What's in this book is what Benjamin Netanyahu is thinking about. Right now.
This nuclear thriller couldn't be more timely, what with Iran getting closer to the bomb and escalating its smack talk against Israel, which meanwhile must try to remain in step with a United States tired of war, its leaders dreaming instead of making nice with the Muslim world.
The book follows the crew of a nuclear-armed Israeli submarine dispatched abruptly as Iran tensions dramatically escalate. A sister sub has been attacked by Iran. Just as he faces his toughest call, the Israeli Prime Minister is incapacited with a stroke, a la Sharon. No spoilers here, but at some point the officers and crew find themselves having to make decisions they never thought they'd have to make.
In a way, it's a parable. It's not that long - half the length of a standard thriller - and focuses more on dialogue and characterization than on bang-bang. It would make a better play than movie.
Author Noah Beck doesn't spare the military hardware and is utterly convincing writing about sub operations. I don't knowwhether he ever served on one, in any case he did his homework, but this book isn't really about that. It's about the moral conflicts created by the possibility of nuclear war, a possibility Israel must face as getting closer every day.
And they're a heterogenous group, as much as the Israeli society they defend. We meet many of them - the crew only has 35 people - in some detail. There's the stalwart captain and his peacenik deputy, both grandchildren of Holocaust survivors but with radically different takeaways from that heritage. There's the one whose family was ripped to shreds by a suicide bomber's attack. There's the Ethiopian Jew, deeply religious, airlifted as a tot out of the Middle Ages to an Israel his family hadn't even known existed, one where they nevertheless face some racism. There's the Persian Jew, whose parents were smuggled out, losing their business and property when the Ayatollah came to power. There's the Indian Jew, incongruouslyl fascinated by all things Brooklyn. There's the Russian Jew, atheistic and secular, totally atuned to anti-Semitism.
And there are several who aren't Jewish: a gay Vietnamese Israeli (really) from a family of boat people offered refuge by Israel when no other country would accept them. A Druze and an Arab Christian who quietly but only occasionally speak Arabic to each other. Interestingly, when push comes to shove, it's the non-Jews who are the most hawkish, partly because they realize Jews aren't the only religious minorities pushed around in the Middle East.
The book, though, is very Jewish and very Israeli. The sailors are family oriented to an extent unlikely in other countries. The pains taken to morally analyze a gravely complicated situation and to view it from a dozen different perspectives is positively Talmudic.
Beck brings to bear on the question of nuclear war many of the perspectives that might be found in Israel's society - religious vs. secular, hawk vs. dove, right vs. left, immigrant vs. native born. He portrays what Iranian nuclear ambitions really mean for the only nation in the world that must actively consider the possibility of being nuked - a nation where the national motto is "Never Again" and the national axiom is "when they say they're going to kill us, they mean it."
His book is both a message and a warning to America: what needs to be done to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions, and what may happen if the world vacillates too long.
Because don't forget: Armageddon is in Israel.
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