Caroline Glick: Israel’s rational and irrational Iran policies
For their part, Israel’s generals did their best to discredit and subvert Netanyahu. From 2010 through 2012, Dagan, Pardo, Ashkenazy and Gantz all rejected repeated orders from Netanyahu to prepare the security services to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. In 2010 Dagan flew to Washington without authorization to tell then CIA chief Leon Panetta that Netanyahu had ordered the Mossad and the IDF to attack Iran. Pardo and Gantz similarly refused Netanyahu’s order to prepare to attack Iran in 2011.Ruthie Blum: Time is running out to act against Iran
Israel’s military and intelligence leaders also worked to undermine Netanyahu’s credibility by refusing to stand with him when he waged his public campaign against the JCPOA in 2014 and 2015. While refusing to publicly criticize the deal which gave Iran a glide path to a nuclear arsenal, military and intelligence leaders gave off-camera interviews applauding the deal. Eisenkot openly embraced the JCPOA after he retired in 2019.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, Pardo condemned Netanyahu for revealing that the Mossad had seized Iran’s nuclear archive, despite the fact that the operation, and its publication, paved the way for Trump’s abandonment of the JCPOA and implementation of his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which brought the regime to its knees and dried up its funding for its terror proxies. Gantz and Ashkenazy opposed the Abraham Accords and torpedoed Netanyahu’s sovereignty plan in Judea and Samaria. Gantz refused to fund a project Netanyahu advocated that would significantly improve Israel’s ability to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.
Last year, with the newly elected Biden having pledged to return the United States to the JCPOA, and with Netanyahu out of power, Israel’s dual rational-irrational response to the JCPOA came to an end. Irrationality won out.
Upon entering office, then prime minister Naftali Bennett, Lapid and Gantz made the security establishment’s defense of the JCPOA and its refusal to recognize its strategic implications the basis of their policymaking. They adopted a policy of silencing criticism of the administration’s Iran policy, and continuously blaming Netanyahu for Iran’s nuclear advances. They ignored the fact that all of Iran’s nuclear advances happened after Biden won the presidential elections in November 2020, and attributed them instead to Trump’s abandonment of the JCPOA. Indeed, they claimed Netanyahu’s public opposition to the JCPOA was the reason Obama signed onto it, and that Netanyahu’s success in persuading Trump to abandon the deal is the reason Iran is now a nuclear threshold state.
Bennett, Lapid and Gantz announced a policy of “no surprises” in relation to Israel’s operations in Iran, giving Biden an effective veto over all of Israel’s actions—which all but ended shortly thereafter. Lapid ended Israel’s independent foreign policy and opted to transform Israel into the State Department’s echo chamber. In so doing, he destroyed Israel’s relations with Russia, endangering Israel’s operations in Syria and paving the way for Russia’s decision to upgrade its ties with Iran.
Whereas Obama’s JCPOA was a looming strategic disaster for Israel, Biden’s nuclear deal is an imminent existential threat to Israel. Despite Lapid and Gantz’s calming messages, Barnea’s warnings are entirely accurate. Even if it is true that Sullivan whispered sweet nothings in Hulata’s and Gantz’s ears, the fact is that under Biden’s deal, the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear operations begin expiring next year, and effectively end in 2025. Biden’s deal leaves Iran’s illicitly enriched uranium in Iran. It hamstrings the IAEA. And it massively enriches Iran, transforming it into a regional power, boasting a nuclear weapons program legitimized by the UN Security Council and guaranteed by an administration that will remain in power until the nuclear restrictions end.
So too, as Barnea warned, Biden’s deal with Iran endangers the Abraham Accords, by compelling the Sunnis to reach accommodations with a hegemonic Iran, leaving Israel without regional partners.
The rational response to this catastrophic turn of events is to disengage from the Biden administration, work with the Republicans to wage a public relations war against the deal, ratchet up Israel’s ties with the Gulf states, mend fences with Russia and work intensively to develop and deploy military means to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. The irrational response is to fly to America, pretend that everything is fine, and proclaim, based on a “feeling,” that the Americans will solve the Iran problem for us.
With the United States and its P5+1 partners on the last stretch of their frenzied race to sign a new version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, a number of retired Israel Defense Forces generals and current think-tank experts have been taking the opportunity to insist that “a bad deal is better than no deal.”Any power the JCPOA had to curb Iranian nukes is long gone
Take Israel Ziv, for instance. A panelist on Saturday afternoon of Channel 12’s “Meet the Press,” the former head of the IDF Operations Directorate argued that the absence of a deal, or violation of it by any of the parties, will not prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold in any case.
He then proceeded, peculiarly, to downplay the significance of the multi-billions of dollars that an agreement would grant Tehran for the development of its nuclear capabilities, while at the same time stressing that the money would be spent on terrorism. Indeed.
Nevertheless, he added, a deal would buy “crucial time” for Israel. Whatever that means.
Though all other participants in the discussion—with the exception of former Israeli Navy commander Vice Adm. (ret.) Eliezer Marom—conceded that a deal is just around the corner, and that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state, they clung to two absurd claims.
One was that former U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 was a mistake, because it enabled Tehran to hone its nukes unmonitored. You know, as though the mullahs were allowing International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to uranium-enrichment sites.
The other was that former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s staunch stance against the deal, and famous address to a joint session of Congress in 2015, did nothing but anger outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama and cause him to abstain from, rather than veto, a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel.
The purpose of this distortion, other than to kill two birds (Trump and Netanyahu) with one stone, is to defend the interim “anybody but Bibi” government’s policy of kowtowing to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden. Prime Minister Yair Lapid, like his immediate predecessor and “alternate,” Naftali Bennett, had set out to illustrate that once Netanyahu was no longer at the helm, Israel would enjoy full bipartisan support in America.
To this fruitless end, Bennett vowed last year to Biden that Jerusalem would make no military or other moves without first informing Washington. Lapid, of course, took up that torch and ran with it.
The trouble is that it’s not a reciprocal arrangement. Perhaps this explains why Lapid has had trouble reaching Biden by phone of late. The latter leader clearly isn’t interested in being coached, yet again, about the safeguards that have to be included in the deal to make it palatable to Israel.
It is possible that the original JCPOA even with its shortcomings in 2015 could have been an imperfect partial solution to a major Iranian threat to regional and international security. Diplomacy very rarely produces perfect solutions. It may have delayed and limited the Iranian nuclear program for a certain amount of time perhaps several years, but the situation has now changed dramatically.
While the United States, Great Britain, Germany and France (the EU3) remain committed to a renewed JCPOA it still remains to be seen whether Iran will agree to its resumption and even comply with its limitations thereafter. Given Iran’s track record, no one should harbor any illusions about Iranian moderation regarding its nuclear aspirations, its regional destabilization and the nature of the present regime under Khamenei and Raisi.
A broader strategic vision
Israel must continue in its efforts to engage the US and the EU3 and outline the dangers and shortcomings inherent in a return to the JCPOA. Coordination with America should remain a high priority but Israel’s determination to define and defend its own national security must remain clear. While it is not up to Israel if this deal will be reached or not, it is also crucial to emphasize the need to back up any new deal with Iran by a robust American determination to deter Iran from approaching or crossing the nuclear threshold. There are tools in diplomacy and national security that can be effective and are not dependent on Iranian consent.
This should also be a time for intense behind the scenes consultations with our Arab peace treaty and Abraham Accord partners regarding the Iranian threat in order to harness and share our diplomatic efforts where they are best served. In that context, forging a broader regional understanding could also help in demonstrating how this new constellation in the Middle East could support other shared strategic interests not least of which should be a renewed search for an effective political horizon between Israel and the Palestinians.
In the final analysis a renewed JCPOA will be a limited agreement in time and substance regarding the nuclear threat. Ultimately, Israel and the other states in the region must contend with an Iran that has become more aggressive in recent years on many different levels and will not abandon its nuclear aspirations in the foreseeable future. This is the time for a broader strategic vision for the region to meet this central challenge.