Natanz

 Was Israel behind the attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz? I suppose the honest answer is that I have no idea, that Israel’s long-standing policy not publicly to comment on incidents like this doesn’t mean that every last thing that happens in the world was the work of Israeli agents. Nor does Israel’s extremely impressive history of reaching into Iran to subvert its nuclear program mean that this incident must too have been the work of Israel. Any savvy journalist will tell you what a mistake it is to assume that all who benefit from a crime were necessarily its perpetrators. And surely the same is true of acts that make the world—even if just briefly and temporarily—safer, saner, and more secure. The United States certainly benefits from this week’s attack on Natanz. So do a significant number of Near Eastern countries aside from Israel. But that doesn’t mean it was the work of their agents or American ones any more than the fact that Israel too benefits from it makes it their work. Of course, there’s also the “who else could possibly have pulled this off?” argument to consider. Let’s leave it at that!

The point was clearly not to damage but to humiliate, a concept with which Americans are more than familiar. The point of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was not to damage some specific piece of the building or some office inside it, after all, but to demonstrate that the world’s most powerful nation was nonetheless not quite powerful enough to defend the epicenter of its military might from a group of suicidal nobodies who managed to take over a civilian airplane. Whether that is a fair conclusion to draw is a different question, of course—but if the fourth plane, the one that went down in Pennsylvania, had continued on to crash into the Capitol, as seems to have been the plan, the point of the operation would have been infinitely clearer. And, of course, the fact that the average American didn’t really think of the World Trade Center as a symbol of America before 9/11 didn’t mean that the terrorists who destroyed the towers didn’t think of them in precisely that way.

And so, similarly, have the Iranians been shown incapable of defending the single most tightly guarded site in the entire country, the nuclear research and development facility at Natanz. Nor does the Iranian leadership have the solace that could conceivably come from describing this attack as an eventuality they hadn’t imagined possible: in 2010, the Stuxnet virus—widely believed to have been jointly developed by the United States and Israel—was unleashed against the same facility in an attack that destroyed a thousand centrifuges. Nor was that the only incident: just last July the facility suffered a mysterious explosion that Iran later described as an act of sabotage. So they can’t have not known the facility was a target—which was completely obvious anyway—and the Iranians still couldn’t keep it secure from outside attack. Of course, these are the same people who could not keep the Israelis from removing 110,000 documents relating to their own nuclear program from a warehouse in Teheran in the course of a single night in 2018 and spiriting all of it off to Israel. (The haul, including videotapes, documents, and photographs, weighed half a ton. So it was hardly something a Mossad agent could carry under his or her jacket on the way out. For a very gripping account of that whole incident that appeared a few years ago in Business Insider, click here.) And it hasn’t been a particularly healthy time for Iranian nuclear scientists themselves either, who have been taken out at such a rate that there is actually a Wikipedia article entitled, “Assassination of Iranian Nuclear Scientists.”

The reviews of this week’s operation have been mixed. Certainly, anything at all that pushes the specter of a nuclear Iran even slightly further into the future makes world a safer place in the short run. But the real point of the operation was to deny Iran the leverage it might otherwise have had in Vienna as the U.S. enters into indirect talks with Iran regarding the possibility of reviving the 2015 Iran deal that President Obama considered one of the signature accomplishments of his presidency and which President Trump abandoned. That deal, about which I wrote many times in this space in 2015, was negotiated with an eye towards preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but succeeded only in delaying what John Kerry and President Obama apparently ended up accepting as an inevitable future development that could possibly be delayed but not actually prevented. And so it was: instead of preventing a future nuclear Iran, the 2015 deal was formulated to lead directly to that end as the sun would sadly set over sunshine clause after sunshine clause until, by 2030, there would finally be no meaningful impediments at all holding Iran back from joining the nuclear club. The hopeful assumption that that somehow won’t happen—because the Iranians will have demanded and achieved regime change by then and no longer be the belligerent nation it is today, or because the Iranians will for some reason agree to negotiate some sort of new agreement before the 2015 one expires, or because Iran will have abandoned its current predilection for sponsoring terrorist groups across the Middle East (and beyond) by 2030 and become a peaceful and peace-loving nation—that assumption seemed then and surely seems now to be rooted far more in wishful thinking than in any reasonable assessment of how things will probably be in nine years’ time.

And so we are, in a sense, back to the future. Our American administration still thinks that the Iranians can be bribed to abandon one of their signature programs with the promise of relaxed, or even totally abandoned, sanctions. (Then-Vice-President Biden was wholly supportive of the 2015 accord and seems now to feel honor-bound not to reject the set of premises upon which it was based.) The Iranians, shamed by their inability to defend their single best-guarded site from outside interference, feel concomitantly honor-bound to abandon neither their nuclear program nor their bellicose rhetoric. And Israel, as aware as ever that it can ultimately count only on itself for protection against a nation whose bloodthirsty leaders make no secret of their desire to eradicate the Jewish state by murdering its Jewish inhabitants, is somehow trying not to alienate the Biden administration at the same time it makes it clear that if the world proves unable or unwilling to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, then it will have to look after the matter on its own. This week’s incident at Natanz was meant to make that point crystal-clear. Which it surely did, and to all concerned too and not solely the Iranians.

Every nation as a mythic background rooted in the past against which it moves forward into the future. Sometimes these background images are rooted in hoary antiquity, but other times they are far more recent and well documented. Iran, one of the world’s two true super-powers when the Roman Empire was the other, recalls vividly its glory-years and today feels underrated and underestimated. And joining the nuclear club is thus perceived as one step towards righting that wrong. That is almost certainly will not work that way—Pakistan and North Korea are both members of the nuclear club and no one considers either a leader-state in the forum of nations—seems not to matter. Nor does it seem to matter that that being known as a sponsor of world-wide terror has made it infinitely less likely that Iran will ever take the place among the nations of the world its leaders feel so certain that their nation deserves.

Israel, for its part, has its own history guiding it forward. Americans tend to wave away as mere bluster Iranian statements about destroying Israel and murdering its inhabitants. Nor do most Americans seem at all impressed by military parades in Teheran featuring missiles bearing the names the Israeli cities they might someday help annihilate. When the Iranian Prime Minister opens insults and mocks the martyrs who died in the Shoah as part of his effort to denigrate the Jewish state—that too seems so far over the top to most Americans as to land somewhere between grotesque and laughable. But that is not even slightly how Israelis see any of the above. Nor is it how I myself see any of it.

For most Israelis—and for Jews like myself—every day is Yom Hashoah. When the leader of an oil-rich nation struggling to gain nuclear weaponry talks about annihilating the six million Jews of Israel, we listen carefully and the very last thing we do in response is wave away the remark as mere rhetoric. The world did just that in the 1930s, preferring to suppose that Hitler couldn’t possibly have really meant it about ridding the world of the Jewish problem by ridding the world of Jews. To label the 2015 Iran Accord as the 21^st century version of Munich Agreement of 1938 is exaggerated, but, like all exaggerations, it is only intelligible in the first place because it contains a kernel of truth. Nor is it reasonable to lay Treblinka at the feet of Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier—neither was thinking of genocide when they gave away somebody else’s country to a madman for the sake, they naively thought, of achieving peace in their time. But despite the noble intentions of its non-Nazi signers, the Munich Agreement did, in fact, lead directly to the outbreak of the Second World War not a year later. And not six full years after that, six million European Jews were dead, as also were almost 75 million other citizens of the world.

For Israelis, the fear of genocide is real and constant. This is hard for outsiders to grasp—in our nation, even groups that face daily prejudice and discrimination don’t fear actual genocide—but the reality of genocide is the beating heart of the consciousness of all Israelis, or at least the vast majority of them. As a result, when the mullahs talk about destroying Israel and murdering its people, Israelis take that seriously. And that is why Israel must and will do what it takes to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The world knows that, of course, which is what allows it to gather in such refined and dignified halls as the Grand Hotel Wien and over Viennese pastries politely to chat about ways to bring our nation back into the accord. I’m sure the coffee is excellent too! But, at the end of the day, none of it will matter: this week’s attack on Natanz makes it perfectly clear that when all the endless talking is over and even more pieces of paper are signed by whomever signs them, what will prevent Iran from using nuclear weapons to achieve its nefarious ends outside its own borders will primarily be a function of the Israelis’ refusal to allow that to happen.