The most serious threat to Israel from “Palestine” is not terrorism. Prospectively existential, this threat concerns synergistic or force-multiplying perils. These perils are ones in which the whole of inflicted harms would be greater than the sum of its parts.
Multiple particulars will require explanation. A Palestinian state – any Palestinian state – would affect the constantly changing balance of power between Israel and its adversaries, both state and substate (terrorist group) foes. Anticipating already nuclear state foes, the most plausible adversary would be North Korea or Pakistan acting as an Iranian surrogate. For Israel, direct military confrontation with either enemy could have authentically unprecedented consequences.
History deserves pride of place. There is still no law-based Palestinian state (only a UN “non-member observer state”), but this could change – suddenly or incrementally. Amid steady denunciations of Israel’s war in Gaza – condemnations that ignore authoritative international law regarding “perfidy” or “human shields” – pressures on Jerusalem to accept some form of Palestinian statehood will continue to mount. This is the case though statehood cannot lawfully be created simply by accumulating acts of recognition.
If Palestinian statehood and new war with an enemy state would coincide, the injurious costs to Israel would be dynamically reinforcing and not merely additive. There would also be destabilizing impacts on Israel from variously reconfiguring jihadi terrorist groups.
In addition to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Fatah, and other usual suspects, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in post-Assad Syria will be worrisome to Jerusalem. Ironically, at the insistence of US President Donald J. Trump, HTS was removed from the US State Department list of terrorist groups.
Though Iran and its principal substate surrogates were weakened by the June 2025 12-day war, Tehran has not abandoned its nuclear ambitions. Accordingly, if this strategic goal were achieved together with Palestinian statehood – even a bestowal of sovereignty that failed to meet codified international law prerequisites – cumulative war outcomes would exceed the simple sum of harms. Inter alia, “Palestine” would become a conspicuous ally of Iran and certain other state enemies of Israel.
Two-state solution increases threat of regional war
For Jerusalem, these complex issues should be viewed as an intellectual, not political, problem. A “two-state solution” would enlarge not “only” the jihadi terrorist threat to Israel (both conventional and unconventional), but also prospects for a catastrophic regional war.
Even if such a war were fought while Iran was pre-nuclear and neither North Korea nor Pakistan was already nuclear, Tehran could still use radiation dispersal ordnance or electromagnetic pulse weapons. Alternatively, that adversary could target the Dimona nuclear reactor with conventional rockets and drones. In separate instances, Dimona was already targeted by Iraq and Hamas.
“Everything is very simple in war,” warns classical Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz in On War, “but the simplest thing is still very difficult.” In regard to North Korea and war against Israel, Pyongyang, with a documented history of active military support for Iran, fought directly against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Regarding North Korean ties with Iranian ally Syria, Kim Jung Un built the Al Kibar nuclear reactor for Damascus. This same facility was destroyed by Israel in Operation Orchard (also known in Israeli intelligence circles as Operation Outside the Box) on September 6, 2007. Without Orchard, HTS jihadists would likely have inherited a nuclear weapons option.
What about Pakistan? As a potentially unstable Islamic state, nuclear Pakistan is continuously subject to coup d’état by jihadi elements and remains aligned with Saudi Arabia and China. Looking ahead, the Sunni kingdom in Riyadh could decide to “go nuclear” itself. In all likelihood, such a decision would be in response to Iran’s “Shi’ite nuclear program” rather than Israel’s presumptive military dominance.
There is more. Would such a decision by Saudi Arabia be a net gain or net loss for Israel? It’s not too soon to ask this seemingly simple but tangibly complex question. Derivatively, Jerusalem will need to consider potentially correlative decisions by Egypt and Turkey. For Israel, this obligation should give rise to an antecedent question: Facing a still-nuclearizing Iran, would Israel be better off or worse off with a simultaneously nuclearizing Egypt and/or Turkey?
Nuclear detterence plan must be clarified
On such elemental nuclear issues, truth may prove counterintuitive. For Israeli nuclear deterrence to work longer-term, Iran and other prospective state enemies will need to be told more rather than less about Israel’s nuclear targeting doctrine and the invulnerability of Israel’s nuclear forces/infrastructures. In concert with such changes, Jerusalem will need to clarify its presently opaque “Samson Option.”
The key objective of such clarification would not be to affirm Israel’s willingness to “die with the Philistines,” but to enhance the “high destruction” end of its nuclear deterrence continuum.
During the next six months, bolstered by world public antipathies to Israel’s self-defense policies in Gaza, Palestinian leaders will launch an escalating effort to acquire statehood.
Even if this effort were not founded on legitimate jurisprudential foundations (i.e., principles of the 1933 Montevideo Convention), and even if such antipathies were openly visceral instead of law-based, Jerusalem would still have to evaluate the restarted nuclear dangers from Iran in tandem with projected hazards of “Palestine.”
Because these dangers could be synergistic or force-multiplying, Israel’s only rational course would be to oppose both threats simultaneously.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism, including Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).