The caption at the top of this photo reads "never again" in Hebrew.
The photo is of the front gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during WWII. Above the gate are three friend-15's of the Israeli Air Force doing a flyover in 2003 to mark the 85th anniversary of the Polish Air Force. This photo is on the wall of virtually every military base in Israel, and the phrase "never again" is supposedly inscribed on Israels nuclear weapons. The philosophy of "never again" is deeply ingrained into the Israeli military mind. They have seen the folly of being unarmed and of relying on other nations to protect them, and they will
never again allow themselves to be in that situation. Israel has demonstated time and time again that, right or wrong, they
will act decisively and unilaterally if necessary to protect themselves. They rescued their hostages in Uganda in 1976, they preemptively destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground during the Six Day War in 1967, they took out the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 (
with Iranian cooperation) and they took out the Syrian nuclear facility in 2007. Bowing to U.S. political pressure, they
failed to strike pre-emptively during the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and almost got wiped out by the Syrians. In that war, they came
very close to deploying nuclear weapons against the Syrian armored columns that almost broke thru the Golan Heights. Israel learned the hard way that striking preemptively is often their only choice. Will they do it this time against Iran, and will they use nuclear weapons?
Thats the question that scares me.