Gold was speaking at a panel on Iran at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem.
Currently the head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Gold said to “put the whole thing online” to help find new ways to analyze the data taken in January 2018 in an already mythic Mossad operation, as well as to try to turn the public relations tide against the Islamic Republic.
Also on the panel was former top Defense Ministry official Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, who said that,“the only solution we can have with Iran is to change the regime,” while acknowledging that regime change was “more similar to a dream than reality.”
Discussing the mix of Iranian and Russian influences in Syria, Gilad said Russia, “does not like Iran to be too powerful” and that Moscow had “given Israel practically a free hand” to attack Iran and its proxies in Syria.
He said that Israeli cooperation with Russia should not be overstated, but that the so-called deconfliction mechanism for communicating to ensure Israeli and Russian forces can operate without harming each other was mostly working.
Due to the success of deconfliction and Israeli attacks on Tehran’s attempt to build up forces in Syria against the Jewish state, he said that, “Iran has a diminished presence in Syria,” though warning that “Iran is determined.”
Similarly, former national security adviser Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror said that Iran “didn’t succeed in Syria, but didn’t retreat.”
He expressed significant concern that “the day the US pulls out” of Syria as US President Donald Trump recently announced, “Iran will open a land corridor from Iran through Iraq into Syria – for us this is a huge problem. It will make the logistics of bringing weapons into Syria much easier for the Iranians.”
“We need to find solutions to this new situation,” Amidror added, and should not “expect the Americans to do the job for us.”
The former national security adviser said that the US would need to accept Israeli cooperation with Russia regarding certain aspects of the Syria situation despite the current tensions between Washington and Moscow.
Israel has been concerned in recent years that Tehran was seeking to establish a new front to attack it from Syria and has undertaken thousands of attacks to prevent that front.
On the nuclear front, Amidror said that the Islamic Republic “didn’t jump yet into the nuclear area, but is building long-range missiles and the next generation of centrifuges” to enrich uranium for a bomb.
Further, he said that the secret nuclear archives Iran kept have proven it will not give up the goal of developing nuclear weapons, since that was the only reason it would have held on to and concealed such files after the 2015 nuclear deal.