The ambitions of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, as harboured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, have been defeated by internal opposition, a growing number of observers have come to believe in the wake of dramatic opposing statements by prominent Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres.

The picture emerging is one of the prime and defence ministers’ isolation in advocating for unilateral Israeli action. It has been known for some time that the chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Benny Gantz, and Tamir Pardo, the head of the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence agency, both oppose a strike on Iran.

This knowledge in itself is unusual. While such sentiments can be leaked, both Gantz and Pardo have been clear in media interviews that they do not share Netanyahu and Barak’s assessments regarding the immediacy of the Iranian threat or the utility of a military strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is worth noting that both Gantz and Pardo were appointed by the current government.

Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in the daily Yediot Ahoronoth on Aug. 10, listed not only Gantz and Pardo among current military leaders opposing an Israeli attack on Iran, but also Air Force chief Amir Eshel, Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi and General Security Services (Shin Bet) director Yoram Cohen, in what amounts to a consensus among Israel’s top defence and intelligence leaders.

Public disagreement

But it was statements by Peres and by the former IDF Director of Military Intelligence General Uri Saguy that exposed the extent of Netanyahu and Barak’s isolation and criticised Israeli’s leaders on points rarely raised in public.

Peres told Israel’s Channel 2: “It is now clear to us that we cannot go it alone. We can forestall (Iran’s nuclear progress); therefore it’s clear to us that we have to work together with…America.”

“Iran is a global threat, to the U.S. and Israel alike,” he said, adding that he was convinced that the U.S. would take action when necessary.

Peres’s statements were widely interpreted as criticism of Netanyahu’s and Barak’s ongoing attempts to pressure President Obama to attack Iran and the perception that Netanyahu was working to unseat Obama in favour of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who is on much friendlier terms with Netanyahu.

There was also a widespread belief that Peres was warning that the tactics Netanyahu and Barak were employing with the U.S. threaten to harm the “special relationship” between the two countries.

While Israelis value their freedom to act on their own, they also recognise the need for U.S. support, as the United States is the only major power that has consistently supported controversial Israeli policies and actions. The idea that the Israeli government may be directly interfering with U.S. politics is an extremely unpopular one in Israel.

Diminished credibility

For his part, General Saguy cast doubt on the ability of Netanyahu and Barak to lead the country under dire circumstances. A reporter who interviewed Saguy for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz described his views of both.

“Saguy does not trust (Netanyahu) because he has not seen him make…one single important decision. He does not trust Barak because he’s seen the results of many important decisions the minister has made, as chief of staff, prime minister and defence minister,” the reporter wrote.

This view from a highly respected Israeli military leader seriously undermines the credibility of Israel’s two leading decision-makers with regard to military action. Combined with the military and intelligence consensus, the public statements suggest the possibility of an open revolt against the current leadership if Barak and Netanyahu try to move forward with an attack on Iran.

Netanyahu, however, sharply criticised Peres for “overstepping” his role as president, a largely ceremonial office in Israel. That sharp retort, as well as Netanyahu’s continued campaign among important Israeli party leaders, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, could indicate that he has not yet given up on finding a way to attack Iran.

It is widely believed that at least part of the Israeli strategy in beating the war drums on Iran is to pressure the Obama administration into acting against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu surely fears that if Israel is no longer believed to be seriously considering a unilateral strike, the urgency in Washington, already far less than he would like it to be, will diminish considerably.

Challenges for Obama

Obama’s position on Iran has been remarkably consistent: pursue sanctions and diplomatic engagement in the hope that Iran will agree to the monitoring of its nuclear program to ensure that weapons are not being developed. Obama has also pledged that all options, including a military one, remain open to prevent Iran from obtaining such a weapon.

An Israeli strike could put Obama in a very difficult position: he could either risk staying out of a conflict not of his making, which would surely set Israel’s supporters in the United States ablaze in opposition to him, or he could support, either directly or indirectly, the Israeli war effort, which would make it easy to cast him to blame when oil prices skyrocket as a result.

With the Israeli threat diminished, at least for the moment, Obama can continue to pursue his approach to Iran with a reasonable level of confidence that this will not hurt his chances of re-election in November. That surely does not please Netanyahu, but unless the situation changes in Israel, he will find it very difficult to raise this issue again before the election.

Two recent interviews apparently given by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak provide evidence that the new wave of reports in the Israeli press about a possible Israeli attack on Iran is a means by which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak hope to leverage a U.S. shift toward Israel’s red lines on Iran’s nuclear programme.

An interview given by a “senior official in Jerusalem” to Ynet News Wednesday Israeli time makes the first explicit linkage between the unilateral Israeli option and the objective of securing the agreement of President Barack Obama to the Israeli position that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapons “capability”.

In the Ynet News interview, the unnamed official is reported as explicitly offering a deal to the Obama administration: if Obama were to “toughten its stance” with regard to the Iranian nuclear programme, Israel “may rule out a unilateral attack”.

Ynet News reporter Ron Ben Yishai writes that Obama “must repeat publicly (at the U.N. General Assembly, for instance), that the U.S. will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that Israel has a right to defend itself, independently.”

Obama made both statements, in effect, at the conference of the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but has not repeated them since then.

But the official added a more far-reaching condition for dropping the option of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, according to Ben Yishai: Obama must also make it clear that his “red line” is no longer evidence of an intention to enrich to weapons-grade levels but the Israeli red line that Iran must not be allowed to have the enrichment capability to do so if Iran were to make the decision.

In the context of that radical shift in the U.S. red line, the Netanyahu government would view the public statements demanded by the official as “a virtual commitment by the U.S. to act, militarily if needed,” according to Ben Yishai.

“The senior Israeli official estimated that should Washington accept the main demands, Israel would reconsider its unilateral measures and coordinate them with the U.S.,” Ben Yishai writes.

The interview indicates that what Netanyahu and Barak are seeking is a U.S. posture on Iran’s nuclear programme that Israel could use to maximise domestic pressure on Obama to attack Iran if he is reelected.

That Israeli interest in leveraging the threat of a unilateral military option to change the U.S. public posture toward Iran is also suggested in an Aug. 10 interview by Haaretz with an official whom interviewer Ari Shavit calls “the decisionmaker”. The unnamed senior official was described in a way that left little doubt that it was in fact Barak.

The unnamed official explicitly linked the Netanyahu effort to keep the unilateral option in play with the need to influence U.S. policy. “If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act,” he said, “the likelihood of an American action will decrease.”

He also hinted at a debate within the Israeli government – presumably between Netanyahu and Barak themselves – over what could realistically be expected from the Obama administration on Iran. “So we cannot wait a year to find out who was right,” said the official, “the one who said that the likelihood of an American action is high or the one who said the likelihood of an American action is low.”

That allusion to different assessments of U.S. action by the Obama administration suggests that Barak may have been arguing that the threat of a unilateral Israeli attack could be used to leverage a shift in U.S. declaratory policy short of an outright U.S. threat to attack Iran. Barak has generally characterised the policy of the Obama administration as tougher toward Iran than has Netanyahu, who has described it in perjorative terms.

Invoking a “genuine built-in gap” between differing U.S. and Israeli “red lines”, the senior official said, “Ostensibly the Americans could easily bridge this gap. They could say clearly that if by next spring the Iranians still have a nuclear programme, they will destroy it.”

But he suggested that such a simple U.S. threat is not realistic. “Americans are not making this simple statement because countries don’t make these kinds of statements to each other,” said the official, adding, “The American president cannot commit now to a decision that he will or will not make six months from now.” The implication was that someone else had been insisting on such an Obama commitment.

The conditions for a deal outlined in the Ynet New interview may represent the more indirect stance Barak was hoping would be a more realistic possibility. But there is no reason to believe that Obama, who has resisted pressure from his own administration to shift his red line in the direction of Israel’s position, would accept such a deal.

The evidence from these two interviews that Israel is eager, if not desperate, for a deal with the Obama administration on Iran suggests that the new wave of reports in the Israeli press in the first two weeks of August about the unilateral Israeli option cannot be taken at face value.

The New York Times reported on Aug. 12 a “frenzy of newspaper articles and television reports over the weekend…suggesting Netanyahu has all but made the decision to attack Iran unilaterally this fall.” But Netanyahu and Barak have always been careful to distinguish between consideration of a unilateral military option and a commitment to carrying it out.

A central objective of the recent press reports – and of the larger Netanyahu-Barak campaign that began earlier this year – has been to make the idea of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites credible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

On Aug. 10, for exampIe, Israel’s television Channel 2 reported that Netanyahu and Barak had been saying in recent conversations that there is “relatively slight chance” that an attack on Iran would “result in a full-scale regional war in the circumstances that have emerged in the Middle East in last few weeks or months.” The report said the “working assumption” is that, although Hezbollah and Hamas would retaliate, “it is assessed that Syria will not react.”

It is neither Syria nor Hezbollah, however, but Iran itself that that worries Israeli military and intelligence officials the most. When challenged by Haaretz’s Shavit on the likely serious consequences of war with Iran, given the hundreds of Iranian missiles capable of hitting Israeli cities, “the decision-maker” argued, “(W)hat characterizes the Iranians all along is caution and patience.”

That argument, aimed at making the threatened attack seem reasonable, involves an obvious contradiction: on one hand, Iran is too cautious to retaliate against an Israeli attack, but on the other hand, it is too irrational to refrain from going nuclear, despite the obvious risks.

The Barak argument on Iran contradicted Netanyahu’s assertion, most recently reported in an Aug. 5 Channel 2 report, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is “an irrational leader”.

Barak also argued in the Haaretz interview that Israel could delay the Iranian nuclear programme for eight to 10 years – enough time, he suggested, for regime change to take place. Top Israeli military and intelligence officials have been reported as believing, however, that an attack on Iran would ensure and accelerate Iran’s move toward a nuclear weapon rather than delay it.

In fact, Barak declared on Sep. 17, 2009, “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel.” And in a Nov. 17, 2011 interview with Charlie Rose, he even denied that the Iranian nuclear programme was aimed at Israel.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.