AVIGAIL ABARBANEL
MAR 10, 2026
On 10 March 2026, retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson — former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell — gave an interview to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! Wilkerson spent decades inside the machinery of American military power and has been reckoning publicly with its crimes since at least 2003. He is someone worth listening to, especially since he is also a compassionate man who has had many years to reflect on his own contribution to the war crimes the US committed during his time in the military.
Towards the end of the interview he said something alarming. He said he believed Benjamin Netanyahu was ready to use a nuclear weapon if the war in Iran ‘went south’. He cited Netanyahu’s remarks to his inner circle, spoken in Hebrew, in which Netanyahu reportedly indicated he was prepared to “show the Iranians something they had never seen before”. Wilkerson drew a parallel to 1973, when Golda Meir told a BBC reporter that she would use a nuclear weapon if Israel faced destruction.
I take Wilkerson seriously. He has watched American and Israeli military decision-making from the inside for decades and has consistently told the truth about what he has seen, at considerable personal cost. But I’m not sure his prediction is right on the question of Israel using nuclear weapons. It’s not because the threat isn’t real, but because he is reading it through a Western strategic logic that Netanyahu doesn’t necessarily share.
Israel is believed to possess between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads, which of course Israel has never officially confirmed. So the capability is there. But even a small tactical weapon, in the 1 to 10 kiloton range, deployed against Iran would generate a regional catastrophe. Wind and air cannot be controlled and nuclear fallout would not stay within Iran’s borders. The Persian Gulf, a shallow, semi-enclosed sea from which most of the Arabian Peninsula draws its desalinated water, would be contaminated. Israel’s own coastline, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq would all be in the fallout zone. Iran, for its part, has not yet fired its most sophisticated missiles, something Wilkerson himself acknowledges. A nuclear strike would not neutralise that capacity before Iran retaliated. It would guarantee retaliation. The Gulf states, which are already under pressure from Iranian strikes could face existential threat not from Iran but from their supposed ally, Israel.
And then there is Netanyahu himself. He is a narcissist of the first order, a man whose entire psychological architecture is organised around his own survival, status, and historical legacy. He wants to be remembered as the saviour of the Jewish people, not as the man who ended his own ‘kingdom’. His narcissism, and his own fear of losing everything he has gained over decades paradoxically serves as a constraint. Netanyahu has grandiose dreams for a greater Israel and he wants to be maybe its high priest or king. He is unlikely to press a button that would end his own dream.
So what is Netanyahu threatening? I think the answer is something far more consistent with the ideology of the Israeli religious far-right government he leads, andIsrael’s accelerating shift towards religious rule. It is something that Western analysts, even well-informed ones like Wilkerson, might be missing because they do not understand the millenarian mindset of Israel and its leaders. They might still mistakenly think of Israel as the Western democracy it pretended to be for over seventy years.
I don’t believe Netanyahu is threatening to use nuclear weapons. I think he is threatening the destruction of Al-Aqsa mosque.
The destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the rebuilding of the ‘Third Temple’ on the site has been an explicit vision and stated goal of the Jewish religious far-right for decades. They have always found the existence of the Mosque on that site an insult to their religious sensibilities, and an obstacle to the rebuilding of their coveted Temple. These are not logical or thoughtful people. These are Messianic fanatics with a disturbing type of psychology that parallels the psychology of Christian evangelical and charismatic groups.
In Israel the desire to build a Temple on the site of Al Aqsa is not a fringe position. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has conducted repeated provocative incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound. Each of those incursions is a statement of disdain for its existence there, and an ominous expression of intent. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister, comes from a movement that regards the entire mosque compound as rightfully Jewish and its current status as a temporary injustice waiting to be corrected.
These men are not Netanyahu’s reluctant coalition partners. They are his government. Netanyahu uses and empowers the religious far-right for his own political survival and aggrandisement. He is under no illusion about the destructive capacity he has placed at the heart of his government, or what Ben-Gvir and Smotrich would do with it if given the chance.
In his essay, ‘Decolonizing My Zionist Mind’, Daniel Klein, who was born and raised in an Orthodox colony in the West Bank and left, testifies:
“I was taught my entire life that the Al-Aqsa mosque standing in Jerusalem needed to be removed for the Jewish Temple to be rebuilt. That the ground it stands on belongs to us by divine right, by ancient claims predating the mosque’s presence. That this functioning holy site, where countless people have prayed for generations, was an obstacle to our redemption.
The reality is that many practicing Jews are openly fantasizing about tearing down a holy structure belonging to another faith, a place actively serving an entire people’s connection to the divine for over a thousand years, calling its destruction divine will.”
… “Growing up in my community, we sang about rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, in school, youth groups, yeshivas, on holidays, at weddings, in the military. We sang about the day redemption would come and the Third Temple would finally stand. I toured the Temple Institute where they showed us the vessels they’d prepared, the priestly garments recreated, the architectural plans for when the time comes. It was a common belief that the biggest mistake in the Six Day War was that we “didn’t go all the way” in liberating Jerusalem.
The Third Temple, in essence, was woven into everything, our prayers, our songs, our identity as a people waiting to return. It’s in the glass we break at every Jewish wedding. It’s in our songs at Passover, at gatherings. It’s the thread that becomes the fabric of the stories making up our identity”.
The people amongst whom Daniel was brought up and their belief system are now in charge of Israel’s government and its military. What was once a fantasy, these people now have the means to fulfil. And this isn’t an accident. The religious sector in Israel has worked steadily and tirelessly over decades to arrive at exactly this position.
The consequences of destroying Al-Aqsa would be without precedent in modern history. The mosque sits on Haram al-Sharif (Arabic for ‘The Noble Sanctuary’), the third holiest site in Islam. It’s sacred to approximately 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. Its destruction would not be experienced as a military act. It would be experienced as a declaration of war on Islam itself.
If they did not respond, every Muslim-majority government in the world, including those that have made peace with, or normalised relations with Israel would face a domestic political situation they could not survive. Saudi Arabia, which has been aligning with Israel would find itself with an impossible choice between its religious obligations and its geopolitical relationships.
But Netanyahu would not present it that way. He would present it to his Christian Zionist supporters in the US as a redemptive act. The rebuilding of the Third Temple is not only a Jewish religious aspiration. It is a central pillar of the End Times theology that drives tens of millions of American evangelical voters. In their theology, the rebuilding of the Temple is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ.
Netanyahu has performed to this audience for decades. He understands that the destruction of Al-Aqsa, framed as the liberation of the Temple Mount from Islam, would electrify the Christian Zionist base in the United States in a way that nothing else could. It would be presented as Israel saving the world, saving Christianity, standing alone against the forces of Islam. And Trump, who owes his political coalition to precisely this constituency, would have every incentive to cheer it on.
This is the logic of a man who is cornered, who has spent his entire career surviving through escalation and manipulation, and who has now bet everything on a war that, as Wilkerson correctly notes, the US and Israel are strategically losing. A nuclear weapon destroys Netanyahu’s legacy and his kingdom. But the destruction of Al-Aqsa, wrapped in the language of biblical prophecy and civilisational conflict, could, in his mind, reshape the entire game. It is an act of spectacular, irreversible provocation designed to make retreat impossible and to bind his American allies to him through religious belief and apocalyptic fervour rather than mere geopolitical, economic, or strategic interests that can shift.
If Netanyahu and his band of lunatics carry out their fantasy of destroying Al-Aqsa, don’t expect it to be a covert operation. They would make it a global spectacle. It will be filmed, broadcast, and celebrated in Israel and elsewhere. Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir would want the world to see it. It won’t be ‘just another’ act of destruction like blowing up a hospital in Gaza or a school in Iran. This will be a performance of dominance and prophetic fulfilment, staged for two audiences simultaneously: the Christian Zionist right in the US, and Isreal’s own people. I have no doubt that Netanyahu will be able to sell this successfully even to Israel’s secular society as the ultimate symbol of making the land of Palestine exclusively Jewish.
I may be wrong, and I hope I am. But I know how Israel’s government and its people think, and I know what they regard as their ultimate prize. I also know the psychology of narcissists. The question is not whether Netanyahu is capable of this. The question is whether the world is paying enough attention to stop it before it’s too late. Not only will such an abominable act of barbaric vandalism represent a reckless destruction of a beautiful part of our shared human heritage, it will be profoundly disrespectful and painful to almost two billion people.
And we don’t know what it could unleash. I’m pretty sure it won’t be the First, or Second coming, or the End Times prophecy the fanatics from both religions are fantasising about.
Itamar Ben-Gvir X Account