Iran Must Not Be Allowed to Go Nuclear

When the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin endorsed the Oslo peace process, his primary motive wasn’t the need to reconcile with the Palestinians but to contain the Iranians. Rabin believed that Iran, whose fundamentalist leaders had turned the Arab-Israeli conflict into a holy war and Israel’s existence into a religious crime, posed the only serious long-term danger to the survival of the Jewish state, which some day might well be forced to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. To prepare for that possibility, Rabin believed, Israel needed to neutralize potential Arab support for Iran by creating a Middle East alliance of moderates. Making peace with the Arabs would allow Israel and its new allies to prevent the emergence of a nuclear Iran.

The recent Iranian testing of a medium-range missile, apparently capable of hitting Israel as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, has brought Rabin’s scenario considerably closer to reality.

Of all the dictator regimes still in a state of war with Israel--Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran--the fundamentalist Muslim republic of Iran is considered by Israelis the most dangerous and unpredictable. The Iranian secret service was almost certainly behind the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, followed two years later by the bombing of that city’s Jewish community center, resulting in 86 deaths. A government that would blow up a community center in a nonbelligerent country, Israelis argue, is the kind of government that might consider nuclear war a reasonable option against heretics.

The growing internal struggle between Iran’s fundamentalists and relative moderates complicates Israel’s options. An attack on Iran intended to thwart its nuclear capacity could diplomatically isolate Israel, which would be accused of undermining Iranian change and encouraging Muslim xenophobia.

An additional restraining factor is the fate of the estimated 15,000 Jews left in Iran, the world’s last remaining “community of distress,” as Israelis call persecuted Jewish communities. Israel has always seen the fate of oppressed Jews as a central responsibility. Iran’s Jews, who are forbidden from emigrating, could become hostages to forestall an Israeli attack.

Finally, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities risks provoking the next regional war, which would almost certainly be nonconventional and aimed at the civilian population. When Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai recently called for a substantial boost in the military budget to offset the Iranian threat, he was deliberately vague about whether the extra funding was necessary for a preemptive strike or for defensive purposes.

Few Israelis believe that the recent changes in Iranian society are profound enough to justify international passivity as the mullahs gain access to nuclear weapons. The sentencing of the liberal former mayor of Tehran to five years in prison and a whipping, the hanging of a Muslim who converted to the Bahai faith and the execution of a member of the Jewish community accused of helping fellow Jews escape the country all indicate that Western expectations of imminent change in Iran were premature.

Even Iran’s less repressive politicians have affirmed that no compromise is possible with the Jewish state. Indeed, the cultural moderates seem to be using hostility to Israel as a way of proving their Islamic credentials even as they press for internal reform.

The precedent that weighs on Israeli leaders as they consider their options is the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981. At the time, Israel was almost universally condemned as a paranoid, Holocaust-obsessed state endangering world peace. Former Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres joined the outcry and declared that French President Francois Mitterand had personally assured him that the Osirak reactor was intended solely for civilian use. We now know that without Israel’s attack, the American-led coalition in the Gulf War almost certainly would have faced a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein and that Israel’s act of seeming piracy decisively contributed to international stability.

Israeli politicians, especially in the Labor Party, fear repeating Peres’ fatal Osirak blunder, which helped make him unelectable. Current Labor leader Ehud Barak, who sees himself as Rabin’s spiritual heir, is no less committed than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to preventing Iran from turning nuclear. Indeed, in a nation divided on the most basic questions of borders and identity, arguably no other issue unites Israelis as does fear of a nuclear Iran.

Still, no Israeli leader today, including Netanyahu, has the trust of the public to order an attack against Iran that might lead to regional war. But the Iranian threat could be the catalyst convincing Likud and Labor to join together in a national unity government. Should a unity government decide on a preemptive strike against Iran, it would be likely to enjoy strong backing from an otherwise war-weary Israeli public.