Israel Cannot Tolerate Iran as a Nuclear-Threshold Power

By Mark Antonio Wright

Tuesday, October 01, 2024

 

The news that Iran has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at targets inside Israel has moved the widening war in the Middle East to a new and very dangerous stage.

 

Israel will not be able to tolerate the prospect of a hostile, nuclear-threshold power that is in the business of repeatedly launching hundreds of missiles at its territory. No sovereign nation could — let alone a nation that conceives of itself as the primary and ultimate guarantor of the Jewish people’s survival.

 

The origins of the present crisis go back many years and certainly encompass the Obama administration’s attempt to conciliate the revolutionary regime in Tehran through the failed 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a.k.a. the Iran nuclear deal. During those negotiations, the implicit position of the United States government towards Israel was that Iran’s ballistic-missile program would be no threat because Iran’s nuclear program would not be militarized under the deal and, conversely, if Iran’s nuclear program ever were militarized, Iran’s ballistic missiles would be no grave threat to Israel anyway because the Iranian regime would know better than to shoot ballistic missiles at the State of Israel.

 

That has all changed now. For the second time in six months, the Islamic Republic of Iran has shown that it has ballistic missiles with enough reach to hit targets protected by Israel’s air defenses and that, critically, it has the will to use them. And Iran is now — right now — a threshold nuclear state.

 

The Biden administration clearly has no interest, in the last weeks of a presidential campaign, in either a wider war in the Middle East or in lifting a finger to destroy an Iranian weapons program that it has minimized for four years. But I don’t think that Israel wants this fight right now, either. As their operations against Lebanese Hezbollah intensify, Benjamin Netanyahu would prefer to concentrate on securing Israel’s north and allowing tens of thousands of Israeli evacuees to return to their homes. Jerusalem would prefer to deal with the Iranians later.

 

However, I fully expect Israel to now execute a campaign to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. This may include air and missile strikes against targets in Iran. The Israelis will want to send a very public and very visible message that it is a bad idea to shoot missiles at Israeli cities. Deterrence must be restored. But I also expect significant covert operations against the Iranian nuclear program and its personnel, akin to what we have seen in recent weeks against Hezbollah’s command and control.

 

For ten years, many Americans and Europeans have hoped and wished that the Iranian nuclear issue would just go away. But that intractable problem was always a clear and present danger to Israel. I now expect the Israelis to defend themselves and their interests.