@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:The world would also like to know where Israel's policies are heading, regarding colonisation of the West Bank.
Israel was and is willing to hand the West Bank over to the Palestinians in exchange for peace.
I doubt Israel has thought much about what they will have to do if (when) the Palestinians refuse to make peace based on 1967 borders. But when the time comes, it is pretty clear what will have to be done. The Palestinians cannot be allowed to stay in the West Bank if they refuse to make peace, so they will all have to be deported to the Gaza Strip.
Once there are no more Palestinians in the West Bank, I'm sure the settlements will expand radically. Israel will have the moral high ground due to the fact that they repeatedly tried to make peace based on 1967 borders, and I'm sure they will take it and run with it.
Obama has asked Israel to let the US be the one to handle Iran. Israel seems willing to go along with Obama's request.
Israel is likely delighted at the prospect of UN inspectors crawling all over Syria and destroying their chemical weapons.
Olivier5 wrote:Or Israeli nuclear weapons (do they exist, do they not???).
Israel has atomic weapons, but they have not yet done the testing
required to develop thermonuclear weapons.
Based on the fact that Israel maintains a battery of 8 inch artillery in very high readiness, the fact that such artillery is obsolete for conventional weapons but useful for launching atomic shells, and the fact that there was a 1 kiloton test detected in a remote part of the Indian Ocean in 1979 (all nations other than Israel have been excluded as possible perpetrators of the test), it is likely that after the 1973 war Israel decided to steal the blueprints for an American atomic shell design, tested it, and now has a battery of atomic shells ready to rain down on any invading army that they cannot handle conventionally.
Israel has a number of diesel submarines equipped with special enlarged torpedo tubes that are designed for firing cruise missiles tipped with atomic warheads.
A likely yield for such an atomic warhead would be on the order of 100 kilotons.