99 Stories of God

67. Forgiveness

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was poised to launch nuclear warheads — the Temple Weapons — rather than suffer defeat at the hands of the Arabs. At the time, Israel had at least thirteen twenty-kiloton atomic bombs — the Hiroshima bomb was sixteen kilotons. Armageddon was avoided only when the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, acting in the vacuum left by the travails of his “drunken friend,” President Richard Nixon, authorized an emergency resupply of high-tech, though conventional, weaponry to the Israelis.

Prime Minister Golda Meir said:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”