What Jeffrey Goldberg Didn’t Report
Pro-Israeli journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in “The Atlantic” magazine was evidently aimed at showing why the Barack Obama administration should worry that it risks an attack by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran in the coming months unless it takes a much more menacing line toward Iran’s nuclear programme.
But the article provides new evidence that senior figures in the Israeli intelligence and military leadership oppose such a strike against Iran and believe that Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric about an Iranian nuclear threat as an “existential threat” is unnecessary and self-defeating.
Although not reported by Goldberg, Israeli military and intelligence figures began to express their opposition to such rhetoric on Iran in the early 1990s, and Netanyahu acted to end such talk when he became prime minister in 1996.
The Goldberg article also reveals extreme Israeli sensitivity to any move by Obama to publicly demand that Israel desist from such a strike, reflecting the reality that the Israeli government could not go ahead with any strike without being assured of U.S. direct involvement in the war with Iran.
Goldberg argues that a likely scenario some months in the future is that Israeli officials will call their U.S. counterparts to inform them that Israeli planes are already on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The Israelis would explain that they had “no choice”, he writes, because “a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people.”
He claims the “consensus” among present and past Israeli leaders is that the chances are better than 50/50 that Israel “will launch a strike by next July”, based on interviews with 40 such Israeli decision-makers.
Goldberg is best known for hewing to the neoconservative line in his reporting on Iraq, particularly in his insistence that that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with al Qaeda.
Goldberg quotes an Israeli official familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking as saying, “In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, six million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation.”
In his interview with Goldberg for this article, however, Netanyahu does not argue that Iran might use nuclear weapons against Israel. Instead he argues that Hezbollah and Hamas would be able to “fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella”.
But Israel relies on conventional forces – not nuclear deterrence – against Hezbollah and Hamas, making that argument entirely specious.
Goldberg reports that other Israeli leaders, including defence minister Ehud Barack, acknowledge the real problem with the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that it would gradually erode Israel’s ability to retain its most talented people.
But that problem is mostly self-inflicted. Goldberg concedes that Israeli generals with whom he talked “worry that talk of an ‘existential threat’ is itself a kind of existential threat to the Zionist project, which was meant to preclude such threats against the Jewish people.”
A number of sources told Goldberg, moreover, that Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli army chief of staff, doubts “the usefulness of an attack”.
Top Israeli intelligence officials and others responsible for policy toward Iran have long argued, in fact, that the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric that Netanyahu has embraced in recent years is self-defeating.
Security correspondent Ronen Bergman reported in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most popular newspaper, in July 2009 that former chief of military intelligence Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash said the Israeli public perception of the Iranian nuclear threat had been “distorted”.
Farkash and other military intelligence and Mossad officials believe Iran’s main motive for seeking a nuclear weapons capability was not to threaten Israel but to “deter U.S. intervention and efforts at regime change”, according to Bergman.
The use of blatantly distorted rhetoric about Iran as a threat to Israel – and Israeli intelligence officials’ disagreement with it – goes back to the early 1990s, when the Labour Party government in Israel began a campaign to portray Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes as an “existential threat” to Israel, as Trita Parsi revealed in his 2007 book “Treacherous Alliance”.
An internal Israeli inter-ministerial committee formed in 1994 to make recommendations on dealing with Iran concluded that Israeli rhetoric had been “self-defeating”, because it had actually made Iran more afraid of Israel, and more hostile toward it, Parsi writes.
Ironically, it was Netanyahu who decided to stop using such rhetoric after becoming prime minister the first time in mid-1996. Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad convinced him that Israel had a choice between making itself Iran’s enemy or allowing Iran to focus on threats from other states.
Netanyahu even sought Kazakh and Russian mediation between Iran and Israel.
But he reversed that policy when he became convinced that Tehran was seeking a rapprochement with Washington, which Israeli leaders feared would result in reduced U.S. support for Israel, according to Parsi’s account. As a result, Netanyahu reverted to the extreme rhetoric of his predecessors.
That episode suggests that Netanyahu is perfectly capable of grasping the intelligence community’s more nuanced analysis of Iran, contrary to his public stance that the Iranian threat is the same as that from Hitler’s Germany.
Netanyahu administration officials used Goldberg to convey the message to the Americans that they didn’t believe Obama would launch an attack on Iran, and therefore Israel would have to do so.
But Israel clearly cannot afford to risk a war with Iran without the assurance that the United States being committed to participate in it. That is why the Israeli lobby in Washington and its allies argue that Obama should support an Israeli strike, which would mean that he would have to attack Iran with full force if it retaliates against such an Israeli strike.
The knowledge that Israel could not attack Iran without U.S. consent makes Israeli officials extremely sensitive about the possibility that Obama would explicitly reject an Israeli strike
Goldberg reports that “several Israeli officials” told him they were worried that U.S. intelligence might learn about Israeli plans to strike Iran “hours” before the scheduled launch.
The officials told Goldberg that if Obama were to say, “We know what you’re doing. Stop immediately,” Israel might have to back down.
Goldberg alludes only vaguely to the possibility that the threat of an attack on Iran is a strategy designed to manipulate both Iran and the United States. In a March 2009 article in The Atlantic online, however, he was more straightforward, conceding that the Netanyahu threat to strike Iran if the United States failed to stop the Iranian nuclear programme could be a “tremendous bluff”.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
The idea of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to Israel is absurd. If two enemy states both possess nuclear arms neither of them will use their bomb, knowing that if they did, they would bring their own annihilation on themselves. The third holiest site of Islam, the al Aqsa mosque, would perish with Israel in any successful nuclear strike as would a large section of the Muslim Palestinian people.
The real problem with an Iranian bomb is that it would lead to a levelling of the imbalance of terror in the Middle East. With another nuclear power in the region Israel would not be able to act as ruthlessly as it has in the last half century. How could it casually let off missiles in, for instance, Syria’s direction if its ally Iran had a nuclear bomb?
All this supposes that Iran really does have a nuclear weapons program. The NIE conclusively demonstrated that it did not, but that won’t stop the neocons propagandising for war.
robert
@robert: I completely agree with you. my doubts are more about Porter’s article to be honest. Why would the Israeli military and intelligence community oppose an attack on Iran while at the same time both communities would do their utmost to make just such an attack happen?
If you look at Israel’s recent weapons purchases you will see that long range versions of the F-15I and F-16I and air to air refueling are right on top of the list.
As for the Mossad, it has been feeding bullshit to the USA, the IAEA, France, and everybody else out there who cares to listen about ‘nuclear laptops’, ‘defectors’, ‘agents inside Iran’, etc. etc. etc.
No, I posted the Porter piece here because it is interesting, but he has absolutely not convinced me.
porter is wrong about the nuclear umbrella.
israel has not relied on the nuclear threat since 1973 because it has excercised superior conventional capacity.
since the withdrawal from lebanon and the failed wars in gaza and lebanon, and the upgrading of syria’s and hezbollah’s military capacities, israel fears that it has lost conventional advantage.
as a result, in the next war, there is a possibility that the ‘geography’ could change, as nasrallah predicts.
in this context, the israeli nuclear arsenal will be pulled out.
if the iranians develop nuke capacity (assuming that’s the goal of the program), israel will be stuck fighting a conventional war in which it might lose ground literally.
that’s the crux of the whole conflict.
israel is scared of a nuclear iran because such a scenario ends the situation in which israel’s bomb is used to fortify relations of domination and occupation vis-a-vis the Arabs.
If I can weigh in on my own article, I haven’t suggested that Israel has relied on nuclear deterrent. I said exactly the opposite, which is part of the reason for calling bullshit on the Netanyahu — and indeed post-Cold War Israeli line on Iran.
I also have no suggested that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. I have spilled more ink than anyone I know trying to debunk the Israeli propaganda on this. And there is more to come.
It’s true that Israeli intelligence has been promoting the fiction about an Iranian bomb. That’s not inconsistent with a position of opposing the “existential threat” line and bombing Iran, however.
@Gareth: first, let me welcome you to my blog and express to you my sincere admiration and respect. I have been a long time admirer of your work and its a real honor for me to have you drop by.
Since your reply is, I think, directly mostly at the comments of anonymous and not mine let me just repeat here that while I am not convinced that the Israeli generals and intelligence officers are really trying to avoid an attack on Iran, I find your article very interesting. However, when you write It’s true that Israeli intelligence has been promoting the fiction about an Iranian bomb. That’s not inconsistent with a position of opposing the “existential threat” line and bombing Iran, however. I would object that in the mind of most Israelis to say the former is to imply the latter. i.e, any Iranian nuclear weapons program is by definition and axiomatically an ‘existential threat’. While it is quite possible that, as your article mentions, some Israeli expert can separate the two propositions, the hysteria over that topic promoted by the Israeli politicians has made that impossible for the vast majority of Israelis, is that no so?
I have spilled more ink than anyone I know trying to debunk the Israeli propaganda on this
Yes, for which I am immensely grateful to you!
Kind regards,
The Saker
And thanks for your posting of my articles on your blog over the years!