Under international law, war and genocide are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, war is sometimes recognized – both historically and jurisprudentially – as an essential means of carrying out genocide. For Israel, in particular, still facing determined Iranian nuclearization, any such recognition obviously warrants very special attention.

“In a dark time,” says the American poet Theodore Roethke, “the eye begins to see.” Today, the Iranian nuclear threat burns brightly in Jerusalem’s visual field.

Today, more than ever, this unconventional peril remains both genuinely unprecedented and fixedly existential.

Correspondingly, Jerusalem’s moral imperative should appear plain and unambiguous. After all, every state’s first obligation must be the assurance of protection.

Always, we may learn from the philosophers, from Aristotle to Grotius to Vattel to Bodin to Locke and to Hobbes, innocent life must be preserved.

When Iranian leaders openly proclaim their belief in the Shi’ite apocalypse, a series of final battles presumed indispensable for transforming the profane “world of war” into the sacred “world of Islam,” essential self-defense becomes a uniquely urgent Israeli concern. Even if such proclamations should turn out to be contrived or inauthentic, a fully rational Iranian nuclear adversary could still pose a very grave threat to Israel. This is because “two scorpions in a bottle” – the original J. Robert Oppenheimer metaphor of nuclear deterrence then obtaining between the US and USSR – are always apt to react precipitously in a world of organized fear and structured uncertainty.

There is more to worry about here than “mere” eschatology. A rational Iranian “scorpion” and/or a rational Israeli “scorpion” could calculate that the risks of waiting passively to be struck first would actually exceed the risks of “stinging” first. However unwittingly, such altogether rational calculations could still result in a nuclear war.

Does “justice” also have a voice in this more expressly strategic matter? Some would argue forcefully against any eleventh- hour Israeli preemption on the grounds of a presumed need for “equity.”