Larry Derfner

Israel’s whole body politic – politicians, media, influential public figures and public at large – is  now leaning into a war with Iran. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s recently reported opinion that Israel would likely strike between April and June is shared, give or take a month or two, by countless others.

The consequences of such an attack range from a bilateral missile war and intensified international terror attacks, to a regional war involving weapons of mass destruction. Israel may not pull the trigger, of course. But at this point, that seems the only realistic working assumption.

Israeli talking points are coming faster and sharper. Iran’s nuclear project is marching toward the “zone of immunity,” says Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “It is our duty to rely on ourselves when we are concerned with a threat to our very existence,” says Netanyahu. Their apparent aim is to create an aura of inevitability around an imminent Israeli strike. Leading the drive, Netanyahu and his one-time army commando unit leader, Barak, want full support at home and no serious opposition from the U.S. if and when they send the jet bombers on their mission. Naturally, they would prefer that the U.S. do the job – inflicting lasting damage on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could well be beyond Israel’s military capability – but from here, at least, the American military option looks unlikely, certainly within a time frame Israel accepts.

Some skeptics think Netanyahu and Barak may just be engaging in psychological warfare aimed at keeping Western economic pressure on Iran, the goal being to force or scare the Tehran regime into giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it denies pursuing. But it’s hard to imagine anything short of visibly destroyed hardware on a massive scale that might convince Israel’s leadership that the nuclear threat had been lifted.

Yet while there is skepticism about the leadership team’s true intentions, there is virtually none being expressed here about the wisdom of going to war. The paucity of dissent is remarkable, not to say depressing, in a country that prides itself on being a “vibrant democracy.”

At the end of last week, the media were talking about which towns had good bomb shelters and air raid sirens and which didn’t. The likelihood that Israel would soon be attacking Iran had begun to sink in. An antiwar demonstration was held across the boulevard from the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. About 25 people showed up. They held signs that read, “Don’t bomb – talk” to the evening rush hour traffic going past. One driver honked.

I asked a sidewalk passerby, a woman in her mid-20s pushing a baby carriage, what she thought of a possible government decision to bomb Iran. “They sit up there, they’re smarter than me, whatever they decide, I’ll support,” she said. A fellow of about 20 on a skateboard said: “I’m not for war, I’m against war. But if somebody is going to attack you, if your enemy is going to attack, don’t you think you have to attack him first, for the sake of survival?” I asked if he thought Iran would attack Israel first. “I don’t know, I’m not privy to all the information. But good luck,” he said, and skated off.

For all the famous outspokenness of Israeli politicians, not one is speaking out against an attack, not from the moderate opposition nor the “peace camp.” Peace Now, a group that has organized huge demonstrations going back 30 years against the Lebanon War and the occupation, has said not a word about the extraordinarily high-risk war of choice that looms in the very near future.

The news media, with the exception of the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, is fully on board. The mainstream media reflect and reinforce public opinion, which shows weariness with settlement-building and settlers, but automatic support for any decision taken in the name of security, especially in the face of a nuclear threat from a regime like Iran’s.

The tone is set by the red-on-black scare headlines in the tabloids and the grim facial expressions and bracing reports from correspondents on Channel 2, which dominates TV news. On the night of the Bangkok bombing, Ehud Ya’ari, dean of the country’s so-called Arab affairs correspondents, reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was expected on Wednesday to inaugurate the uranium enrichment facility in Fordo, a site built deep underground in the side of a mountain. “Thus,” said Ya’ari, “Iran’s nuclear project enters what Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls the ‘zone of immunity.’” Draw your own conclusions, folks.

Except for Gideon Levy at Ha’aretz, no well-known newspaper columnist or TV commentator has come out against a war; nearly all are worried and noncommittal. But one of the most influential columnists, Yediot’s Sever Plocker, a passionate centrist with long-standing contacts around the Israeli establishment, wrote a column Tuesday titled “Israel won’t blink first.” Declaring that “the State of Israel, as the national home of the Jews, has decided to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons,” Plocker maintained that unless Iran freezes its nuclear weapons program and allows international inspectors into the underground sites and even the “secret” ones, “zero hour” will soon arrive. “No begging will stop Israel at that point. There will be a war,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the literary triumvirate of Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, Israel’s loftiest voices of peace and enlightenment, have remained silent. President Shimon Peres, who has put his days as a peacemaker far behind him, is warning only about the dangers of a nuclear Iran and not at all about those of an Israeli attack.

So what’s going on? What is this lockstep march to war in a country that made peace with Egypt and Jordan; that at times tried to make peace with the Palestinians; that absorbed missile attacks from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War yet held its fire at America’s behest; that had “warriors for peace” in the Prime Minister’s Office, “peace governments” and a “peace camp”?

It’s all gone. Since the Palestinian intifada ended the “peace process” in 2000, Israelis blame everything that goes wrong, every political dispute, violent or nonviolent, completely on the other side. No politician, commentator or other public figure who seeks mainstream approval can be thought of as “weak on security” or “naïve about the Arabs.”

Yet the reaction to the Iranian nuclear threat has deeper roots than that. While Netanyahu is known for his Holocaust analogies on this issue, his predecessors going back to Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago have all lobbied the world to stop Iran from going nuclear, which has been marked “unacceptable.” Since Menachem Begin ordered the 1981 attack on Iraq’s reactor (over the opposition of Peres and war heroes Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman), Israel has lived by the doctrine that no enemy in the Middle East will have nuclear weapons. After the 1981 attack, it acted on this doctrine a second time in 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (and defense minister Barak), with the airstrike on Syria’s embryonic nuclear facility.

So the issue for Israel isn’t just the Iranian regime’s jihadist craziness and Holocaust denial. Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor when Saddam Hussein was the Reagan administration’s man in the Gulf against Iran. It bombed the Syrian installation before Bashar Assad started slaughtering Syrians en masse, when he was offering Israel land-for-peace negotiations.

While it’s true that Iran isn’t just any Middle Eastern enemy, the Israeli doctrine applies to all of them.

Only one person has made a real effort to reverse the country’s course, and lately he’s given up, too. At the start of last year, upon finishing his legendary tenure as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, then the country’s unchallenged supreme warrior, did the unprecedented. He began speaking out openly against an attack on Iran, calling it “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and warning that afterward, “the regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.” He was going public, he explained, because “there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak” from undertaking such a “dangerous adventure” now that he and the other military and intelligence chiefs, who had the clout to rein in the political leadership, were retiring.

Last week, after months of silence, Dagan resurfaced to announce he’s heading a new NGO to change Israel’s parliamentary system – an old chestnut of the good government movement that seems conspicuously irrelevant now. For nearly a year, Dagan raised a flag, and when he saw hardly anyone behind him, he lowered it. A few high-level ex-warriors, including two former army chiefs of staff, warned against the consequences of attacking Iran. But these were isolated remarks that got very little attention; in the public’s mind, the antiwar movement began and ended with one man.

I asked a retired army general who agrees with Dagan’s views why he and the many others like him didn’t get together and sign a letter in a major newspaper, or hold a press conference, or do something that might start a public debate over this fairly fateful matter; after all, Israelis listen to generals. He replied that he and his fellows didn’t have the information that those around the cabinet table had, they didn’t know if the government really intended to order an attack, and they didn’t want to take the chance that this was all “psychological warfare,” which they would be undercutting if they spoke out.

“You have to understand,” he said, “Israel is a small community, everybody knows everybody else’s opinion, so you have to be responsible. That’s the way I was educated.”

No opposition – that’s what Netanyahu and Barak want, and at home, that’s what they’re getting.

As for opposition from the Obama administration, it has been awfully muted. The Republican presidential candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) have  been gung-ho, which has much to do with the administration’s wariness toward Israel in this election year. But then how strong an argument for restraint can the administration make to the Israelis, after repeating for years that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable” and that “all options are on the table”?

Vestiges of that concern were still echoed by Palestinian negotiators after Barak
and Mubarak exchanged a warm handshake amid the snapping flashbulbs in Alexandria
Friday. “What we heard from Barak at the press conference was more music than
words,” Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath told the Associated Press.
“We want to see him starting the peace process with implementation of Wye, and a
real cessation of settlement activity.”

But among his supporters in Israel and among Western leaders, the meetings this
weekend mark a dramatic turnaround from the Netanyahu era. In his first steps as
prime minister, and in the formation of his ruling coalition, Barak has sent a
clear message that peace is once again at the top of the Israeli political agenda.

The key clue comes from Barak’s decision to include the ultra-religious, but
relatively dovish Shas party in his coalition instead of the Likud. After the aged
hawk Ariel Sharon, who succeeded Netanyahu as Likud leader, demanded control
of the peace process, Barak turned him down and went with Shas.

Shas, an ultra-religious Sephardic (Middle Eastern Jewish) party, is by far the
fastest-growing political party in Israel. It grew from 10 to 17 Knesset seats
(out of 120) in the last election, putting it just behind Likud (19 seats and
falling) as the third-largest party in Israel.

Shas is dovish almost solely because its founder, spiritual leader and
all-powerful decision maker, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, believes that the Torah requires
that parts of the holy land of Israel be sacrificed if this will save Jewish
lives. While Shas follows Yosef’s dictates, most of its supporters — many of whom are
religious, but less so than the Shas leadership — tend to be more nationalistic
and less willing to give up land.

Unlike other religious parties, Shas is not involved in sending Israeli settlers
into controversial new Israeli housing projects in the West Bank. United Torah
Judaism, an ultra-religious Ashkenazic (European Jewish) party, is also in the
government, and has loose but growing ties to the settlements. Its policy on the
peace process tends to be hawkish, but not automatically so.

The party that, more than any other, represents the settlers is the National
Religious Party. It has also joined the Barak government — mainly to safeguard, to
whatever extent it can, the settlements’ welfare. The NRP is against giving up
any land, but it also recognizes that a large majority of the Israeli public
wants the peace process to continue, so it has become increasingly pragmatic. If
Barak gets to the point where he’s making extensive concessions of land to the
Palestinians and Syrians, the NRP is likely to leave the government. UJT might
also leave. Shas, however, is a good bet to stay — because of both its dovishness and
its abject dependence on government money to finance its social and educational
network in Israel’s slums, from which the party draws most of its support. As the
largest of the three religious parties, Shas is the most important to Barak. If
Shas leaves, Barak would probably have to reach out to Likud to keep his
government from crumbling.

On the domestic front, Barak has turned away from Israel’s experiment with
Thatcherism by reappointing Rabin’s finance minister, Avraham Shochat — who became
the Netanyahu government’s whipping boy because he had dared to spend the
taxpayers’ money on schools and roads. (He had even wanted to put a tax on stock
market winnings!)

Barak also elevated the most dovish Zionist party of all, Meretz, and gave it
control of the most coveted ministry of education.

To make his radical moves — to give up most, if not all, of the land conquered in
1967, and uproot possibly tens of thousands of settlers from their homes, in
return for peace on every border — Barak is convinced he needs wide support among
the various warring tribes of Israel.

So far, he’s gotten it. He’s crafted a broad-based coalition which includes
religious and right-wing parties that are not friends of the peace process. But at
the same time he’s built the engine of the government out of dovish parties like
One Israel (the reconstructed Labor Party), Meretz and others. Barak placed all
the decisive ministries — including defense, which he kept for his own party — in liberal hands. His politics have always hewed as close as possible to the
mythical Israeli center, but faced with forming a government, he had to make a
choice between right and left, and he chose left.

But if his reputation is to be believed, Barak’s motives may have more to do with
self-interest than any particular ideological bent. He is notorious for his
excessive appetite for power and control, earning the nickname “Napoleon” among
his countrymen.

He left some of the most talented, popular Labor Party figures out of the upper
reaches of his cabinet, showing a preference for reliable loyalists. Out of 17
ministers, he appointed only one woman, and no Arabs (who make up one-sixth of
Israel’s population). This is in keeping with backward Israeli tradition; Barak
isn’t any worse than his predecessors, but then he built his campaign around the
promise of “change.”

In front of a crowd or on television, he hardly ever manages to inspire, and then
only mildly. Most of the time he’s so leaden that his supporters applaud strictly
to be polite, or obedient. Barak comes with no trumpets or doves; those left with
Rabin, and they won’t return until the soldiers come home from Lebanon, or the
peace is finally nailed down with the Palestinians, or maybe until Assad gets off
a plane at Ben-Gurion Airport. Israelis won’t be easily impressed by Barak, and,
because they’re Israelis, will be quick to run him down.

Barak said all along that he wanted an inclusive government, including left,
right and center; religious, ultra-religious and secular. He believes Rabin was
plagued, and ultimately killed, because he tried to make a revolution with only
half the country behind him. Barak wants to complete the revolution — to draw a
final border between Israel and the Palestinians and let the two peoples go their
separate ways.

Barak has also made it clear he wants to make peace with Syria. That will likely
mean giving back the strategic, and symbolic, territory of the Golan Heights,
which Israel annexed after 1967′s Six-Day War. A return of the Golan would
allow Israel’s soldiers in Lebanon, who have been fighting since 1982, to finally
get out.

But Barak is by no means a peacenik. In his 35-year army career, he got to know
Arabs mainly as blood enemies. (So, of course, did Rabin.) He remains obsessed
with security precautions, with holding on to that radar station on yonder hill,
and he means to make a deal with the Palestinians that Israelis will accept. The
problem — the old, familiar problem — is this: What Israelis are ready to give up
isn’t even close to what will satisfy the Palestinians.

The Palestinians’ line remains unchanged: Arafat has called for a return of all
the land Israel won from Jordan in the Six-Day War to create a Palestinian
state that includes East Jerusalem as the state capital. There
are roughly 350,000 Israelis living in those places now; it is inconceivable to
ask all of them to live under Palestinian rule, or to move them all out. Both
sides are going to have to soften their positions a great deal. Barak, who
swears never to give up any part of East Jerusalem, and wants to hold on to
substantial parts of the West Bank, has a long way to go before he can meet the
Palestinians somewhere in the middle. Nobody knows if he — or Arafat — is willing
to go that far.

What is known is that for the first time in three years, Israel has a prime
minister who treats Arabs, even Arafat, with respect — and a prime minister known to keep his word. This alone gives the peace process a strong, symbolic jolt — though much of the hard negotiating remains unfinished.