Israel has long pursued a strategy to remain the Middle East’s sole nuclear-armed state, using military force to preempt or prevent other regional powers from acquiring nuclear-weapons capabilities. But Israel’s strikes on Iran risk backfiring, with a wounded foe more determined than ever to acquire the nuclear bomb.

Israel’s strategic posture, institutionalized as the “Begin Doctrine” after former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, holds that it will not allow any neighboring state to even approach nuclear-weapons capability. In practice, Israel has expanded this doctrine to block even peaceful nuclear programs under international safeguards.

The Begin Doctrine was first operationalized in 1981 with the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which was built by France for peaceful research and subject to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Though Iraq was a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and had agreed to stringent safeguards extending beyond international inspections to prevent reactor misuse, Israel claimed Baghdad harbored military ambitions and struck preemptively.

The attack, which destroyed the $275 million reactor just before it was to become operational, was carried out with U.S.-supplied F-16 and F-15 aircraft. One French engineer and 10 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The operation triggered minimal diplomatic fallout for Israel, but pushed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program underground — an outcome that would later lead to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq under the false pretext of dismantling weapons of mass destruction.

In 2007, Israel again invoked the Begin Doctrine to destroy a suspected nuclear........

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