The ongoing diplomatic process between the United States and Iran continues to raise concerns in Israel, sparking a variety of assessments among former Israeli defense officials.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Prof. Jacob Nagel, former head of Israel’s National Security Council and former acting national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that entering negotiations with Iran under the wrong conditions would result in a “clear and absolute victory for the Iranians, as was the case in 2015” during the nuclear deal.
Nagel, now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued that the United States should avoid negotiations until Iran takes verifiable steps to dismantle its remaining nuclear capabilities.
“The United States must not enter negotiations at all, before the Iranians execute in practice a number of actions that will guarantee they will not have fissile material for a nuclear weapon and the ability to produce a bomb, and that this is beyond empty declarations,” Nagel told JNS.
Such steps, he said, must include the complete dismantlement of enrichment facilities, centrifuges and nuclear materials, as well as the disbanding of research teams, weaponization laboratories and testing sites.
Nagel added that any acceptable agreement must also address Iran’s ballistic-missile program, production capabilities and support for terrorist organizations.
“As things seem at the moment from the draft of the agreement, which the Iranians have not even agreed to, none of the above is mentioned, except a partial solution for the Strait of Hormuz, removal of sanctions and injecting resources into Iran,” he said.
If an agreement fails to address Iran’s missile program, Nagel argued, Israel will have to confront the threat on its own.
“Israel will be forced to deal with this by itself, and probably also in other ways that are not only kinetic, including a return to the campaign between the wars in all its shades,” he said.
Nagel also dismissed the idea of seeking side agreements or additional American guarantees to compensate for shortcomings in a potential deal.
“I really do not recommend, and do not think one needs to ask from the United States, agreements, side clauses, understandings and guarantees, for what will be missing, since these have no practical and tangible value,” he said.
Ultimately, Nagel argued that preventing a nuclear Iran will require regime change.
“The only way to guarantee that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon is, of course, by replacing the murderous and corrupt Iranian regime, which will now search for nuclear capabilities at any price,” he said.
Sima Shine, former head of the Research and Evaluation Division of the Mossad and now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, offered a different perspective.
“For Israel, the most important issue is the nuclear one and therefore it needs to ensure that on this issue, if there is an agreement, it will handle all the relevant issues and not only the existing enriched material, future enrichment and intrusive and daily supervision,” Shine told JNS.
She said Israeli policymakers must assume that Iran will continue seeking nuclear weapons capabilities.
“The assumption needs to be that Iran will strive to achieve a nuclear weapon as one of its lessons of the wars that attacked it,” she said.
At the same time, Shine acknowledged that Iran is unlikely to agree to restrictions on its ballistic-missile arsenal.
“On the issue of missiles, there exists Iranian opposition to engage, as was also the case in the Obama agreement,” she said. “I assess that also this time the issue will not be handled and it is clear to everyone that Iran will invest special efforts to improve the missiles and to produce as many as possible because this is in fact their only means of deterrence and defense.”
As a result, she argued, Israel cannot realistically launch repeated preventive strikes whenever Iran expands missile production.
“Israel will have to live with this and will not be able, in my opinion, to go out every time anew to strikes in Iran,” she said.
Noting reports that a future U.S.-Iran agreement could include a mutual nonaggression clause, Shine said Israel should seek explicit American security commitments.
“In these circumstances, it is important that Israel receives an American promise in the wording of Article 5 of the NATO alliance that if Iran attacks Israel, the U.S. will come to its aid,” she said.
Shine rejected the prospect of Israel fighting major military campaigns against Iran every one or two years, particularly without American backing.
Such a scenario, she said, would be “bad and in my opinion, not applicable.”
Once the current conflict ends, Israel will need to think beyond existing assumptions and formulate a new strategy for dealing with Iran, she added.
