When you’re the defense minister of a country that has nuclear weapons but won’t admit to having them, citing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as models for dealing with the professed greatest threat to your country’s existence is, um, an interesting rhetorical choice. Yet here we have Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, last week at a conference in Jerusalem, according to Ali Gharib at LobeLog:
Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem nearly two weeks ago, the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon invoked the American decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II in response to a question about “dealing with a threat like Iran.”
At the conference, organized by the right-wing Israeli legal activism group Shurat HaDin, Yaalon defended Israel’s decisions in several of its recent wars that critics have said showed a disregard for civilian life.
Here are Yaalon’s own words:
I can imagine some other steps that should be taken. Of course, we should be sure that we can look at the mirror after the decision or the operation. Of course, we should be sure it is a military necessity. We should consider cost and benefit, of course. But, at the end, we might take certain steps.
I do remember the story of President Truman was asked, How do feel after deciding to launch the nuclear bombs [at] Nagasaki and Hiroshima, causing at the end the fatalities of 200,000 casualties? And he said, When I heard from my officers that the alternative is a long war with Japan, with potential fatalities of a couple of millions, I saw it was a moral decision.
We are not there yet. But that [is] what I’m talking about. Certain steps in cases in which we feel like we don’t have the answer by surgical operations or something like that.
Cool story, am I right? Welp, the Iranians certainly thought so; in fact, they thought it was so cool that they wanted to share it with the whole UN:
Iran’s envoy to the United Nations sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, as well as the Security Council, protesting recent remarks made by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who invoked the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II when responding to a question of how to deal with Iran at a conference in Tel Aviv this month.
The Iranian letter, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency, said Yaalon’s comments showed “the [Israeli] regime’s aggressive nature” and was an indication of Israel’s own extensive, covert nuclear arsenal, whose existence remains an open secret.
Now, I’ll grant you that Iran is doing a little nutpicking here, but when the nut in question happens to be Israel’s Minister of Defense, it’s a pretty big deal. Not only did Yaalon kind of spill the beans on the nukes that Israel has but doesn’t have, the oblique reference to nuking Iran sure doesn’t do much for the “Iran aggressor, Israel victim” narrative that he and Benjamin Netanyahu like to push so much. I wonder if Yaalon is going to be allowed to speak in public without a prepared script anymore.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
I would say that this is more than just interesting and nut picking of the Iranians. When the Iranian ex-president and paper tiger blubbered something like: the zionist REGIME should vanish from the page of time … like the Sowjetunion,
all the newspapers in the world repeated and repeated and are still repeating that Iran (not just that unelected idiot) wants to wipe Israel off the map (declaring all Iranians as potential killers, and making any preventive attack seem a just thing). This is still making the case for sanctions that hurt the people of Iran, hardly the regime, even though Ahmadinejad is not anymore in charge and what he was saying was nothing like killing all or even a single Jew, it was just regime change (The fall of the Sowjetunion did not mean that all Russians were killed or wiped off the map).
I wish the UN and other parts of the international community (US & Europe) would be neutral and just enough to treat Yaalon and like minded people in the Israeli administration like they did with Ahmadinejad – leaving the room, isolating and condemning. But unfortunately this will never happen.