The Hands Are on the Pillars
The Paper Trail Part Two
“Let me die with the Phillistines” “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived. Judges 16:30
This is the second installment of The Paper Trail — a series built on primary sources, documented records, and the discipline of following evidence wherever it leads. If you haven’t read the first piece on the Jeffrey Epstein Non-Prosecution Agreement, it lives on my Substack and website. Before you read what follows, you may also want to revisit my recent piece Israel Was Not in the Room — because what I’m about to show you is what was already built before anyone sat down at that table. The seventy-two hour clock on the Iran nuclear deal expires tomorrow. I am not telling you what that means. I am showing you what exists and urging you to do your own research in order to form your conclusions.
He had been a man of impossible strength and ordinary weakness.
The Nazirite vow marked him from before his birth. No razor would touch his head, no wine would pass his lips, no unclean thing would defile him. He was set apart. Consecrated. The angel who announced him to his mother didn’t come to his father first. Didn’t come to the elders or the priests. Came to a barren woman standing alone, and told her that the child she would carry was already spoken for.
Samson grew into his gift the way a river grows into a canyon — by force, by wearing everything around him down. He killed a lion with his bare hands and told no one. He burned the Philistine fields with three hundred foxes, tails tied together, torches fastened between them. He struck down a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey and stood in the aftermath and made a joke about it. The text doesn’t flinch from any of it. Neither should we.
But he was undone the way consecrated men so often are. Not by his enemies. By his own appetite, and by something deeper than appetite.
Delilah didn’t take his strength. She took his secret. And you don’t surrender a secret like that to someone you merely want. You surrender it to someone you have made the mistake of needing.
Three times he lied to her. Three times she called the Philistines waiting in the other room and three times his strength held. The text says she pressed him daily with her words and urged him until his soul was vexed to death. That phrase deserves to sit for a moment. Vexed to death. He told her everything not because she outsmarted him but because he was tired. Because the weight of being what he was had worn him through. Because somewhere in the wearing down, she had become the only place he allowed himself to rest.
They came for him while he slept in her lap. They shaved the seven locks from his head and he woke to find himself ordinary. He didn’t know, the text says, that the Lord had departed from him. That detail is almost unbearable. He rose to fight and reached for something that was no longer there.
What followed was not quick. The Philistines didn’t kill him. They put out his eyes, both of them, the text specifies, as if one would not have been enough of a statement, and brought him to Gaza, the city he had once carried the gates of on his shoulders and walked away laughing. They bound him with bronze chains and set him to grinding grain in the prison. The champion of Israel, blind, chained, doing the work of an animal in a circle that never ended.
But the text notes something the Philistines didn’t think to watch for.
His hair began to grow again.
The lords of the Philistines gathered for a great feast to celebrate. Their god Dagon had delivered their enemy into their hands, and this called for thanksgiving, for spectacle, for the particular pleasure of watching a fallen giant humiliated. The temple filled. Three thousand people on the roof alone — men and women who had come to watch Samson perform, to laugh at what he had become. The lords were there. The rulers. The ones who had paid Delilah her eleven hundred pieces of silver each.
They sent for him. Let the blind man entertain us.
A young boy led him by the hand into the temple. Samson asked the boy to guide his hands to the pillars — the two central columns that held the weight of the roof, the weight of the crowd, the weight of everything above them. The boy placed his hands on the stone.
The text records his prayer with plain economy. He asked God for strength one more time. Just once more. He wanted to pay back what had been done to his eyes.
And then he said the words that would name a nuclear doctrine three thousand years later.
Let me die with the Philistines.
Not let me live to fight again. Not let my people be delivered. Not let your name be glorified. Let me die with them. Let the roof come down on all of us together — on the lords and the rulers and the three thousand watching from above, on the guilty and the incidental alike, on everyone in this building including the man pushing these pillars.
He pushed.
The text says the dead he killed at his death were more than those he had killed in his life. The temple came down on the lords and on all the people in it. His family came to collect what was left of him and bury him in his father’s tomb.
It’s not a clean story. It wasn’t meant to be.
I have never been able to read Samson without being pulled in two directions at once.
He was a narcissist. That much is plain in the text — a man who used his gift like a personal weapon, who made riddles for sport and burned fields for revenge and turned the sacred into transaction. He is not a clean hero. The book of Judges doesn’t ask you to read him as one.
But something in him has always made me sad.
Maybe it’s the hair.
Across millennia and across cultures, hair has carried the weight of identity in a way that resists easy explanation. The Samurai’s top-knot was not decoration. It was rank, it was honor, it was the visible mark of what a man was. When the Meiji government forced samurai into the streets to have their knots cut off, they were not changing a hairstyle. They were performing an unmaking. A woman who shears waist-length hair in a moment of private breakdown understands something ancient about what she is doing; that she is taking the shears to something that represents her, something that grew slowly and meant something, something she cannot get back quickly.
Samson’s seven locks were not just hair. They were the seal of everything he had been set apart to be. And Delilah did not just cut them. She had them cut while he slept in her lap, in the place where he had finally allowed himself to rest, in the arms of the person he had made the mistake of needing.
They took the most sacred thing about him in the moment he was most exposed.
And then they put out his eyes so he couldn’t see what he had lost.
I think about that when I think about what was built in the Negev desert. About what was named after him. About the kind of power that survives its own humiliation and goes quiet and waits and grows back in the dark.
Every doctrine needs a name. Names are chosen carefully by people who understand that language shapes perception, that what you call a thing determines how people are willing to think about it. Military planners know this better than anyone.
Someone looked at a blind man chained to pillars in a temple full of people who had destroyed him, a man with nothing left but the strength returning quietly in his hair and the willingness to die if he could take everyone in the building with him, and they said: that is the posture we need a name for.
Not victory. Not defense. Not deterrence in the clean Cold War sense of mutually assured destruction where both sides theoretically survive long enough to regret it. Something older and more absolute than that. The willingness to pull the roof down on yourself and everyone else in the room when there is nothing left to protect except the refusal to be the only ones who die.
They called it the Samson Option.
And unlike Samson, they built it in secret.
The desert southwest of Beersheba holds a particular quality of silence. The Negev is not empty — it only presents itself that way to people who haven’t learned to read it. In 1955 the Israeli government began construction on something in that silence that it would spend the next several decades officially describing as a textile factory. Then an agricultural research station. Then, when the size of it made those explanations implausible, a nuclear research center for peaceful purposes called Dimona.
The French helped build it. A secret agreement between Israel and France in 1957 provided not just a reactor but a plutonium reprocessing plant — the piece of the architecture that transforms nuclear research into nuclear weapons capability. France was simultaneously negotiating its own place in the postwar world order and found in Israel a partner whose secrecy requirements matched its own ambitions. The arrangement was kept from the United States. Deliberately. By both parties.
By the time American U-2 surveillance flights spotted the construction in 1958, something significant was already in the ground.
The question then became what to do about what they had seen.
The answer, it turned out, was very little. And then, eventually, nothing at all.
The United States had a problem.
It knew, by 1960, that Israel was building something in the Negev that could not be plausibly explained by agricultural research or textile production. The CIA knew. The State Department knew. President Kennedy knew, and unlike his predecessors and successors, he pushed. He pushed hard enough that the Israelis agreed to allow American inspections of the Dimona facility.
What followed was one of the most elaborate deceptions in the documented history of nuclear nonproliferation.
The inspectors who arrived at Dimona were shown a facility. They walked through rooms, examined equipment, and wrote reports. What the declassified State Department cables and the work of historian Avner Cohen — whose 1998 book Israel and the Bomb nearly resulted in his prosecution by the Israeli government — documents is what the inspectors were not shown.
There was an elevator that went down, but the inspectors were not taken to it.
There was a reprocessing plant beneath the visible facility — the machinery that takes spent nuclear fuel and extracts from it weapons-grade plutonium. It was the most significant piece of the entire operation. It was not on the tour.
Walls were constructed before inspection visits to conceal tunnel entrances. Equipment was removed temporarily. What the Americans were shown was, in the language of intelligence, a Potemkin facility — a constructed facade with nothing behind it but the intention to keep them looking at the facade.
The inspectors returned home and their reports noted no evidence of weapons development.
Kennedy was not satisfied. He pressed for more access, more rigorous inspection, inspectors of American choosing rather than visits arranged by the Israelis. His letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on the subject are part of the documented record — direct, pointed, reflecting a president who understood exactly what was at stake if a Middle Eastern nation acquired nuclear weapons outside any international framework.
Ben-Gurion resigned in 1963 before the inspection regime Kennedy was demanding could be formalized.
Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year.
His successor did not press the matter.
Lyndon B. Johnson, the declassified record shows, moved American policy toward what would become its permanent posture on Israeli nuclear capability — a posture with a name as carefully chosen as the doctrine itself.
They called it ambiguity.
Six years before Moshe Dayan stood in a war room invoking the destruction of the third temple, another incident was written into the permanent contested record of what the United States is willing to absorb in silence when Israel is the one holding the weapon.
June 8, 1967. The Six Day War was four days old and nearly won. Israeli forces had already destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, had taken the Sinai, were moving on Jerusalem. In the eastern Mediterranean, in international waters, an American naval vessel was doing what it had been sent to do — signals intelligence collection, monitoring communications from all parties in the conflict.
The USS Liberty was not a warship in any combat sense. It was a technical research vessel. It was flying its American flag. The day was clear. The sea was calm. Israeli aircraft had conducted reconnaissance passes over the ship hours earlier — close enough, survivor accounts would later establish, that crew members could see the Star of David markings on the wings and wave at the pilots.
What happened next lasted approximately two hours.
Israeli aircraft attacked first — unmarked at the outset of the assault, a detail that would become one of many points of contention in the years that followed. Rockets. Cannon fire. Napalm. The Liberty’s communications antennae were among the first things hit, limiting its ability to call for help. When crew members attempted to deploy life rafts to evacuate the wounded, the rafts were strafed.
American aircraft were launched from a nearby carrier to assist. They were recalled before they arrived. This is documented. The recall came from the highest levels. Survivors have testified that the ship was left to absorb the attack without assistance for reasons that were never formally explained.
Then the torpedo boats came. Five of them. Israeli torpedo boats struck the Liberty with a torpedo that killed twenty-five men in a single compartment. By the time the attack ended thirty-four Americans were dead and one hundred seventy-one were wounded. The Liberty was so badly damaged it should not have stayed afloat. It did, because the crew kept it afloat through the kind of effort that gets memorialized and then quietly forgotten.
Israel apologized within hours. Called it a tragic case of mistaken identity.
The United States accepted that explanation within twenty-four hours.
The Naval Court of Inquiry was convened and completed in ten days. For an incident in which a United States naval vessel was attacked in international waters with the loss of thirty-four American lives, ten days is a remarkable pace. Survivors who sought to testify about details that didn’t fit the mistaken identity explanation have stated under oath that they were warned — by superior officers, in explicit terms — that the matter was closed and their careers depended on understanding that.
The investigation’s supervising officer was Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr. His son, the late Senator John McCain, would spend decades in public life during which the Liberty was never formally reinvestigated despite repeated requests from survivors and their advocates.
NSA intercepts that survivors and researchers argued showed Israeli forces had identified the Liberty as an American vessel before the attack was completed were classified for decades. What they contain in their released form remains disputed by the parties with the most to lose from a definitive answer.
What is not disputed is what happened to the men on the ship.
What is not disputed is how quickly the official explanation was accepted.
What is not disputed is that no one with the authority to demand a fuller accounting ever did.
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel simultaneously. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement. The timing was not accidental. Israeli intelligence had failed catastrophically. The army was unprepared. In the first hours and days of the war, Israeli forces were being pushed back on two fronts in ways that hadn’t happened since 1948.
By October 8th, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was telling Prime Minister Golda Meir that what he was watching was the destruction of the third temple.
That phrase was not hyperbole. It was a reference and anyone in that room understood what it meant.
Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen nuclear warheads. The weapons were configured for delivery by aircraft and by Jericho missiles aimed at Egyptian and Syrian targets. Israeli Air Force pilots were briefed. The weapons were not yet armed for launch but they were no longer in storage. They were in the pipeline between storage and use, which is a different thing entirely.
This is documented. Seymour Hersh reported it in detail in 1991 drawing on intelligence sources. William Quandt, who served on the National Security Council during the crisis, has confirmed the American awareness of what Israel was preparing. Avner Cohen’s research corroborates the assembly and the alert status.
What happened next happened fast.
American intelligence detected the alert. The nature of what Israel was preparing was communicated to Henry Kissinger, then serving as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, a concentration of foreign policy authority in a single unelected official that itself deserves its own paper trail. Kissinger understood immediately that if Israel used nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, which was resupplying Egypt and Syria, would have no choice but to respond. The regional war would become something without a ceiling.
The United States initiated an emergency military airlift to Israel. Tanks, ammunition, aircraft, artillery — everything the Israeli military needed to fight conventionally was loaded onto American transport planes and sent. The resupply was massive enough to turn the tide of the conventional war.
The nuclear weapons went back into storage.
But something had been demonstrated that October that no official statement would ever acknowledge. The Samson Option was not a theoretical deterrent. It was not a philosophical position or a strategic abstraction. It was a set of weapons that had been taken out of their containers and pointed at cities while a defense minister compared the moment to the destruction of the Second Temple.
The roof had not come down. But the hands had found the pillars.
In 1968 the United Nations opened the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for signature. The logic of the treaty was straightforward in the way that logic often is before it encounters political reality. Nations that already had nuclear weapons would commit to eventual disarmament. Nations that didn’t have them would commit to never acquiring them. In exchange, all signatories would have access to peaceful nuclear technology under international inspection.
One hundred ninety-one countries have signed it.
Israel has not.
This is not a secret nor a disputed fact. It is a matter of public record that generates almost no sustained American political discussion, which is itself a kind of answer to the question of why it matters.
India has not signed. Pakistan has not signed. North Korea withdrew in 2003. These absences are noted, condemned, sanctioned, and used as justification for significant American foreign policy pressure up to and including military action in the case of nations deemed to be pursuing the capability Israel already has.
The framework applied to Iran — the negotiations, the sanctions, the threat architecture, the entire diplomatic superstructure of the last two decades — rests on the foundational argument that a Middle Eastern nation cannot be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons outside the NPT framework.
Iran has signed the NPT.
Israel has not.
This asymmetry is not an oversight. It is not a bureaucratic anomaly or a historical accident that no one has gotten around to correcting. It is a policy. It has a name. The United States government calls it deliberate ambiguity, and it has been the official posture of every American administration since Lyndon Johnson looked at what Kennedy had been pressing for and decided that pressing was not something he intended to do.
The policy works like this. The United States does not officially acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel does not officially confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons. In exchange for this arrangement, the United States does not apply to Israel the nonproliferation standards it applies to every other nation on earth. American foreign aid to Israel — which has totaled over one hundred fifty billion dollars since 1948, more than to any other nation — continues regardless of the provisions in American law that prohibit assistance to countries pursuing nuclear weapons outside the NPT framework.
Those provisions exist. They are written into the law. The Symington Amendment of 1976 and the Glenn Amendment of 1977 explicitly prohibit American foreign assistance to countries that deliver or receive nuclear enrichment technology outside international safeguards.
They have never been applied to Israel.
Not once. Not by any administration. Not by any Congress.
The legal mechanism by which this is sustained is not a formal waiver or a declared exception. It is silence. The law exists. The situation exists. The acknowledgment that would require the law to be applied does not exist. And so the aid continues and the weapons continue and the doctrine continues and the American government continues to describe its position as one of not confirming or denying what the CIA, the State Department, and every serious nonproliferation scholar on earth has documented for sixty years.
Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who in 1986 provided the Sunday Times of London with photographs and detailed technical descriptions of the Dimona facility — the real one, not the Potemkin version shown to American inspectors. His evidence allowed nuclear experts to conclude with confidence that Israel possessed between one hundred and two hundred nuclear warheads.
He was lured to Rome by a woman working for Israeli intelligence. Drugged. Smuggled to Israel on a cargo ship. Tried in secret. Sentenced to eighteen years in prison, eleven of which were spent in solitary confinement.
He was not tried for lying.
I have thought about those eleven years. A man alone in a cell for telling the truth about something that everyone with a security clearance and a reason to know already knew. There is a real kind of violence in that. Not the violence of the drugging or the smuggling or the secret trial, though those are violence enough. The particular violence of the solitary years. The message they were designed to send to anyone watching.
We have time. We have patience. We will wait you out in a room by yourself until the telling stops feeling worth it.
It works. It has always worked. The taxonomy of silencing is older than any government that has ever practiced it. Sometimes it is a prison sentence. Sometimes it is professional excommunication — the career warning, the reassignment, the funding that quietly disappears. Sometimes it is the simple arithmetic of making an example so visible and so prolonged that no one who might follow requires an explicit threat.
And sometimes it is something more permanent than any of those.
Vanunu was released in 2004. He was prohibited from speaking to foreign nationals or journalists. Prohibited from leaving the country. Those restrictions have been repeatedly renewed. He has been rearrested multiple times for giving interviews.
The United States government made no formal objection to any of this.
When the truth is dangerous enough, the silence of powerful nations is not passive. It is a choice. It is a wall built around the man in the cell to make sure the cell does the work it was designed to do.
The textile factory. The mistaken identity. The deliberate ambiguity.
And eleven years alone in a room.
I have spent a long time with this paper trail. Long enough that when October 2023 arrived I did not experience it as a surprise. I experienced it the way a person experiences something they have been reading the conditions for and with a kind of dread that has no clean name because it sits at the intersection of sorrow and recognition.
What the documented record shows is this:
On October 7th, 2023, an attack on Israeli civilians killed approximately 1,200 people. It was the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. The images were real. The grief was real. The dead were real.
What followed was a military campaign in Gaza that has by documented international accounting killed tens of thousands of people in one of the most densely populated territories on earth. The overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population has been displaced. The infrastructure — hospitals, universities, water systems, homes — has been systematically destroyed in ways that humanitarian organizations have described in terms the United States government has declined to formally adopt.
I am not going to tell you what to think about any of that.
What I am going to tell you is what exists in the Negev desert while all of it is happening. What doctrine is active policy in the hands of a government operating under what it has publicly and repeatedly described as existential emergency. What cabinet ministers have said out loud in radio interviews that got them suspended for a news cycle and then quietly forgotten.
The paper trail doesn’t tell you what October 7th means.
It tells you what was already built before it happened.
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was asked in a November 2023 radio interview whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option. He said that was, in his words, one of the possibilities. He was suspended from cabinet meetings. He was not removed from the government. His words were described as not representing official Israeli policy.
No one in the Israeli government explained what official Israeli policy actually was. They couldn’t. Official Israeli policy is that there is no nuclear arsenal to have a policy about.
The deliberate ambiguity that Lyndon Johnson institutionalized in the 1960s had arrived at this moment — a cabinet minister publicly discussing nuclear weapons use in an active war, suspended for a news cycle, and then the subject closed because opening it requires acknowledging something that sixty years of American policy has been constructed to never acknowledge.
Itamar Ben-Gvir. Bezalel Smotrich. These are not fringe figures in the current Israeli government. They are senior ministers with documented records of statements about Palestinian civilians, about the acceptability of collective punishment, about the nature of what Israel is and what it is entitled to do to survive. They govern in a coalition that would have been politically unthinkable in Israel a generation ago.
This matters to the Samson Option for a reason that is structural rather than personal.
The doctrine was conceived as a last resort — the pillar option, the roof-comes-down option, the we-have-no-other-move option. It assumed governments that understood it as such. Governments that would reach for it only when the alternative was national annihilation.
The question that the current moment forces, the question that the paper trail demands be asked, is what happens to a last resort doctrine when the definition of last resort expands. When the officials holding the option include people who have publicly described civilian populations as legitimate targets. When the regional war involves Iran, whose nuclear program has been the stated justification for American policy in the Middle East for two decades, and whose proxies are engaged in active conflict with Israel on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Iran has its own calculations. It’s watched what happened to Iraq, which did not have nuclear weapons when the United States invaded in 2003. It has watched what happened to Libya, which gave up its nuclear program in 2003 and whose government was gone by 2011. It’s watched North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, and drawn its own conclusions about what those weapons provide.
The nuclear logic of the Middle East right now is not stable. It is not a Cold War standoff between two superpowers with enough to lose that the math of mutually assured destruction holds. It is a region with one undeclared nuclear arsenal, one near-threshold program, several American military installations, multiple active proxy conflicts, and a doctrine named after a man who decided that if he was going to die he was going to take everyone in the building with him.
The United States is in the building.
So is everyone else.
The text of Judges does not record anyone trying to stop him.
Three thousand people in that temple. Lords and rulers and servants and the simply unlucky. People who had come for a festival, people who were doing their jobs, people who had nothing to do with what had been done to Samson’s eyes and everything to do with what was about to happen to the roof. The text does not record a single voice saying "‘wait. Do not do this. There is still another way.’
Perhaps there wasn’t. Perhaps by the time a man has found the pillars in the dark the moment for other ways has passed.
Or perhaps the silence in the text is just the silence of people who understood what was happening and had no language for stopping it and so said nothing and hoped the math would work out differently than it did.
That silence has a modern equivalent. It lives in sixty years of American foreign policy. It lives in the Symington Amendment that has never been applied and the inspections that showed a textile factory and the Naval Court of Inquiry completed in ten days and the career warnings given to men who wanted to testify about what they saw from the deck of a burning ship. It lives in every press briefing where a spokesperson has said the United States does not comment on the nuclear capabilities of other nations and moved on to the next question.
It isn’t ignorance or oversight. It is a choice, made deliberately, maintained consistently, passed from one administration to the next like a document that everyone signs and no one files.
Samson did not bring the temple down alone. He had help getting to the pillars.
He always does.
Sources
Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991.
Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967. Brookings Institution Press, 2005.
National Security Archive, George Washington University. Declassified documents on Israeli nuclear development. nsarchive.gwu.edu.
U.S. Department of State. Declassified cables regarding Dimona inspections. Available via National Security Archive.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, 1968. un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt.
The Symington Amendment. Section 669, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended 1976.
The Glenn Amendment. Section 670, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended 1977.
USS Liberty Veterans Association. Survivor testimony and documented record. ussliberty.org.
Naval Court of Inquiry findings, USS Liberty incident, June 1967. Declassified.
Vanunu, Mordechai. Sunday Times (London) disclosure, October 5, 1986.
Arms Control Association. Israeli nuclear weapons documentation. armscontrol.org.
Kennedy, John F. Correspondence with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion regarding Dimona inspections, 1963. Available via National Security Archive.
Eliyahu, Amichai. Radio interview, Kol Berama, November 2023. Reported by multiple outlets including The Times of Israel.