—specifically, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak—on how to respond to Iran’s nuclear program.
Former Shin Bet domestic intelligence chief Yuval Diskin spoke out bluntly against Netanyahu and Barak for using increasingly alarmist rhetoric in the past few months to build a case for striking Iran’s nuclear sites.
Earlier, Netanyahu had told CNN he would not want to hinge “the security of the world on Iran’s rational behavior,” which “could put their ideology before their survival.”
“Today, the regime in Iran openly calls and determinedly works for our destruction. And it is feverishly working to develop atomic weapons to achieve that goal,” Netanyahu said in a speech on the occasion of Israel’s Holocaust memorial day.
Several members of the Netanyahu cabinet – including those of transportation and sports – criticized Diskin, but key members of the military and intelligence establishment agreed with him.
Ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan supported Diskin’s comments, as did Israel’s current military chief, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, who, in a rare act of public difference with the prime minister, said his professional assessment leads him to believe that Iran is working to obtain a nuclear weapon capability, not exactly to produce a bomb, and that the Iranian leadership is comprised of “very rational people.”
He said he does not believe Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi will in the end opt to order the construction of a bomb. “In my opinion, he will be making a huge mistake if he does that, and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile.
“I think the Iranian leadership is comprised of very rational people. But I agree that such a capability in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists, who at some moments may make different calculations, is a dangerous thing,” he said.
Gantz made the remarks as a poll conducted by the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post showed 72 percent of Israelis backed a strike against Iran if it were led by the United States. The poll also showed 45 percent would back a unilateral Israeli attack, while 40 percent were opposed, a near equal division.
Gantz’s assessment directly contradicts that of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called the Iranian leadership “irrational.” Gantz was agreeing with the top US military officer, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who told CNN recently that Iranian leaders are “rational” and that a strike would be premature.
The “rationality” argument goes back many years, but has only recently broken out into the public media. Neo-con thinkers going back many years have argued that the Islamic Republic is especially dangerous because it is led by religious zealots or fanatics who would sacrifice Iranian national interests; the neo-con argument is that the Iranian leadership is not “rational” because it is driven by fanaticism and is quite willing to bring about Armageddon for religious reasons. They point to the Shia doctrine of the second coming of the Hidden Imam.
The counter-argument is that Iran is “rational”—that is, that the Islamic Republic carefully weighs alternatives and would not pursue a policy with the goal of causing a conflict that could engulf Iran and bring about the second coming of the Hidden Imam.
The “rational” argument does not mean that the Islamic Republic’s leadership thinks the same way as Western states, just that it doesn’t act on whim or theological zealotry. The “rational” argument is embraced almost uniformly by academic specialists on Iran and the foreign policy establishment, but it doesn’t get as much attention in the public media as the more dramatic “zealot” concept.
In the Islamic Republic itself, the preservation of the regime is generally seen as the driving force of public policy. The justification made for dramatic shifts in public policy—for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to accept the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988—has always been the need to preserve the revolutionary regime. Imprisoned dissidents who have confronted their inquisitors with the fact that the torture they mete out violates Islamic principles have been told by their tormentors that they have been authorized to do anything necessary for the preservation of the regime.
Netanyahu has displayed impatience with diplomacy and often talked of the likely need for a military strike. He said that sanctions are “certainly taking a bite out of the Iranian economy, but so far they haven’t rolled back the Iranian program or stopped it by one iota.”
He said Iran has one goal in agreeing to talk: “to stall, delay, run out the clock.”
But many wonder if Netanyahu is really impatient to attack or is actually just posturing to appear tough for public consumption. They note that Israel has never before held a public discussion before an attack. It just attacks. In 1981, the Israelis never said a word about possibly attacking the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. They just struck it. In 2007, then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert never told the world that Israel had discovered a reactor in Syria. Olmert asked the United States to bomb the reactor. When President George W. Bush declined, Olmert ordered an attack. The world didn’t even know there was a Syrian reactor until there wasn’t a Syrian reactor.
Olmert himself last week added his voice to the growing chorus of influential Israelis speaking against a strike on Iran. He said there was no need now to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, joining those who say there is still time to try diplomacy and plenty of time before military action would be required.
This cacophony of apparently divergent comments in the Israeli establishment has created national and international speculation about rifts inside Israel on a key security question.
Accordingly, aides from key officials rushed to address the concerns.
General Gantz’s office was the first to issue a clarification: “The headlines [say] there’s a difference of opinion between the leaders, and that’s not true,” an aide said. “They [Gantz and Netanyahu] both view Iran is the main threat for Israel and Israel is ready to cope with Iran.”
The prime minister’s office joined in agreement, saying, “We’ve noted in his comments that he says there is no difference.”
The Defense Ministry, too, chimed in: “The minister of defense [Barak] and the chief of staff [Gantz] are completely on the same page,” said a senior aide to Barak.
Some Israeli analysts and former officials agreed that any differences in the Israeli establishment are overblown.
“From an Israeli perspective, it would appear that such analysis is a little far-reaching and not sensitive enough to the nuances of the debate in Israel,” wrote Amos Harel, the Haaretz defense correspondent who conducted the original interview with Gantz.
Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the UN and author of “The Rise of a Nuclear Iran,” offered this explanation for the apparent disagreement: “The Iranians have an irrational goal, which they may try and advance in a rational wayÖ. This is one of those subjects where every word and nuance is sometimes interpreted to mean a lot more than it does.”
Other analysts say the disagreement is very real and not even new. They say it is the surfacing of a longstanding difference between the political and military leaders over policy toward Iran.
“This is bringing the latent disagreement, which has been there for months, into the open, and it gives steam to the public debate,” said Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University and former director-general of the Foreign Ministry.
Dennis Ross, the former White House official handling Iran policy, agreed, saying Gantz’s comments show that “in the Israeli security establishment, there are different views.”