Deciphering Israel's mixed messages on Iran's nuclear threat - analysis

• Author: HERB KEINON
• Published date: 05 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The first was that of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who put the international community on notice during his UN speech that Israel's patience was not endless.

"Over the past few years, Iran has made a major leap forward in its nuclear R&D, in its production capacity, and in its enrichment," Bennett said.

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"Iran's nuclear program has hit a watershed moment – and so has our tolerance. Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning.''

His message was clear, if not necessarily new. Israel will act if it must in order to prevent what it deems an existential threat from Iran.

That was one message.

But then another message – starkly different – came out in several analysis pieces in the Israeli media that appeared a few days later on Friday (including in The Jerusalem Post), all saying essentially the same thing: Israel does not have an up-to-date and effective military plan for hitting Iran's nuclear installations.

That the pieces all appeared on the same day and had the same underlying message was an indication that senior journalists were briefed by a high-level official. And the message that emerged was that, while a decade ago Israel had a plan on how to attack Iran's nuclear program, once the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was concluded in 2015 and it became clear that Israel could not now buck the will of the world and hit Iran militarily to keep it from racing toward nukes, those plans – including the budget that allocated considerable sums to train and acquire the military hardware to carry out such an attack – were scratched.

In other words, while a decade ago Israel had what it felt was a credible and effective plan to thwart its existential threat, today those plans simply do not exist.

This is the product of a feeling that after the nuclear deal was signed, it could not act alone, and then – when the US-backed out of the deal in 2018 – the result of the political paralysis in Israel and an inability, because of the lack of a state budget, to allocate the billions of shekels needed to plan, train and prepare for such a mission.

According to these stories, with the new state budget soon expected to be approved and money earmarked for this purpose, the plans are now being revamped, and Israel – in the near future – will again have a plan.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi implied as much in comments he made...