My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  And yet, although the three contexts were known and acknowledged, both the West and Israel were dormant regarding Iran for many years. The problem was not ideological or moral but cognitive. There were no good guys and bad guys vis-à-vis the uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz and Fordow—there were only those who saw and those who were blind. In the early 2000s, it should have been crystal clear that Israel’s number one mission was to do everything in its power not to reach the bomb-or-bombing juncture. But Israel failed to address the Iranian challenge seriously. The strategic establishment and the intelligence community dealt with it, but the public at large ignored it. As it had no immediate consequences and no tangible costs, the threat remained abstract and vague. It did not become part of the political debate or public discourse. It had no real place in our real lives. A mental block would not let us see Iran clearly, and it cost us a crucial decade in which Iran could have been stopped without the use of force.

  The cognitive block did not blind only Israel. By 2005, all Western intelligence agencies were cognizant of the Iranian nuclear program. All Western leaders knew that Iran might endanger the future of the United States, Europe, and the world. But Western public opinion was incapable of addressing the challenge, psychologically or conceptually. Preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Western media, academia, and intelligentsia turned their backs on the Iranian challenge. Many wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t see, and wouldn’t comprehend. That’s why the West’s leaders did not have the necessary political backing needed to act decisively against Iran. Since the issue was not a tomorrow morning issue, dealing with it was glossed over and postponed. Crippling sanctions were not imposed in time. A deal with Russia, which would have put Iran under a real economic embargo, was not struck. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was not confronted with a credible ultimatum: (military) nuclearization or (political) survival. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Tehran encountered a weak and distracted West that would not impede its race to the bomb.

  The Israeli cognitive block and the West’s cognitive block had a lot in common. Both were the outcomes of strategic success and stability. For forty years, Israelis had been leading reasonably good lives under the umbrella of Dimona, and they had begun taking for granted Israel’s strategic regional monopoly. They were not fully aware of the appalling consequences of the possible end of this monopoly, or simply refused to imagine them. True, there were two Gulf wars, two Lebanon wars, and two Palestinian uprisings—but these did not threaten the existence of Israel. And as existence was not threatened, complacency increased. Israelis were no longer aware of how lucky they were and what might happen to them once the Dimona monopoly was broken.

  For seven decades Americans and Europeans had been living a life of peace and plenty thanks to the safety net of Western strategic superiority. Consequently, they, too, took this superiority for granted, unaware of the fact that the appearance of a radical Islam nuclear threat would directly affect the good life of Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. True, during this period of time there was a Korean war, a Vietnam war, and the Bush wars, but apart from the Cuban missile crisis (in 1962) there was nothing that exposed the United States and Europe to a real nuclear threat. As strategic stability was not really challenged, their complacency increased. Americans and Europeans were no longer aware of how lucky they were and what might happen to them once ayatollahs or Islamist terrorists intimidated their sheltered way of life and their pursuit of happiness.

  The Iranian nuclear project was like a baobab tree. In the early stages of its growth, it would have been easy to uproot. Iran was no match for Western might. But in the early stages of its growth there was no serious attempt to uproot it. Because of the gap between Iranian tenacity and Israeli and Western complacency, the Iranians had the upper hand. The United States got entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of focusing on Iran. Israel dealt with settlements rather than centrifuges. Because of its internal weaknesses, Europe was paralyzed. Both the West and Israel saw the terrifying tree of a nuclear Iran grow in front of their eyes but did not fell it.

  I meet Amos Yadlin in his pleasant Karmei Yosef home, east of Tel Aviv. The view from the balcony is astounding: the Tel Aviv skyline, the Mediterranean coastline, Rehovot’s white urban sprawl, Hulda’s gray-green vineyards, the archaeological site of Tel Gezer. Some five hundred yards from the garden fence, on Gezer’s slope, are well-tended orchards where once stood the Palestinian village of Abu Shusha and the stately home in which my great-grandfather settled in the 1920s.

  In 1981, Major Yadlin was one of the eight Israeli pilots who bombed Osirak, the French-built Iraqi nuclear reactor. In 2007, as chief of military intelligence, General Yadlin was the man in charge of collecting intelligence on the North Korean–built Syrian nuclear reactor in Deir ez Zor. Between 2006 and 2010, Yadlin played a central role in Israeli operations against the Iranian nuclear project. He was not the one to conceptualize the Begin Doctrine, according to which Israel will not allow any enemy nation to acquire a nuclear weapon, but he was one of its leading soldiers. Twice he managed to implement the doctrine in an extraordinary manner, while his third attempt was rather less successful. So here I sit, in a garden chair, listening closely to the round-faced, thoughtful Israeli general who, time after time, happened to be in the place where history was decided.

  First Yadlin tells me about his childhood in Kibbutz Hatzerim in the Negev, where the pioneering farmers struggled to work the salt-streaked soil and eventually triumphed over it. The socialist Zionism that raised him and shaped him in the 1950s was moderate and humane; its primary goal was to conquer the desert and to make a home in the desert for the Jewish people. Then Yadlin tells me about his early years in the Israeli Air Force. He was proud in the early 1970s to belong to this most professional and efficient Israeli organization, which secured the existence of the Jewish national home. Then Yadlin tells me about the eighteen traumatic days and nights of the Yom Kippur War: seven of his fellow pilots died and five were captured, while his squadron lost seventeen of its thirty Skyhawk bombers. As war raged all around him, Yadlin learned to steel himself and regain confidence in himself. In the years of recovery that followed 1973, the IAF did the same. When Yadlin returned from training in Utah in the summer of 1980 as one of the first pilots of Israel’s first F-16 squadron, both he and his peers felt a renewed sense of strength.

  The 1981 mission seemed impossible: to bomb the nuclear reactor the French were building for the Iraqis on the outskirts of Baghdad. On the face of it, Baghdad was too far away and the Israeli Air Force did not have the technological capabilities required for such a mission. There was no GPS yet, no smart bombs, no airborne refueling. There was no precedent, either: no air force in the world had ever bombed a nuclear reactor. And yet, on June 7, 1981, at 1600 hours, eight state-of-the-art F-16 bombers took off over the Gulf of Eilat and crossed, at low altitude, six hundred miles of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. They covered mountains, deserts, the Euphrates Valley, the Euphrates River; plateaus, water canals, railways, houses, fields. Some Iraqi citizens, unaware of what was going on, waved to the pilots flying so low over their roofs. And then, after 103 minutes of flight, Yadlin ascended from five hundred feet to ten thousand feet in twenty seconds. He could now see the reactor’s dome, and five seconds later the reactor itself was within the bomber sights. After another ten seconds the young kibbutznik pushed the button, releasing two two-thousand-pound bombs. Twenty seconds later he made a quick descent into the plumes of smoke from the erupting antiaircraft missiles, dropping to five hundred feet again, and escaped home over the darkening deserts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Sitting in the cockpit, Yadlin knew that mission impossible was accomplished. One meticulous minute over the target had removed the threat of a second Holocaust.

  The 2007 mission also seemed impossible: to destroy the nuclear reactor that the North Koreans were building for the Syrians without provoking war. Yadlin will not talk to me about the details of the operation attribut
ed to Israel by non-Israeli sources, but much has been published abroad about Operation Orchard by foreign journalists and experts.

  This time the challenge was not technological but conceptual. It was not so much about the planes and the bombs, but about getting the right information and making the right decisions in time. In 2006, Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, known as the Mossad, argued that there was no sense in investing intelligence resources in Syria, for it was a dead horse that did not threaten Israel in any way. Amos Yadlin begged to differ. He remembered that three years earlier, Israel had failed to detect the Libyan nuclear project, and he asked his lieutenants to scan all possible sources to see if any surprises were hidden anywhere. In the late summer of 2006, one of his men raised the possibility that the enormous cement structure in Deir ez Zor concealed a North Korean plutonium reactor. By autumn there was some evidence supporting this seemingly wild hypothesis. According to non-Israeli sources, Yadlin shared his concern with the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and an American intelligence chief, who dismissed him. Both were under the influence of Dagan, who insisted that there was no Syrian reactor. But in March 2007, an intelligence breakthrough totally changed Dagan’s position. According to non-Israeli sources, the head of the Mossad now demanded immediate action—before the reactor could be activated and before the Syrians realized that their great secret had been discovered. In the late spring of 2007, Yadlin’s role was that of a moderator. Non-Israeli sources claim that he was the one who advised the prime minister and the chief of staff to plan a low-key operation that would not embarrass the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and would enable him not to launch a full-scale retaliatory war. In a sense, the Israelis would give Assad cover to pretend that nothing had ever happened. The non-Israeli sources claimed that Yadlin’s military intelligence also made the point that there was enough time to plan the highly risky air raid properly: the window of opportunity would close only in a few months’ time, when the reactor might turn critical. In retrospect, Yadlin would be proven right: the precise timing and nature of Operation Orchard would achieve the two essential goals of no core, no war.

  According to the American journalist and analyst David Makovsky, just after midnight on September 5, 2007, four F-16 bombers took off for the Syrian nuclear reactor from the same Yizrael Valley air force base that was used twenty-six years earlier to bomb the Iraqi reactor. In a long piece published in The New Yorker in 2012, Makovsky writes that the four F-16s were escorted by four F-15s that took off from the desert air force base situated close to Yadlin’s childhood kibbutz, where he later served as commander. The eight Israeli planes, equipped with advanced electronic warfare devices, flew along the Mediterranean coast and along the Turkish-Syrian border. After midnight they dropped seventeen tons of explosives on the plutonium plant and flattened it.

  For another seventy-two hours, tensions ran high: Would Syria respond with a devastating missile attack that would set Tel Aviv ablaze? Would a war break out that would claim the lives of thousands? Just as Yadlin predicted, an overwhelmed Syria did not react. Israeli might, deterrence, and stealth caused Syria to bow its head in defeated silence. The second implementation of the Begin Doctrine was another remarkable success. When the world failed to prevent an Arab dictatorship from going nuclear, and when the United States failed to act, Israel seized the initiative, taking its fate into its own hands. Once again, one meticulous moment hovering over the target removed the threat of a second Holocaust.

  But the Iran mission is far more complex and difficult than the missions impossible of 1981 and 2007. The Iranians are much more sophisticated and cunning than the Iraqis and the Syrians. Their strategic goal is not to build a bomb quickly but to build one safely. That’s why they advanced along many tracks: they built a reactor in Bushehr, a reactor in Arak, a military complex in Parchin, a uranium enriching facility in Natanz, an underground bunker in Fordow. That’s why they try to do most of their work under the umbrella of international legitimacy. They are very careful not to be caught red-handed and do not provide smoking guns. They do their utmost not to take provocative steps that will so enrage the West that it will be forced to act. Just as Yadlin was being nominated to head the IDF intelligence in January 2006, the Iranians began to enrich uranium in Natanz. First they obtained a few centrifuges, then dozens, then hundreds. In early 2007, they had only a thousand centrifuges. By 2013 they had more than fifteen thousand centrifuges, some of them highly sophisticated. Accordingly, the amount of enriched uranium the Iranians piled up grew from only fifty kilograms in early 2008 to more than seven thousand kilograms in mid-2013. Although the international community (weakly) protested and although it imposed (limited) sanctions, the Iranians patiently and persistently marched on toward their goal. From his spacious office on the thirteenth floor of the IDF headquarters, General Yadlin monitored the situation as the Iranians fooled the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and fooled the UN and fooled the Western powers, inching closer and closer to their coveted atomic bomb.

  Israel was late in responding to Iran’s progress. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on Meir Dagan of the Mossad to defuse the Iranian threat. According to non-Israeli sources, the Mossad received generous funding and carried out a series of breathtaking operations—including cyberattacks and assassinations of nuclear scientists—that achieved impressive tactical results. But Dagan’s natural self-confidence turned into arrogance. In 2005 he promised his colleagues and superiors that Iran would not be able to spin even one centrifuge. Two years later, when more than a thousand centrifuges were spinning in Natanz, the IDF High Command began to worry that Dagan’s approach might lead to a dead end. As the diplomatic option and the sanctions option hadn’t yet yielded any concrete results, there was no other way but to consider the military option. According to non-Israeli sources, the head of intelligence, Yadlin, the air force commander, Eliezer Shkedi, and the deputy chief of staff, Dan Harel, insisted that Israel must prepare a credible military option vis-à-vis Iran. Although some senior generals objected, the chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, instructed the air force to prepare an operational plan. Intelligence was gathered, and pilots trained just as they had in 1981 and 2007. The IDF prepared itself to implement the Begin Doctrine for the third time.

  In November 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), representing the consensus view of all sixteen American spy agencies, asserted that there was no conclusive evidence that Iran was indeed trying to build a nuclear weapon. After Yadlin met his American counterpart in Rome, he realized what the shocking report was all about: following the trauma of the invasion of Iraq, based on false intelligence that was manipulated by the White House, the American intelligence community was determined to prevent President George W. Bush from acting precipitously in Iran and getting America into a third war against a third Islamic nation. But after Yadlin returned to Tel Aviv and instructed his staff to assess and reassess the U.S. NIE, they came to the conclusion that it did not hold water. Four different analysis teams in the Mossad and in military intelligence asserted that the Iranians were advancing toward military nuclear capabilities and that the Americans were grossly underestimating the state of the Iranian program.

  Isolation was difficult. France and Britain were the only two powers that really understood Iran. Meanwhile, China, Russia, and India were partially collaborating with Iran. Many countries in Europe were still trading with Iran. The United States was paralyzed because of its entanglement in other wars. Even within Israel the political leadership was not quite focused on Iran. The idea that Dagan could thwart Iran’s progress was a widely held assumption. While in Iran centrifuges were multiplying and uranium was piling up, Israel was snoozing. Non-Israeli sources suggest that even the Shkedi-Yadlin military option was beginning to become irrelevant.

  Enter Benjamin Netanyahu. When he arrived in office in April 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu brought with him a totally new approach to Iran. As he saw i
t, Iran was the Nazi Germany of the twenty-first century; its combination of a nonconventional regime with nonconventional weapons was lethal. Weak and decadent, the West of the 2000s resembled in many ways the West of the 1930s. But the Jewish people would not be led again to some sort of nuclear Auschwitz. The Jewish people now had a state, an army, and technological might. They would do whatever it took to prevent Tel Aviv from becoming a Hiroshima.

  The new prime minister’s great contribution to the struggle against Iran was cognitive awareness. Unlike his predecessors, Netanyahu understood Iran, internalized Iran, was totally focused on Iran. From the day he took office, he knew that his life’s mission was to prevent Iran from going nuclear. To stop Iran he entered a strange coalition with Labor’s Ehud Barak, who was installed as minister of defense. To stop Iran he appropriated huge funds and assigned them to intelligence gathering and to air force buildup, while holding frank talks with the leaders of the West. To stop Iran he formulated an effective Israeli military option, and time after time he prepared to use it. As he readied the IDF for action, the United States became more and more apprehensive. Several times in 2009, 2010, and 2011, Israel acted as if it was about to strike. Both in Washington and in Tel Aviv there were tense moments when it seemed as if the Middle East was on the verge of war.

  Amos Yadlin and his fellow generals didn’t know if Netanyahu and Barak really intended to strike or if they were playing an unprecedented game of strategic poker. The experienced pilot put his superiors to a test: he asked them to grant specific funds and authorize specific intelligence gathering that were needed only if a real strike was planned. Barak refused, but Netanyahu agreed. The IDF’s top intelligence officer reached the conclusion that while the defense minister might have a hidden agenda, the prime minister meant business. Benjamin Netanyahu really believed that the fate of the Jewish people was on the line. If all else failed, he would strike, come what may.