Unthinkable (33 page)

Nevertheless, it seems more likely that Hizballah would retaliate. Its ties to Iran run deep, and they are spiritual, historical, operational, and even familial. So far, the specter of losing Syria has made Hizballah more dependent on Iran, not less. Nasrallah announced in September 2012 that if Israel attacked Iran, Hizballah would join the retaliation against Israel. As he put it, “A decision has been taken to respond and the response will be very great.” The Iranians seem to think so, too, as former Iranian IRGC commander Yahya Rahim Safavi said at about the same time, “If, one day, the Israeli regime takes action against us, resistance groups, especially Hezbollah . . . will respond more easily.”
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It would be hard for Hizballah to back away from such an unequivocal commitment even if they wanted to, although they might honor it with less than fulsome effort.

If Hizballah leans toward retaliating for an Israeli strike on Iran, Hamas appears to lean away. Iran's backing of the Shi'i Alawi regime in Damascus has offended Sunni Arabs across the region, and the Sunni Islamists of Hamas have tried to distance themselves from both the Syrians and Iranians. Moreover, Hamas suffered from Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 and its leadership seems wary of picking another fight with the Israelis.
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If an Israeli-Iranian conflict came to be seen as an Israeli-Muslim conflict, or if Hamas had specific motives related to its own interests, it might well join in. Still, Hamas might wait at least for the early days of an Israeli-Iranian conflict to see how the rest of the Arab world reacted—and detect any shifts that might make it palatable for them to join Iran before doing so.

CAN ISRAEL TAKE IT?
A critical element of the argument of those who advocate for an Israeli strike on Iran—either now or at a future moment of “last resort”—is that the Israeli public will be willing to accept the price of Iranian retaliation to stave off the threat of an Iranian nuclear capability, at least for a few more years.

Certainly the Israeli public is long inured to making sacrifices for their personal safety and the security of the state. Prior to Israel's military campaign in Gaza in 2012, Operation Pillar of Defense, it endured 797
rockets fired from Gaza, and another 630 the year before.
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During the operation, Israelis suffered 1,456 more rocket attacks, which killed five people and injured another 219.
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During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam launched forty-two Scud missiles at Israel, killing two people and injuring 230 more.
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All of these numbers demonstrate a willingness on the part of Israelis to endure the kind of rocket and missile attacks that Iran would be expected to mete out in response to an Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities. Israelis have routinely faced terrorist attacks, and while they go to extraordinary efforts to protect themselves, they accept that a certain number of deaths is the price to pay for their freedom, even their existence. By one count, 3,721 Israelis have been killed in various terrorist attacks between 1920 and 2012 (from a Jewish population that ranged from about 80,000 in 1920 to about 6 million in 2012).
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While that may or may not be precise, it gives a sense of the order of magnitude. And over that ninety-three-year period, there were only five years in which no Israeli was killed by an act of terrorism.
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Israeli toughness is not the only consideration, however. These kinds of wars impose a high price on Israel's economy, one that could become unbearable in a protracted conflict. An Israeli-Iranian war following an Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear program could go on for weeks or months, with terrorist attacks even years later.
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A good example to illustrate these costs is Israel's monthlong war against Hizballah in 2006. During that conflict, Hizballah launched 3,970 missiles and rockets at Israel. Israel suffered 43 civilians and 119 soldiers killed, and 4,262 wounded or traumatized by the attacks. The war cost the government of Israel $1.6 billion, representing 1 percent of GDP. One million Israelis spent the entire conflict living in bomb shelters, while six thousand homes were destroyed or damaged by rocket fire. Ultimately, the economic shutdown of northern Israel (where 630 factories were forced to close), the damage caused by the rocket and missile attacks, and the losses from tourism cost another $5.3 billion (and another 3.3 percent of GDP).
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All of that from just one month of conflict. Iron Dome (and Israel's Arrow antiballistic
missile system) could reduce such costs, but it would not eliminate them. Indeed, in crisis simulations looking at the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Iran, the economic costs of long-term Iranian-Hizballah retaliations loom large, potentially driving Jerusalem to far-reaching and risky measures to try to end it.
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Moreover, there is another important consideration for an Israeli government seeking to attack Iran: the Israeli public does not favor it. Even if Iran's retaliation for an Israeli strike proved less than apocalyptic, it could still prove problematic for Jerusalem because the Israeli populace appears less than convinced that an attack on Iran is necessary.

In poll after poll, the Israeli public has shown itself to be lukewarm to an attack on Iran. Most Israelis do not seem to think a strike even necessary. A 2009 poll found that only 21 percent of Israelis believed that Iran would attack them with a nuclear weapon.
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Three years later, in 2012, a poll by Israel's Institute for National Security Studies asked the same question and found that only 18 percent of Israelis believed that.
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A joint Israeli-Palestinian survey also conducted in 2012 found only 20 percent of Israelis who feared this.
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Quite consistently, no more than one in five Israelis fears that Iran would use nuclear weapons against them unprovoked. In a similar vein, a January 2013 survey by the
Times of Israel
concluded that only 12 percent of Israelis saw Iran as the top priority facing the government that would take office after the elections that month, compared to 16 percent who felt that Israel's top priority should be deteriorating relations with the Palestinians, and 43 percent who said economic problems.
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Indeed, the poor showing of Prime Minister Netanyahu's coalition in the January 2013 elections and the unexpectedly strong performance by centrist parties were largely a function of public interest in addressing Israel's social and economic problems, and their relative deprioritization of the Iran issue.
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A February 2012 poll by my colleague Shibley Telhami and Israel's Dahaf Institute found that only 22 percent of Israeli Jews supported an attack on Iran regardless of the circumstances, another 43 percent would back it if the attack had
American support, and 32 percent said they opposed it on all grounds.
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In September 2012, the joint Israeli-Palestinian survey reported that only 18 percent of Israelis supported a strike by Israel alone, 52 percent supported an attack in conjunction with the United States, and 24 percent opposed a strike under all circumstances.
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If part of the reason that Israelis are so ambivalent about a strike is that few fear that Iran would use nuclear weapons against them, another part lies in the fear that Israelis evince for what they believe will be a protracted war with Iran and its allies afterward. The joint Israeli-Palestinian poll from September 2012 showed 77 percent of Israelis believed that an Israeli strike on Iran would produce a “major regional war.”
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The Telhami-Dahaf poll from February 2012 found that “a majority of Israelis polled, roughly 51 percent, said the war would last months (29 percent) or years (22 percent), while only 18 percent said it would last days.” That same survey found, “Two-thirds of Israelis, meanwhile, believe Hezbollah would most likely join Iran in retaliation against Israel—even if Israel did not strike Hezbollah forces.” And in the last piece of the puzzle, the Telhami-Dahaf poll found that only “22 percent of Israelis said a strike would delay Iran's capabilities by more than five years, while . . . 31 percent said it would delay its capabilities by one to five years, 18 percent said it would not make a difference and 11 percent said it would actually accelerate Iran's capabilities.”
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It is hard not to agree with the insightful, left-wing Israel analyst Daniel Levy, who has observed that an “oft-overlooked aspect is the absence of public pressure in Israel for military intervention or of a supposed Iranian threat featuring as a priority issue for Israelis. The pressure to act is top-down, not bottom-up. And to the extent to which there is trepidation among the public, that is a function of fear at the blowback from Israeli military action, rather than fear of Iranian-initiated conflagration.”
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These findings would not surprise anyone who has visited Israel in recent years. Life is good there. The economy is booming. Israelis have never been safer, thanks in large part, it must be said, to the construction
of the two security barriers isolating Gaza and the West Bank from Israel's primary population centers.
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It's not that Israelis don't have complaints—they are Israelis after all—but they are far more interested and concerned about affordable child care, food prices, and Israel's growing secular-religious divide than about Iran. The
Times of Israel
poll seems accurate when it reports that Israelis see—by wide margins—social, economic, and domestic political questions as far more pressing than the Iranian nuclear threat.
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The large number of Israeli military and intelligence personnel who oppose an attack on Iran reinforces this sentiment. The veteran reporters Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer wrote in Israel's largest circulation newspaper,
Yedioth Ahronoth
, over the summer of 2012, “There is not a single senior official in the establishment—neither among the [Israel Defense Forces] top brass nor in the security branches, or even the president—who supports an Israeli strike at the moment.” Even accepting the usual hyperbole of the Israeli press, their depiction seems more right than wrong.
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Even Israel's ultra-orthodox and radical right-wing settlers are not pushing for war with Iran, because they fear that regional conflict resulting from an Israeli attack would mean international pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.
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This public sentiment puts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of step with his electorate. In contrast to the Israeli public's desire for him to focus on economic and social problems, Netanyahu told a visiting delegation of U.S. senators the same month as Israel's election, “My priority, if I'm elected for a next term as prime minister, will be first to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
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He reportedly believes that the United States does not understand Iran and its leadership, at least as he believes they should be understood, saying of the American government, “They know it's [Iran with a nuclear weapons capability] a very bad thing, but they need to understand the convulsive power of militant Islam . . . the cult of death, the ideological zeal.”
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And the prime minister is not entirely alone in his fears. As noted above, about 20 percent of the Israeli populace seems to share his views. The revisionist Israeli historian Benny
Morris writes about an Iranian bomb in apocalyptic terms: “The Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes—not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.”
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In the end, the decision to strike will rest with Israel's prime minister and his or her top advisors and political partners, not with the Israeli public. If the prime minister decides to launch the attack and can convince the cabinet and the IDF to go along with that decision, Israel will attack. However, the views of the Israeli public are not irrelevant to this decision because they will ultimately have to pay the price for any such attack. They will bear the brunt of Iranian retaliation, not the prime minister. The evidence that they do not feel an existential threat from the Iranian nuclear program, that they do not want to attack Iran without the full participation of the United States, and that they believe that Israel has more pressing concerns all suggest that they may be loath to pay those costs.

A FINAL THOUGHT ON THE FOURTH PARADOX.
There is a variant on the fourth paradox that should also be considered. The main thrust of this paradox rests on the assumption that the principal threat that a nuclear Iran poses to Israel is greater unconventional aggression—terrorism, rocket, and missile attacks. However, the logic holds even if you believe instead that Iran might be crazy or messianic enough to want to use nuclear weapons against Israel or give them to terrorists to do so, no matter how unlikely this is in reality. If you believe that Iran's leadership might consider nuking Israel unprovoked, there is nothing that is more likely to convince them to do so than an unprovoked Israeli attack on their nuclear facilities. If that is how the Iranians think, then an Israeli strike would undoubtedly convince them to withdraw from the NPT, rebuild their nuclear program in secret, acquire a nuclear weapon as quickly as they could, and then use it on Israel immediately. Or more realistically,
if there is anything that
might
convince the Iranian leadership to use a nuclear weapon against Israel or give one to terrorists to do so, it would be an unprovoked Israeli attack on Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear capability. In other words, in the long run, an Israeli strike is likely to hurt more than it helps regardless of your view of Iranian aims and motives.