Ronen Bergman on Whether Israel Will Attack Iran

NYTimes -- Ronen Bergman is a political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and is currently at work on a history of the Mossad. He wrote this week’s cover story on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran in 2012 to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Q.

You’ve made quite a few headlines with this story. To begin with, what has the response been in Israel?
A.

It takes a few days for Israel to absorb something written in English, but on Friday, Ha’aretz ran an article with long quotations from it in Hebrew and said that it was the first time Minister of Defense Ehud Barak had spoken about this on the record, and publicly laid out the parameters for an Israeli strike on Iran.
Q.

Is it possible that this is Barak’s way of announcing an attack?
A.

Well, the Ha’aretz article suggests that perhaps Barak had purposely given the New York Times and me this interview in order to send a very strong message to the U.S. administration and to the White House.
Q.

In the U.S., Robert Wright wrote in The Atlantic online that maybe Barak calculated that by giving these interviews he could succeed in “scaring America into either ratcheting up sanctions to even higher levels or going ahead and bombing Iran.” What do you think about that idea?
A.

Barak is one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met and I would love to have a record of his thoughts, but of course not even Israeli technology has yet found a way to attach a bugging device to someone’s brain. However, I do know who initiated the story, and who pushed Barak to give as many on-the-record quotations as possible. It was I. So I know how reluctant he was at the beginning and even as we progressed in the last weeks. And other Israeli officials remain very reticent when it comes to speaking about this issue. Spokesmen for various entities in the military and intelligence establishment even gave an order not to cooperate with me on the story. Towards the end of the story, I mention that people are asking the question: Are Barak and Prime Minister Netanyahu for real, or are they just heating up the atmosphere to create more pressure on the U.S. and Europe to strengthen sanctions on Iran?
Q.

And you conclude that they have it both ways. They are for real and they’re not for real.
A.

I do think both are true. There was a meeting that I had Sunday the 15th with a very high-ranking intelligence source who regularly participates in meetings with the chief of staff, prime minister and minister of defense, and he’s one of the few people in the inner circle. And as he was walking me to the door at the end of the conversation, I asked him this question: “Are they for real?” He has many more hours with them than I do, and he said, “Listen, I don’t know, there are only two people who know the answer to that question, and these are Netanyahu and Barak.” This is something that they agreed upon under four eyes, or six eyes, if Netanyahu is wearing his glasses.
Q.

We don’t have that expression in English, but I know it from German — under four eyes means just between them, in private.
A.

We have another expression in Hebrew: “Hold me back.” Like in a street fight: hold me back so I don’t hit that other guy. Israel is trying to send a message like this to the United States and Europe. Do something to Iran, otherwise we will do it. The problem with that is that once you create this kind of fear that Israel or Iran is going to strike, in the end it blows back to the Israeli papers, which quote these aggressive statements made to the U.S. or European media about how advanced the Iranian nuclear program is and about Israeli threats. And Israelis are getting really scared.

Almost every day, almost everywhere I go, at least one person who recognizes me from my TV appearances will accost me (Israelis are not famous for our etiquette) and demand an answer to the same recurring question. Not “Will they nuke us?” but just “When will they do it?” To the extent that these street encounters reflect anything, most Israelis are convinced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will launch a nuclear attack against Israel just as soon as he has a red button to push. Last November, when the media were full of reports about how close Iran was to getting its bomb and the mutual threats between Jerusalem and Tehran, Israel’s nationwide system of air- raid sirens was tested. The Homeland Security Command announced the exercise in advance, but when the sirens began to wail (at the time I happened to be driving along the Tel Aviv seafront), many people were sure that war had broken out and began running around in a panic looking for shelter against the incoming Iranian missiles.
Q.

So it is your impression that anxiety has really ratcheted up?
A.

I have covered the secret war that Israeli and American intelligence have waged against Iran’s nuclear program and assistance to jihadi movements in the Middle East since the mid-’90s. I have watched the issue grow from a negligible sideshow, the preserve of those in the know alone, into a major campaign that preoccupies the Israeli defense establishment and intelligence community and in their wake the politicians and then the media and the public as a whole. When something is presented as an existential threat, it is very easy to scare the Israelis. I have seen how an entire country has slowly become stricken with anxiety over the perceived menace. For years I have been writing that ultimately, if nothing else stops the Iranian nuclear project, such as the sanctions or a change in the regime in Tehran, Israel will itself take action to destroy it, from the air. Most of the time, the day that would happen seemed very far off. But in the past year, and especially after conversations with most of the relevant decision makers and other top-level sources in Israel while researching this article, this feeling has changed dramatically.
Q.

Of course Israel doesn’t want to damage its relationship with the U.S., but it does want to make its own decisions. You cite a scenario in which Israel gives two hours of warning time before an attack on Iran. Would that be enough time to avoid souring that relationship?
A.

That scenario is given by Matthew Kroenig, and I included it in the story because what is the alternative scenario? If Israel gave the U.S. an earlier heads-up, that jeopardizes the secrecy of the operation, as much as there can be secrecy because we are already talking about it. This would be the best-known surprise attack in the history of war. But seriously, a longer lead time would also take away the U.S.’s plausible deniability. To give them the chance to try to dissuade Israel might lead to something far more complex in the relationship between the two countries.

I was very surprised when researching the story that both sides — American officials who spoke on terms of background and Israeli high officials — all describe the same atmosphere of intentionally vague language in order not to directly discuss the two main topics: what exactly America is willing to do to fulfill its promise to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear and what Israel is going to do. The Israeli side is not promising the Americans anything about a possible strike, either to do it or not to do it or when to do it. The Americans are also very vague on the phrasing. It’s strange, these people have known each other for a long time, sit together for hours, discuss all the tiny details of how thick is the roof of the bunker where the Iranians hide nuclear material, but they still are using this vague language when it comes to the most crucial decision.
Q.

You predict that Israel will strike in 2012. When people ask you for a more specific timing than that, what do you tell them?
A.

I don’t know, of course, because the decision has not been made. We’re in the winter, and it’s cloudy, so a strike in the next few months is unlikely. So I can at least reassure people that it is not imminent. But the general atmosphere here is of great fear. Many people dislike Netanyahu so much, on a personal level, that they suspect he might make such a decision to affect the next election.
Q.

Do you think that’s implausible?
A.

I don’t discount political motivations. Politicians are doomed to make that kind of decision. I would just say that Netanyahu has been the prime minister for the last almost three years, and he’s had plenty of chances to take such actions. He cannot make this decision alone. It needs to be the decision of the cabinet, which has 14 members. There is a tradition that once the prime minister and defense minister take a position, the chance that the cabinet will object is not high. But this is highly debatable in this case. And everyone knows that an operation could go in an unexpected direction.