Insight: Has Iran Ended Israel’s Begin Doctrine?

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Menachem Begin did not pull his punches. In 1981, as work neared completion on an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israel believed would produce plutonium for warheads, the Israeli prime minister dispatched eight F-16 bombers to destroy the plant. Begin later said that the raid was proof his country would “under no circumstances allow the enemy to develop weapons of mass-destruction against our people”.

The event defined a strategy that became known as the “Begin Doctrine” and is best summed up by the phrase “the best defense is forceful preemption.”

Israel’s message is now more guarded. In a civil defense drill of unprecedented scale last June, sirens summoned schoolchildren to shelters, radars searched the skies for computer-simulated missile salvoes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet descended into the Jerusalem foothills to inaugurate a nuclear bunker with a mock war-session.

Why would a country that has long vowed to stop its foes attaining nuclear weapons need a nuclear bunker? The question highlights a new, reluctant restraint that has quietly infused Israeli decision-making in recent years as regional threats have grown more complex and sapped the applicability of classic force of arms. Nowhere is this felt more than in the Netanyahu government’s posture toward Iran.

The spin of the Islamic republic’s uranium centrifuges stirs mortal fear in the Jewish state. In defiance of western pressure to curb the project’s bomb-making potential, Iran has pushed on with its nuclear program, saying it has no hostile designs. The International Atomic Energy Agency will say this week that Iran now has the ability to build a nuclear weapon, the Washington Post has reported. Israeli officials have long hinted they may launch a preemptive strike.

That threat has taken on fresh intensity in the two years since Netanyahu — a right-wing ideologue like Begin — assumed office. Media speculation that Israel might launch a unilateral strike has surged again in the past two weeks.

In October, the dean of Israeli pundits, Nahum Barnea, suggested on the front page of the best-selling Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the government was hatching an imminent attack. Days later Netanyahu warned of the “direct and heavy threat” posed by Iran’s nuclear program and then, on November 2, Israel test-fired a missile. The same day the military said it had completed air exercises in Sardinia, “practicing operations in (a) vast, foreign land”.

Such talk robs Israel of some of the element of surprise if it really is planning an assault on Iran. Could it instead be a loud reminder to the rest of the world of its problem with Iran in the hope that Washington or another power might intercede?