Columnist Gareth Porter, who comes at issues from left of center and more commonly criticizes US and Israeli policy, last week did some research on the Israeli “threats” that the Islamic Republic complains about daily.
He was not surprised to find heated rhetoric, but he noted that did not include any direct threats to attack Iran. “In recent months, both have refused to make anything like such a threat [even] when invited to do so by interviewers,” he wrote last week.
“The absence of any such explicit threat of force by Netan-yahu and Barack does not in itself rule out the possibility that they are prepared to attack Iran under some circumstances,” he said. “A review of the history of Israeli declaratory policy toward Iran, however, reveals that the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert twice actually did issue explicit threats to attack Iran if it did not end its nuclear program.”
And both of those threats were made by Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz, while he was a member of the cabinet. In the last year, however, Mofaz has been calling for Israelis to cool the rhetoric about Iran.
In February 2006, Defense Minister Mofaz declared that, if diplomacy failed to “delay or curb” the Iranian nuclear program, Israel couldn’t “sit idly by” while Iran was on the threshold of achieving nuclear capabilities. But that was not a bald threat to attack.
On June 8, 2008, Mofaz, then deputy prime minister in the Olmert government, was much more explicit, declaring, “If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it.”
In contrast to that one straightforward if conditional threat to use military force against Iran, Porter reports that Netanyahu and Barak have either refused to address the war issue in speeches and interviews or have limited themselves to much broader statements about “all options” being “on the table”—the George W. Bush formulation—and Israel’s “right to self-defense.”
When asked by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last November 20 whether Israel was going to attack Iran, Barak would not answer, saying it was not a “subject for public discussion.” Instead Barak talked about the vague notion of an Iranian “zone of immunity,” in which a sufficient proportion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be in sites protected from a potential Israeli attack so that such an attack would be futile.
In Ottawa before his visit to Washington in March, Netanyahu said only, “Like any sovereign country, we reserve the right to defend ourselves against a country that calls and works for our destruction.”
In his speech to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) March 5, Netanyahu sought to refute the argument that “stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb” and likened it to arguments made by the United States against bombing Auschwitz in 1944.
But Porter said that appeared to be an argument against the Obama Administration’s policy of refusing to attack Iran in the absence of evidence of moves to enrich uranium at weapons grade.
Netanyahu refused to say under what circumstances his government would resort to force against Iran. “I read about what Israel has supposedly decided to do or what Israel might do,” he said. “Well, I’m not going to talk to about what Israel will do or will not do. I never talk about that.”
In an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News March 7, Netanyahu repeated that generic idea: “If it’s necessary we’ll act in our own defense.” But when she asked if Israel could act alone, he said, “You know I never talk about that.”
The closest Netanyahu has come to a direct threat of war was on March 10, when he said he hoped “there won’t be a war at all, and that the pressure on Iran will succeed,” but added that the “eleventh hour” is approaching for Iran to “halt its nuclear program or suffer the consequences.”
Porter said Netanyahu’s refusal to make a public threat to attack Iran “is also consistent with his well-established reputation as an extremely ‘risk averse’ political figure.”