My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  Washington reached a similar conclusion. 2009 was wasted on a futile engagement policy, and 2010 was wasted on a failed attempt to impose UN sanctions, but by 2011 the fear of a desperate Israeli move impelled the dovish Obama administration to take nondovish steps. First the president approved cyberwarfare against Iran, then, in coordination with the Europeans, he imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, and finally he instructed the Pentagon to prepare an effective American military option.

  But while the Israeli military option proved to be a political success, within Israel all hell broke loose. Dagan refused to admit that clandestine operations and cyberwarfare had bought precious time but could not achieve the strategic target of defeating the Iranians. Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi adamantly opposed the actual use of the military option he had devised. A titanic struggle evolved between Netanyahu and Barak on one side and Dagan and Ashkenazi on the other. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet national security agency, and most army generals sided with Dagan and Ashkenazi. While the prime minister and the minister of defense thought their subordinates lacked historical perspective and courage, the top army intelligence brass thought of their superiors as messianic, warmongering zealots. The fierce struggle between the two groups became personal, visceral, and ugly. To make the debate more pertinent and less personal, General Yadlin drafted a seventeen-point questionnaire designed to render decision making as rational as possible. Only if all of Yadlin’s questions were answered in the affirmative would there be justification to launch an Israeli attack on Iran.

  As the internal Israeli debate spiraled out of control, various doomsday scenarios were bandied about. The doves argued that an unprovoked Israeli raid would endanger the alliance with America, trigger a regional war, and elicit a missile attack on Israel that might cost the lives of thousands or even tens of thousands. The hawks argued that inaction would lead to the establishment of a multipolar nuclear system in the Middle East, to the radicalization of the region, to endless conventional wars, and possibly to the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv. Yadlin tried to formulate a third way. On the one hand he agreed that an Israeli bombing that would prevent an Iranian bomb was strategically justified and would not bring about Armageddon. He trusted that the Israeli military option would be effective and he believed that both Israel and the West could withstand the limited price they would have to pay. If Israel shied away from taking action just because it was deterred by a few hundred Iranian missiles and a few thousand Hezbollah rockets, it had no right and no way to survive. But on the other hand, Yadlin argued that with no international legitimacy and without American backing, an Israeli bombing would be futile. If the United States refused to complement the Israeli offensive with paralyzing sanctions, only two years would be gained at an extremely high price. The challenge was not the operation itself but the decade after the operation, Yadlin claimed. He urged Prime Minister Netanyahu not to quarrel with President Obama but to foster an intimate strategic bond with him. Only if the great American democracy and the small Israeli democracy worked shoulder to shoulder would they be able to stop the rising Shiite power.

  Netanyahu ignored Yadlin’s advice. He didn’t make the occupation-related concessions that would win over Obama and improve Israel’s international standing. Rather, he provoked Obama’s anger. He turned Israel into a semipariah state. Netanyahu didn’t build up legitimacy for the dramatic operation within Israel or outside Israel. When the military option yielded impressive political results, Israel’s prime minister overplayed his hand. In the summer of 2012, he was perceived to be intervening in America’s presidential election, and by the autumn of that year it was clear that he had missed the moment and lost whatever political leverage he had had.

  Netanyahu’s famous red-line speech at the UN in September 2012, in which he called for international action when Iran reaches the final stage in its nuclear program, was actually a concession speech. After realizing that he would not be able to strike before America’s presidential elections, he moved the critical benchmark to 2013–14. In a sense, he put the destiny of his nation in President Obama’s hands. But since that grand speech, Yadlin tells me, things have deteriorated. The time Iran needs for a surprise “breakout” that would give it a nuclear bomb has shrunk from over six months to less than three months. Soon it might shrink to one month. As we speak, Yadlin says, the Iranians are crossing Netanyahu’s red line. They are approaching the point where Israel will not be able to stop them by force. Soon after, they will reach the point where even the United States will find it difficult to stop them in time. The moment of truth is nigh. If the West does not wake up soon and if America does not show determination, Israel will soon be facing the most dramatic junction. It will be forced to choose between bomb and bombing.

  Yadlin believes that the surprise victory of President Hassan Rouhani in Iran’s presidential elections indicates that the Netanyahu strategy was partially successful: it was the Israeli threat of 2010–11 that brought about the international pressure of 2012, which in turn brought about the Iranian political change of 2013. If the West would not budge and would tighten sanctions and put a credible military option on the table, an overall deal could be reached that would defuse the Iran crisis. But as the second-term Obama administration projects indecisiveness, the Iranians might yet have the upper hand. After being drawn again into Israel’s decision-making circle, Yadlin believes that the real moment of truth will come in the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarters of 2014. If the Jewish state will be cornered, it might feel obliged to surprise and strike.

  The Iranian decision is probably the most difficult decision Israel has to make in this era. In a sense, it resembles the Dimona decision. With both Dimona and Iran, the risks are mind-boggling. With both Dimona and Iran, what is needed is a unique combination of audacity, responsibility, and cunning. Israel must work with the Western powers but also stand up to them. Facing a unique challenge, the nation must mobilize all its resources and skills to produce a unique solution that a mature leadership endorses and promotes. So when I sit with Amos Yadlin, I am reminded of the engineer who ran Dimona in its critical years. The Begin Doctrine is a complement to Dimona, devised to ensure that there would be only one Dimona in the Middle East. And the challenge Yadlin and his peers faced in the 2000s was not dissimilar to the one the engineer and his colleagues faced in the 1960s. Yet there is a major difference. While building Dimona, young Israel acted in an exemplary manner, but while facing Natanz and Fordow, middle-aged Israel faltered badly. True, great deeds were accomplished thanks to intelligence and technological excellence. According to non-Israeli sources, there were incredible achievements. But the nation as such did not mobilize all its powers to contend properly with its most dramatic existential challenge.

  Yadlin is an optimist. With a bitter smile he reconstructs the frustrating moments of his tenure. In Yadlin’s first year, everybody still believed Dagan would solve the Iranian problem, while Yadlin shifted precious military and intelligence resources to the Iran campaign against the current. In Yadlin’s second year, intelligence and military capabilities increased dramatically, but the Syrian reactor drew attention away from Iran, and the American NIE report muddied the waters. In Yadlin’s third year, there was already a good intelligence picture of Iran, but by then the Iranians had gone underground in Natanz, had already dug the Fordow fuel enrichment plant, and had crossed what Israel had previously defined as the point of no return. In Yadlin’s fourth year, Netanyahu reinvigorated the campaign to stop Iran, but later it turned out that the American-Israeli cyberwar strategy that Yadlin and Dagan had counted on had its limits. In the fifth year, no smoking gun was found that would persuade the international community to act decisively, and the internal debate within Israel grew ugly. But in the years after Yadlin retired—2011–13—his multiyear endeavor began to bear fruit. Inexcusably late to act, the Americans and Europeans finally imposed biting sanctions and the Iranian economy began to crumble. True, the Iranians ha
d piled up enough enriched uranium for six or seven bombs and very much shortened the breaking-out time they needed to manufacture those bombs. But at last the earth under their feet was shaking. There was some hope that at the very last moment they would be stopped.

  Perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps there will be no other way but to contain Iran or stop it with force. But after a frustrating decade Yadlin wants to believe that a minute before midnight, the West is finally waking up, that the West will not forsake Israel and will not let it stand alone against the fanatical power wishing to annihilate it.

  “Tell me about the Iranians,” I say to Yadlin. “When you were reading the classified information coming from Tehran, what did you learn? What sort of society and what sort of regime did you see? Who are the people we are facing?”

  “With the Iranians, one finds a fascinating combination of religious fanaticism and strategic prudence,” says the bespectacled, solicitous retired general sitting across from me. “They are very ambitious. They regard their struggle with America and Israel as a clash of civilizations. As they see it, their civilization is the more pure and more just, and therefore it is stronger. The Judeo-Christian civilization is for them an evil imperialist civilization that is now in a state of decline. They feel genuine rage because of what the British and the Americans and the Russians did in Iran, and because of what the Zionists did in Palestine. They are totally convinced that because our civilization is spoiled and corrupt it cannot endure suffering, has no resilience, and is bound to rot. That’s why they have no doubt that they will have the upper hand and eventually bring about the downfall of Israel, Europe, and America. The future is theirs, they believe. Their rising culture will topple ours.

  “And yet,” Yadlin goes on, “in their day-to-day conduct, these zealots act with sophistication and restraint. They are not in a hurry, they are not hasty, they make few mistakes. Rather than advance directly toward their goal and attract fire, they built a wide and steady front that is slowly approaching the goal, so at the right moment it may be conquered with a high degree of certainty. It took me approximately two years to understand this, but when I grasped what they were really doing I was deeply impressed. One cannot but have respect for the Iranians. They are deadly serious, and in their own way they are very impressive.”

  “Now tell me about the Israelis,” I say to Yadlin. “How did we act? Were we impressive, too?”

  “Our problem was that Iran is far away in every respect,” he replies. “It was not at the focal point of our attention. Some Israelis thought it was not relevant for us, others thought it was too much for us to take on. Both approaches led to the same outcome: we dealt with the Palestinian terror, and we dealt with disengaging from the Gaza Palestinians, and we dealt with trying peace with the West Bank Palestinians—but we didn’t deal with the Iranians. Not seriously. Not until it was quite late. At the very same time, the Americans were dealing with al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and Iraq, but not with Iran. Not seriously. Not until it was very late. So for both Israelis and Americans it was convenient to say to the Mossad, ‘Take some money and solve this one for us.’ The Mossad took the money but it didn’t solve the problem. Only in 2007 did the IDF rise to the challenge, and only in 2009 did the Israeli national leadership rise to the challenge, and only in 2011 did the world awaken. The dramatic question is whether this awakening came too late. We don’t yet know the answer.”

  While the summer of 2011 was a summer of protest, the summer of 2012 was one of anxiety. Early in the year, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak signaled that for them, 2012 was the decisive year. Both argued that Iran was about to enter a “zone of immunity” that would prevent Israel from acting against it by force. If the international community would not stop it immediately, Israel would have to stop it on its own—by exercising its now-famous military option. As summer approached, tensions rose. I experienced it myself. Coming out of two private meetings with the prime minister and three private meetings with the defense minister, I felt my knees shake. Did they really mean what they were saying? Did Netanyahu really feel that President Obama was like President Roosevelt, who wouldn’t bomb Auschwitz in 1944? Did Barak really think that we have only nine to twelve months left before we’ll have to strike? Barak was difficult to decipher, but Netanyahu seemed absolutely sincere. He seemed convinced that he was the Churchill of the twenty-first century who must save his homeland and save the West from ultimate evil.

  But Netanyahu did not act like Churchill. He did not share his dramatic perception of reality with his people and did not prepare his nation for an ultimate test. Even if he saw the Iranian challenge correctly, and even if he is a gifted, strategic poker player, he did not lay out the big picture as he should have. Under his leadership, it was not Tehran that was perceived as the threat to world peace, but Jerusalem. Because of his personal conduct, there were inconceivable gaps between the Israeli cabinet, the Israeli military, the Israeli people, and the world.

  A series of interviews I conducted with some of Israel’s best strategists, which I published in Haaretz in the summer of 2012, proved to me what I had only intuitively understood ten years ago: Iran is not a Netanyahu bogeyman; it is a real existential threat. So when the summer of anxiety came to a close without a strike, I knew that this was just a pause. The Iran crisis was not resolved, it was simply postponed. After the Palestinian front heated up again, and after Israel went into a stormy election campaign, the crucial decision was pushed back from the year 2012 to the future. But Iran is still here. Iran casts a heavy shadow over the future of Israel.

  The first half of 2013 was quite extraordinary. Although by now Israelis were fully aware of the Iran dilemma and its significance, they chose to ignore it. In Israel’s 2013 election campaign there was less talk of Iran than in America’s presidential elections held only three months earlier. When Israel’s new government was formed in the spring of 2013, Iran was not a prominent issue. By now nearly all the old players—Barak, Dagan, Ashkenazi, Diskin, Yadlin, and some prominent government ministers involved in the Iran issue—were gone, but the one player who really matters remained: Benjamin Netanyahu. In meetings with the reelected prime minister and with his new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, and his new chief of staff, Benny Gantz, it was made clear to me that Iran was at the top of their agenda. After giving Obama a chance and after giving sanctions a chance and after giving diplomacy a chance, they actually felt that their argument was stronger than ever and that by now Israel had captured the moral high ground. They also felt that the geostrategic changes—the meltdown of Syria, the weakening of Hezbollah, the growing tensions between Sunnis and Shiites—made the doves’ alarmist scenarios obsolete. If Israel were to strike, they thought, the backlash would not be apocalyptic and the Middle East would not be engulfed by the flames of regional war. So the issue was very much an American issue. Will Obama’s United States have the resolve? Will post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan America stop Iran or let Israel stop Iran? Unlike the Israeli public, Israeli decision makers are fully aware that the most important event or nonevent of 2013–14 will be the Iranian one.

  After bidding Amos Yadlin farewell, I look out at the ancient mound of Gezer, under which lie the ruins of more than twenty civilizations, and I look out at the Tel Aviv skyline. Tel Aviv’s liberal and creative culture is just like New York’s: it can only survive under the defensive shield of Western strategic supremacy. But Tel Aviv is much more exposed than New York; it depends not only on Dimona but also on Dimona’s complement: the Begin Doctrine. In 1981 and 2007, Tel Aviv still had the ability to implement the Begin Doctrine in a way that guaranteed its future. But as time passes, this capability is eroding. As the world changes, the Dimona monopoly is bound to fade. Will Tel Aviv be able to sustain its individualistic and hedonistic life in 2020 and 2030? Will the Middle East of 2040 and 2050 allow the Tel Aviv culture to survive? State-of-the-art bombers are flying low over the ancient mound of Gezer.

  (photo credit 17.1)

 
SEVENTEEN

  By the Sea

  EVERY SUMMER MY FAMILY TRAVELS TO ENGLAND. PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE our roots are there. Perhaps it’s because England is the opposite of our homeland. While Israel is frenzy and constant change, England is tranquillity and continuity. As the plane descends toward Heathrow, a deep though unjustified sense of homecoming overtakes me. And as I drive my wife and three children through Somerset and Dorset, the feeling of calm deepens: we pass flocks of sheep, village pubs, ancient churches. When we reach the stone cottage we rent on the shores of South Devon, my happiness is complete. In the light rain, I stand with my wife, Timna, and my children, Tamara, Michael, and Daniel, at the edge of the white cliff across the field from our house and look out at the deep-green vales descending down to the gray-green ocean. England. There has not been a successful foreign invasion here for centuries. There has not been violence for decades. With its deep calm of solid identity, England has all that we never had and all that we may never have: peace.

  Our history is more ancient, I tell my children. When we wrote the Bible, the people of this green isle were illiterate barbarians. But our history is that of “Get thee out of thy country,” and our land itself is a mound, one layer of life upon another, layer upon layer of destruction. Yes, we Jews had Jerusalem when London was still a marsh. But the English have what we can only dream of: they are born in serenity and they die in serenity. Not even world wars endanger their very existence. We, on the other hand, are always restless, for we live between great fires. We thrive between calamities. That’s why we are so quick and vital and creative. That’s why we are so neurotic and loud and unbearable. We dwell under the looming shadow of a smoking volcano.