Edward Luttwak
Through its early history — but not for the last four decades and more — the main threats to Israel’s security came from its Arab neighbours. That resulted in several wars against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. But except for Jordan, Israel’s Arab enemies were in effect proxies for a far more potent threat: the Soviet Union. To displace American power in the Middle East, Moscow supplied thousands of tanks and hundreds of jets to Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Thousands of soviet technicians and training officers came too, even as Arab officers were trained in soviet academies.
This was a formidable threat to Israel's survival in its first decades. But nobody there even considered the possibility of striking directly at the Soviet Union itself. Aside from the certainty of a massive retaliatory response, there were simply no relevant targets that Israel could strike, even if its small airforce managed to penetrate Soviet airspace.
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