Israelis debate merits of strike against Iran

Los Angeles Times

JERUSALEM — With international efforts to increase sanctions against Iran at a standstill, many Israelis believe their nation alone stands in the way of Tehran eventually building nuclear weapons.

But officials and analysts in Jerusalem also acknowledge that a unilateral attack is fraught with danger and might fail to cripple Iran’s bomb-making abilities. Much of the international community quietly wants Israel to launch a strike, the officials say, but only if it succeeds.

“They will be very happy if we do their dirty work for them,” said Efraim Inbar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University. “The world is moving into ‘What can we do about it?’ mode. There is a strong instinct here to do it on our own.”

To many in Israel, the situation is reminiscent of 1981, when the Jewish state acted on its own in bombing the Osirak reactor in Iraq and last year, when it launched a unilateral strike on a suspected nuclear site in Syria.

A wild card in the equation is Israel’s own political situation. With a national election to select a prime minister on the horizon, no leader in Jerusalem is a dove concerning Iran.

This month, the U.N. Security Council voted to extend sanctions, but failed to add additional strictures. Immediately after, Israeli Cabinet minister Benjamin Ben-Elizer charged that “the world has resigned itself to the fact that Iran is going to be a nuclear power. ... This means only one thing: that we have to look out for ourselves.”