Israeli poll undercuts Netanyahu on
Iran By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - As top US and Israeli
officials prepare for a crucial set of meetings, a
new survey finds little backing among the Israeli
public for a military strike against Iranian
nuclear facilities without Washington's approval.
Only about one in five Israelis (19% )
favor a unilateral strike without US support,
according to the poll, released at a briefing at
the Brookings Institution here Wednesday.
If, on the other hand, Washington gave a
green light for an attack, another 42% of Israelis
would favor it, according to the survey, which was
conducted late last week by Israel's Dahaf Institute
and has a margin or error
of 4%.
The poll, organized by Shibley
Telhami, a senior fellow at Brookings who teaches
Middle East politics at the University of
Maryland, found that 34% of the 500 Israeli
respondents questioned by the pollsters oppose a
strike and that a similar percentage believes such
a strike would either have no effect on Iran's
nuclear program (19% ) or actually accelerate it
(11%).
The poll, which also found that
more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) believe
that such an attack will provoke retaliation by
Lebanon's Hezbollah, is likely to bolster those in
the administration of President Barack Obama who
hope to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
when the two men meet here next week to shelve any
plans his security cabinet may have for carrying
out such an attack this year.
Netanyahu
will be here to speak before the annual convention
of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), which has been the main
domestic lobbying force pushing for a hawkish
policy and congressional passage of a series of
ever-tougher sanctions against economic and
financial sanctions against Iran.
Obama,
as well as Israeli President Shimon Peres and a
host of other political heavyweights from both
countries and major US parties, is also scheduled
to speak to the convention before his meeting with
Netanyahu.
The Obama-Netanyahu meeting
will cap a flurry of bilateral meetings of senior
officials in both countries' capitals over the
last month in what appears to be an effort to
gauge each others' intentions.
Israeli
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, widely considered the
most hawkish member of Netanyahu's eight-man
security cabinet, is here this week, while Obama's
national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was in
Israel last week. The head of Israel's Mossad, its
foreign intelligence agency, was in Washington to
meet with his US counterparts, shortly after the
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Martin Dempsey, completed a two-day visit to
Israel.
While officials on both sides
publicly insist that that they are coordinating
their policies, the frequency of these high-level
meetings, as well as off-the-record comments by
anonymous officials, suggest that key differences
on tactics and strategy in dealing with Iran may
in fact be widening.
Top administration
officials, backed by a growing number of retired
military and intelligence officials here, have
made increasingly clear that they oppose an
Israeli military strike.
Echoing both his
predecessor, Admiral Michael Mullen, and his boss,
Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, Dempsey warned in an
interview 10 days ago in the clearest expression
of the administration's position to date that such
an attack would be, among other things,
"destabilizing", "premature", "not prudent", and
unlikely to achieve Israel's "long-term
objectives".
US military and intelligence
officials have also stated repeatedly that they do
not believe the Iranian leadership has yet decided
to build a nuclear weapon.
Such remarks
have infuriated Netanyahu who, according to
Israeli reports, accused Dempsey of "serving
Iranian interests" by reducing the credibility of
the threat that Israel or the US would resort to
military action if Tehran did not abandon its
nuclear program. He also reportedly refused to
promise Donilon that he would give Washington
advance notice if he decided to mount an attack.
Netanyahu himself reportedly hopes to
persuade Obama to take a tougher line against
Iran, beyond the administration's mantra that "all
options are on the table", a reference to possible
military action.
In particular, he wants
Washington to publicly establish a clear "red
line" - specifically, the achievement by Iran of
an ill-defined nuclear-weapons "capability" -
which, if crossed by Tehran, would trigger a US
attack.
The administration, however, has
so far declined to do so, insisting privately
instead that its red line would be Iran's actual
"weaponization", a benchmark that most analysts
believe would take at least three years for Iran
to achieve if it indeed decided to produce a
deliverable bomb.
And while its officials,
including Dempsey, continue to emphatically insist
that the military option remains on the table,
many analysts here - and in Israel - believe that
the administration prefers putting in place a
"containment and deterrence" strategy toward a
nuclear Iran over a war whose consequences cannot
be predicted.
Thus, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), presumably with
Netanyahu's encouragement and support, is lobbying
for a pending senate resolution that would take
the "containment" option from the table and
declare that it is a "vital national interest" of
the US to prevent Iran from acquiring a "nuclear
weapons capability".
"We want to say
clearly and resolutely to Iran: you have only two
choices - peacefully negotiate to end your nuclear
weapons program or expect a military strike to end
that program," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, one
of the co-sponsors.
Two other co-sponsors,
John McCain and Lindsay Graham, met with Netanyahu
in Israel last week, while three of the four
remaining Republican presidential candidates are
expected to endorse it when they address AIPAC
next week.
The resolution so far has 37
co-sponsors, roughly equally divided between
Republicans and Democrats, in the 100-seat Senate,
but AIPAC is expected to make an all-out push for
passage when its 10,000 activists arrive in
Washington this weekend.
In this context,
the latest poll should strengthen Obama's hand. In
addition to the lack of support for a unilateral
strike that isn't approved by Washington, it also
found that a large majority of Israelis - and
especially Israeli Jews - believe that Hezbollah,
which is believed to have tens of thousands of
rockets targeted on Israel, would join Iran in
retaliating against any attack on Tehran.
On the other hand, a 44% plurality of
Israeli respondents said they believed that an
Israeli attack could set back Iran's nuclear
program by at least three years.
Asked
what they expected the US to do if Israel carried
out an attack, 27% said they thought Washington
would join the war on Israel's behalf, while 39%
said it would provide diplomatic support but not
military assistance. Only 15% said Washington
would punish Israel by reducing its assistance.
Respondents were equally split on whether
an Israeli attack would weaken or strengthen the
Iranian regime, and a slight majority said a
military strike against Iran would trigger a
military conflict lasting months or years, as
opposed to days or weeks.
Israeli
respondents were split on whether they preferred
Obama to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney
in November's presidential elections, but
preferred Obama by large margins over the other
Republican candidates, including former
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and House
Speaker Newt Gingrich, who have been the strongest
advocates of military action against Iran.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at www.lobelog.com.
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