Israel mixes rhetoric with
realism By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - When Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert declared last week that his country
could not risk another "existential threat" such
as the Nazi Holocaust, he was repeating what has
become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign
against Tehran - that it cannot tolerate an Iran
with the technology that could be used to make
nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically
committed to the physical destruction of Israel.
The internal assessment by the Israeli
national-security apparatus of the Iranian threat,
however, is more realistic than the
government's public rhetoric
would indicate.
Since Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005,
Israel has effectively exploited his image as
someone who is particularly fanatical about
destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's
threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear
weapons.
But such alarmist statements do
not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of
Israeli national-security officials. In fact,
Israelis began in the early 1990s to use the
argument that Iran was irrational about Israel and
could not be deterred from a nuclear attack if it
ever acquired nuclear weapons, according to an
account by independent analyst Trita Parsi on
Iranian-Israeli strategic relations to be
published in March. Meanwhile, the internal
Israeli view of Iran, Parsi said in an interview,
"is completely different".
Parsi, who
interviewed many Israeli national-security
officials for his book, said, "The Israelis know
that Iran is a rational regime, and they have
acted on that presumption."
His primary
evidence of such an Israeli assessment is that the
Israelis purchased Dolphin submarines from Germany
in 1999 and 2004, which have been reported to be
capable of carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
It is generally recognized that the only purpose
of such cruise-missile-equipped submarines could
be to deter an enemy from trying to take out its
nuclear weapons with a surprise attack by having a
reliable second-strike capability.
Despite
the fact that Israel has long been known to
possess at least 100 nuclear weapons, Israeli
officials refuse to discuss their own nuclear
capability and how it relates to deterring Iran.
Retired US Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel
Rick Francona, a former Pentagon official who
visited Israel last November, recalls that Israeli
officials uniformly told his group of eight US
military analysts they believed Iran was
"perfectly willing to launch a first strike
against Israel" if it obtained nuclear weapons.
But when they were asked about their own
nuclear capabilities in general, and the
potentially nuclear-armed submarine fleet in
particular, Francona said, the Israelis would not
comment.
In fact, Israeli strategic
specialists do discuss how to deter Iran among
themselves. An article in the online journal of a
hardline think-tank, the Ariel Center for Policy
Research, in August 2004 revealed that "one of the
options that [have] been considered should Iran
publicly declare itself to have nuclear weapons is
for Israel to put an end to what is called its
policy of nuclear ambiguity or opacity".
The author, Shalom Freedman, said that in
light of Israel's accumulation of "over 100
nuclear weapons" and its range of delivery systems
for them, even if Iran were to acquire nuclear
weapons within a few years, the "tremendous
disproportion between the strength of Israel and
an emergent nuclear Iran should serve as a
deterrent".
Even after Ahmadinejad's
election in mid-2005, a prominent Israeli academic
and military expert has insisted that Israel can
still deter a nuclear Iran. In two essays
published in September and October 2005, Dr
Ephraim Kam, deputy head of the Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a
former analyst for the Israel Defense Forces,
wrote that Iran had to assume that any nuclear
attack on Israel would result in very serious US
retaliation. Therefore, even though he
regarded a nuclear Iran as likely to be more
aggressive, Kam concluded it was "doubtful whether
Iran would actually exercise a nuclear bomb
against Israel - or any other country - despite
its basic rejection of Israel's existence".
Kam also pointed out that the election of
a radical like Ahmadinejad would not change the
fundamental Iranian policy toward Israel, because
even the more moderate government of president
Mohammad Khatami had already held the position
that the solution to the Palestinian problem
should be the establishment of a Palestinian state
in place of the Zionist Israeli state.
Furthermore, he wrote, Iran's basic motive for
aspiring to nuclear weapons in the first place had
not been to destroy Israel but to deter Saddam
Hussein's Iraq and later to deter the United
States and Israel.
Despite the existence
of a more realistic appraisal of the actual power
balance and its implications for Iranian behavior,
Israeli officials do not see it as in their
interest even to hint at the possibility of
deterring a nuclear Iran. "They don't talk about
that," said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born
analyst based in Tel Aviv, "because they don't
want to admit the possibility of defeat on Iran's
nuclear program. They want to stop it."
Occasionally, Israeli officials do let
slip indications that their fears of Iran are less
extreme than the "second Holocaust" rhetoric would
indicate. In November, Deputy Defense Minister
Ephraim Sneh explained candidly in an interview
with the Jerusalem Post that the fear was not that
such weapons would be launched against Israel but
that the existence of nuclear capability would
interfere with Israel's recruitment of new
immigrants and cause more Israelis to emigrate to
other countries.
Sneh declared that
Ahmadinejad could "kill the Zionist dream without
pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this
regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all
costs."
Israel's frequent threat to attack
Iran's nuclear facilities is also at odds with its
internal assessment of the feasibility and
desirability of such an attack. It is well
understood in Israel that the Iranian situation
does not resemble that of Iraq's Osirak nuclear
reactor, which Israeli planes bombed in 1981.
Unlike Iraq's program, which was focused on a
single facility, the Iranian nuclear program is
dispersed; the two major facilities, Natanz and
Arak, are hundreds of kilometers apart, making it
very difficult to hit them simultaneously.
In mid-2005, Yossi Melman, who covers
intelligence issues for the daily newspaper
Ha'aretz, wrote, "According to military experts in
Israel and elsewhere, the Israeli Air Force does
not have the strength that is needed to destroy
the sites in Iran in a preemptive strike." He
added that that the awareness of that reality was
"trickling down to the military-political
establishment".
Javedanfar, Melman's
co-author in a forthcoming book on Iran's nuclear
program, agrees. "There is no way the Israelis are
going to do it on their own," he said.
That is also the conclusion reached by
Francona and other air force analysts. Francona
recalls that he and two retired US Air Force
generals on the trip to Israel told Israeli Air
Force generals they believed Israel did not have
the capability to destroy the Iranian nuclear
targets, mainly because it would require aerial
refueling in hostile airspace. "The Israeli
officers recognized they have a shortfall in
aerial refueling," Francona said.
In the
end, the Israelis know they are dependent on the
US to carry out a strike against Iran. And the US
is the target of an apocalyptic Israeli portrayal
of Iran that diverges from the internal Israeli
assessment.
Gareth Porter is a
historian and national-security policy analyst.
His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
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