass all of the Iranian cities, they will get the same repercussions than if they had nuked them without provocation, so whatever considerations are keeping them from nuking Iran right now would still be the same.
Finally, we can use past prisoner exchanges to get an idea of how much citizens and enemies weight in the Israeli utility function (to the degree that it is coherent). The exchange rate peaked in 2011 at 1027 Arabs per Israeli, but has cratered since Hamas has taken their hostages. But I imagine that killing 2M Iranians for 100k Israeli, while being a favorable exchange rate given both population sizes, would not be seen as favorable by Israel.
It shaped politics that much because it was basically a godsend, a moment some of the PNAC crowd have been secretly praying for.
Funny:
They were actually not that stupid and wanted to axe new carrier construction, but did not manage to do so.
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