Curious things are going on in the Middle East. On the one hand, Israel seems to be taking some early, tentative steps towards peace with its nearest enemies. It has just agreed a six-month ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza; it is deep into indirect peace talks with Syria, aimed at a comprehensive treaty; and earlier this month came word that Israel is keen to have direct negotiations with Lebanon.
Yet all these welcome murmurings of peace are fighting to be heard above a growing drumbeat for war — against the country Israel fears more than any of its immediate neighbours: Iran.
Last week it emerged that no fewer than a hundred Israeli fighter planes had taken part in an exercise in the Mediterranean that looked uncannily like a practice run for an attack on Iran. Earlier the former defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who still sits in Israel’s security cabinet, announced that ”attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable”.
And now comes the claim that the Syrian site bombed by Israel last September was a joint nuclear venture between Syria, North Korea and Iran. The defence analyst Shmuel Bar, who sits on Israel’s national security council, is unambiguous: ”It is 100% certain that the Iranians are on track towards a nuclear weapon and 100% certain that no diplomatic pressure will prevent it.”
The Israelis believe this danger is more imminent than anyone else realises. They estimate the Iranians will pass ”the point of no return” no later than 2010. They are utterly dismissive of sanctions. Bar asks what possible basket of carrots would persuade the Iranians to give up the benefits that would come from acquiring the bomb: ”It would become the hegemon of the region, it would dictate oil prices, it would lead the Muslim world. Against all that, what can you offer?”
All this has apparently led Israel to conclude that it must act, alone if necessary. It harbours no delusions that it could take out the Iranian nuclear programme from the sky, as it did when it bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, but it reckons its airforce could do enough damage to ”set back” the Iranian nuclear effort for a year or two.
What to make of all this warlike talk? The simplest option is to take it at face value, to conclude that Israel is going to act and is preparing the ground. It wants its planes ready and also its arguments, so that if action is timetabled for ”summerÂÂfall 2008” as one Israeli analyst wrote this week, then it has at least made some effort to brace world opinion for the shock.
This view — that Israel might really mean it — rests on understanding what, for Israel’s policymakers and public alike, are a series of givens.
First, even though no one doubts that Israel itself is a nuclear power, it still carries a mortal fear of even a single Iranian bomb. That’s because it believes the old cold war rules of nuclear balance and mutually assured destruction don’t necessarily apply in its neighbourhood. Israelis recall the words of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who, in 2001, declared that ”the use of a single atomic bomb has the power to destroy Israel completely, while it will only cause partial damage to the Islamic world”.
They took that to mean that Iran is big enough to withstand a nuke, while Israel is so small it would be wiped out with just one bomb. What’s more, Israelis worry that a regime with a strong doctrinal belief in martyrdom might not fear national suicide the way that, say, the Soviet Union once did.
It does not help that Iran’s current president regularly conjures up the threat of annihilation. There was some dispute over the precise meaning of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s notorious warning that Israel would be wiped off the map, but, as if to avoid any confusion, he repeated the threat earlier this month when he proclaimed that Israel ”is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene”.
In seminar rooms in London or Paris it’s easy to hear all this as mere metaphor, not to be taken seriously. But Israelis hear it differently. ”We have a Holocaust complex,” says David Landau, the former editor of Ha’aretz. Having faced a real attempt at total eradication in living memory it’s quite understandable, he says, if Jews feel especially anxious when a sworn enemy starts threatening obliteration. Nor does it help that the Iranian president targets this most neuralgic spot, repeatedly questioning the historic truth of the Holocaust.
The result is that Israelis do not assess risk and probability like other states. It may not be an iron certainty that Iran wants to acquire a nuclear bomb that it will then hold over Israel’s head — but if there is so much as a risk, says Landau, that is too much to live with.
After 2003 those watching from afar become sceptical when they hear doomsday talk of weapons of mass destruction — especially after December’s US national intelligence estimate said the Iranian nuclear quest had been on hold for four years. Indeed, Western intelligence agencies are said to be wary of sounding the alarm these days, chastened by their Iraq error.
But the experience that haunts Israeli intelligence was the opposite, its underestimate of the threat in 1973 that led to the Yom Kippur war. It’s underplaying a danger, not overplaying it, that Israel’s military establishment now seeks to avoid.
There is an alternative way to read the current situation. It would see all the latest, apparently bellicose, moves as goads by the Israelis to spur the rest of the world into action: ”Act now,” they are saying, ”because if you don’t, we might just do something crazy.”
That warning is worth taking seriously, if only because the consequences of military action against Iran are awful to contemplate. Iran would unleash a fierce retaliation, with American soldiers in Iraq the first target. Tehran could choke the world’s oil supply through the Gulf, then use its enormous influence not only to destabilise Iraq but to dispatch its proxies around the world on a campaign of attacks on civilian targets, with Hamas and Hezbollah forming the first wave. The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Mohammed ElBaradei, has warned that a military strike would turn the region into a ”ball of fire”.
A world anxious to avoid that outcome either has to bet that, when it comes to it, Israel will duck confrontation and learn to live with a nuclear Iran, or it must find another way to prevent Tehran getting a bomb. Despite Israel’s avowed scepticism, that can only mean diplomacy and the sanctions process.
One British official admits that the current effort is ”only scratching the surface”. The West has shut off access to the dollar, the pound and the euro — but it barely hurts the Iranians, who are awash in cash thanks to the soaring price of oil.
What’s needed are sharper sticks and juicier carrots, including tolerance for an Iranian role in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current Western posture – no talks until Iran suspends its nuclear effort — cannot hold: Iran loses nothing by carrying on its quest. Tehran is not yet being forced to make a tough choice. It has to and soon — before Israel makes an even tougher one.
Israel: Syria was to supply Iran with nuclear fuel
Israel believes that Syria was planning to supply Iran with spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium from the site it bombed last September, and which is currently being inspected by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, writes Ian Black.
The claim, from an adviser to Israel’s national security council, came this week as speculation mounts about a possible Israeli attack on Iran. The Israeli government officially backs UN sanctions to force Tehran to halt its uranium enrichment but has little faith they will succeed.
Details about the alleged Syrian reactor and the Israeli raid remain shrouded in secrecy. Syria denies it has or had a covert nuclear weapons programme and insists the Israelis hit an ordinary military structure being built at al-Kibar, in the country’s north-eastern desert.
The US claimed in April that Syria had almost completed the plant with the help of North Korea, which evaded the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) checks and tested a nuclear device in 2006. Officials in Damascus accused the US of fabricating evidence in collusion with Israel, which, unlike Syria and Iran, is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and is the Middle East’s only nuclear power. Washington did not mention any link to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The Israeli adviser said: ”The Iranians were involved in the Syrian programme. The idea was that the Syrians produce plutonium and the Iranians get their share. Syria had no reprocessing facility for the spent fuel. It’s not deduction alone that brings almost everyone to think that the link exists.”
On Monday the German magazine Der Spiegel quoted ”intelligence reports” as making similar claims. A Syrian government spokesperson dismissed them as ”nonsense”. But Der Spiegel said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was considering withdrawing support for the Iranian nuclear programme. Tehran and Damascus have had close relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Both support Hezbollah, which fought Israel in 2006.
Amos Yadlin, head of Israel’s military intelligence, told MPs last Sunday that the Syrians were ”concerned” about the inspection by the IAEA and were trying to conceal their actions.
The IAEA team reached al-Kibar on Monday. The IAEA put Syria on its proliferation watch-list in April after receiving intelligence photographs from the US, said to show a reactor that could have yielded plutonium.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of IAEA, condemned the Israeli raid and criticised the US for failing to share intelligence on Syria sooner. Last week ElBaradei cast doubt on his inspectors’ ability to establish the nature of the site. ”It is doubtful that we will find anything there now, assuming there was anything there in the first place,” he said.
The Israeli adviser said the US ”implored” Israel to agree to release details of the September attack, which Israel never officially acknowledged. Israel was reluctant to do so, fearing Syrian retaliation. Since then, the two countries have begun peace talks. —