The 'villa in the jungle' nuclear paradigm: Israel's nuclear narrative and practice in a changing regional security complex.

Abstract

The 'villa in the jungle' metaphor, conventionally associated with Israel's former Defence Minister Ehud Barak, is one of the most referenced metaphors in Israeli political discourse. Its perpetuation has contributed to the fixation of two co-constitutive collective identities: Israel as an exemplary democratic society amidst a violent and backward Arab neighbourhood. This article examines an often-overlooked aspect of such a discourse: its transposition within Israel's nuclear narrative and its impact on Israel's nuclear politics. It contends that the perpetuation of this discourse has fuelled Israel's nuclear orientalist narrative, fixing a paradigm according to which certain identities have crystallised as commonsensical and certain actions as legitimate. On one hand, it has helped to construct Israel's entitlement to possess nuclear weapons and the Arab non-entitlement thereto. On the other hand, it has provided a rationale for Israel's kinetic counterproliferation actions. However, the 'villa in the jungle' discourse and the identities constructed by it are anchored to a specific security context, which saw Israel as an isolated country facing an existential threat. But what if a change in the status quo, such as the emergence of a new regional security complex (RSC), devalued the 'villa in the jungle' paradigm and thus delegitimised both Israel's nuclear orientalist discourse and practice? As Israel normalises its relations with Gulf monarchies and civilian nuclear programmes become increasingly salient in the region, for the first time since its creation, Israeli policymakers might find themselves entangled in a new dilemma, one centred on a re-assessment of the definition of 'enemy state' in Naor's very first definition of the Begin Doctrine - or the 'jungle' in Barak's definition.