Israelis See Iran as a Nuclear Menace

The Risk Report
Volume 1 Number 7 (September 1995) Page 9

Disappointed that U.S. allies haven't joined the embargo against Iran, lobbyists for Israel are urging the U.S. Congress to adopt legislation that could punish foreign companies that do business with Iran. One of Israel's top strategic priorities is to prevent Tehran from getting the bomb.

In April, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) endorsed a bill sponsored by New York Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato that would ban U.S. trade with foreign companies caught selling sensitive technology to Iran. A former Pentagon official who tracks Iran's weapon programs says the legislation "scared the White House to death" and helped push President Clinton to ban trade with Iran despite protests from American companies.

Israeli defense officials and analysts believe Washington is the key to stopping Iran from going nuclear. "Washington is the litmus test," Uri Lubrani tells the Risk Report, "If Washington will take the Iranian threat seriously, others will follow." Mr. Lubrani is a senior defense official who was Israel's ambassador to Iran for almost seven years before the Shah fell. He believes Iran will not hesitate to use the bomb and will pursue all avenues to it, "even if it means mind-boggling sums to buy a device off the shelf. How to stop them and how to delay it that is the practical problem."

An Israeli government analyst who requested anonymity says that "in strategic terms, Iran has become the most important threat" because Tehran opposes the mere existence of Israel. He calls inflamatory statements by the Iranian leadership "the old rhetoric one used to hear in the sixties" when all Arab states called for Israel's destruction. Even Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, considered a "pragmatist" by the West, confirmed the analyst's view in a December 1994 interview: "While others talk about liberating Palestine in terms of territories, we mean the liberation of all Palestine," he told the Iranian press.

That is the reason many Israeli analysts see a nuclear-armed Iran as the top strategic challenge facing Israel in the coming decade. Ephraim Kam, an analyst at the Jaffee Center for International Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Risk Report that most Israeli and American experts agree that Iran decided in the late 1980s to develop a military nuclear capability, or at least the infrastructure needed to give it the nuclear option. Kam believes the Iranian threat will increase over the next decade, in part because the Iran-Iraq war is over and because "Iran is run by a radical regime that desires to change the status quo."