In tomorrow’s New Statesman, NS editor Jason Cowley reports from Tel Aviv on the mood inside Israel following the launch of “Operation Pillar of Defence”. He finds a population almost entirely united behind Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, with dissenting voices increasingly marginalised.
Among other things, Israel’s attack on Gaza was intended as a warning to Iran, the nation that it regards as its existential enemy. By neutralising Hamas’s military capability, it aims to limit the group’s ability to retaliate in the event of a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, a move that it is openly contemplating. Mark Regev, the Israeli prime minister’s spokesman, tells Jason:
A nuclear-armed Iran is something we will not accept. No serious person thinks that their nuclear programme is benign. We have little doubt that, by the middle of next year, the Iranians could have enough enriched uranium to make a bomb.
He adds:
They call for wiping Israel off the face of the earth and we take that threat very seriously. We have thought about the possible blowback but the bottom line is that the challenges involved in trying to prevent Iran from proliferating are dwarfed by the challenges involved in dealing with a nuclear-armed Iran.
You have to operate realpolitik. You need sanctions, economic, diplomatic and political pressure, but you also need a military option. The paradox is that if you have a credible military option you might not have to use it, and conversely if you take the military option off the table you are undermining the chances of a peaceful solution.
An Israeli strike on Iran could act as the spark for a regional conflagration, with, as Jason notes, “attacks on western and Jewish interests throughout the world, Hezbollah and Iranian rocket attacks on northern Israel, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a consequent spike in the world oil price, even a possible land invasion of Israel”. Should that come to pass, the events of the last week will pale by comparison.
You can read Jason’s piece in full as well as Phoebe Greenwood’s report from Gaza in tomorrow’s NS.
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