Israel is behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof, writes Ayman El-Amir When informed that Israel had bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirack in 1981, former US president Ronald Reagan's reaction was "Well, boys will be boys". The US was not happy with the Israeli strike but would do no more than frown upon its naughty ally. Today, US Middle East policy is caught between objecting to any unsanctioned Israeli military action that could jeopardise US interests in the region and acknowledging Israel's right to self-defence. Iran's development of nuclear technology is now the focus of intensified US-Israeli debate. There are indications that Israel is chomping at the bit to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities while the US is trying to hold it back. That, at least, is the impression made by the recent flurry of visits to Israel by senior US officials. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is the third high-ranking official to visit Israel in five months and reassure its radical leaders the US understands and supports their concerns, if not their desire to jump the gun. He was preceded by CIA Director Leon Panetta in May and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March. Both Gates and Vice-President Joseph Biden have admonished Israel on different occasions about the dangerous consequences of a military action against Iran. While Israel's short history is replete with wars of aggression against its neighbours, a military strike against Iran's military and nuclear facilities is fraught with more risks than Israel has ever faced. Israel clearly does not want to have a rival challenging its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. It has long regarded superior military power as the best guarantee of security in an Arab world unwilling to accept past Israeli conquests, occupation and expropriation of lands or the gradual liquidation of the Palestinian people. Iran's rise as a military power in the region challenges Israeli domination. Such is the "existential threat" its political salesmen are marketing in the West. Israel argues that the emergence of any nuclear power other than itself would drag the region into a nuclear arms race. The view from Tehran could not be more different. For Iran the development of nuclear technology is a matter of national pride. It has nothing to do with hardliners or reformists, except in the way this sense of pride is articulated. Iran, which is believed to have invented the game of chess at the same time as China, is playing the US, the European Union and Israel. It has no intention of giving up its pursuit of nuclear technology because of Israel's hysterical outbursts and threats. It seems willing to risk a pre-emptive Israeli strike and retaliate, and to take on more Western-imposed sanctions, in pursuit of its goals. Iran's Arab neighbours are conducting themselves no better than Israel. They are participating in psychological warfare against Iran. Israel has often boasted that it has at least one thing in common with its closest Arab neighbours: they agree that Iran is the major threat to Middle East stability. Some Arab countries have launched their own brand of propaganda against Iran, accusing it of seeking Shia denomination over Sunni Muslims. It is three decades since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Yet all of a sudden, in the past three years, secret Shia cells are being uncovered. Senior Sunni clergymen are now a regular fixture of newspaper articles, television interviews, talk shows and public debates decrying the dangerous spread of Shia orthodoxy. For Arab states in the Gulf, and major Arab countries of the Middle East, the concern is less about the spread of Shia influence than Iran's revolutionary rhetoric destabilising corrupt and decrepit regimes that hang on to power against the will of their people. Most Arab states with tottering autocratic regimes depend on the US and Western powers for their political survival. As a consequence they are falling in line behind the US- Israeli psychological campaign. Some of them, like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, with growing Muslim-Shia minorities, have resisted any call for a regional defence alliance including Iran. While most Arab Gulf states are dotted with US military, naval and air bases, Abu Dhabi now has a French military base, inaugurated in May by President Nicolas Sarkozy, in addition to the US air-base at Dhafra, just outside the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Some of these bases were upgraded to support the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. With the US military presence in Iraq being scaled back or redeployed, the only purpose of Western military expansion in the Gulf region is to hem in Iran. This overkill capacity is likely to prove a danger, particularly if Israel decides to embark on one of its blitzkrieg adventures. It would seem that despite all rhetoric to the contrary European governments believe it will be almost impossible to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear enrichment programme. They are willing, given certain guarantees, to live with a nuclear Iran. After all, they have learned to live with a nuclear India and Pakistan, and it was the French who helped Israel build its nuclear industry, including weapon-grade enrichment. For more than 60 years nuclear powers, even in developing countries, have behaved responsibly. While the US and the former Soviet Union almost came to blows in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, India and Pakistan, which have fought three major wars, have yet to resort to the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Both countries developed their nuclear arsenals under the eyes of the Reagan administration which chose, in the case of Pakistan, to look the other way, and in the case of India to impose symbolic sanctions that amounted to an exceedingly gentle rap on the knuckle. These were later lifted and replaced by nuclear cooperation agreements between the two countries. Israel's building of its nuclear weapon programme is a case of Western political hypocrisy par excellence. Israel's nuclear programme has been the secret everyone knows since the Nixon administration decided in 1969 that the US could live with an "undeclared nuclear Israel". Egypt, on the other hand, was coerced into signing the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it ratified in 1982, opting out of the nuclear club. Given that Iran will not abandon its nuclear programme, Western countries have the option of accepting a nuclear Iran on the same premise they accepted a nuclear Israel. The West will also have to provide specific security guarantees to countries that are concerned about such a development, including Israel, something likely to prove more easily said than done. In facing down a nuclear IranIsrael has one of two options: either to accept a serious, just and lasting settlement of the Palestinian problem and the Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war, thus undermining Iran's alliance with radical forces in the region, or launch a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Israeli acceptance of the first option is just too good to be true. Yet its ability to wage a strike is far from certain without US support. Caught between such hard choices Israel is behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof. Its argument for military action against Iran is wearing thin and could endanger the entire region, US interests included. Yet if it cannot even accept the removal of settlements, repeatedly judged illegal and an obstacle to peace, it is hard to see how Israel can reach a final and acceptable settlement with the Palestinians. Risking military action against Iran in the hope that the international community will hail a successful surgical strike that leaves a minimum of civilian casualties and puts an end to the Iranian headache could be tempting for Israel. The other, unexplored possibility, is to let Iran develop its nuclear capability without Western countries extending official recognition to it and thus create a balance that could force Israel into a settlement and eliminate tensions in the Middle East.
