Outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan has been making headlines. A military strike on
Iran would be a “stupid idea,” Dagan said a few weeks ago at a Hebrew University
conference. At a Tel Aviv University conference last week he elaborated that
such an attack “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given
Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.”
In the
Tel Aviv forum, Dagan also complained that Israel had failed to put forward a
peace initiative with the Palestinians and that it had foolishly ignored the
Saudi peace initiative, which promised full diplomatic relations in exchange for
a return to the 1967 lines. With Palestinians geared up to push through a
declaration in the UN General Assembly recognizing a Palestinian along the 1949
armistice lines, Dagan worried that Israel would soon be pushed into a
diplomatic corner.
One day later, last Thursday, he got more specific,
questioning the leadership skills of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and
Defense Minister Ehud Barak – this time through a leaked statement to
journalists. Dagan reportedly expressed his belief that his retirement and the
near-simultaneous retirement of other top security chiefs – former chief of
General Staff Lt-.-Gen. (res.) Gadi Ashkenazi and former Shin Bet head Yuval
Diskin – had taken away a necessary alternative voice in decision making,
particularly regarding any military attack on Iran.
Spoken by a seasoned
military commander and spy master with impeccable credentials and privy to
Israel’s most guarded secrets, Dagan’s comments have understandably shaken up
the political establishment. Here is a man who had remained silent for nearly a
decade, with a long history of dedicated military service behind him, now
apparently morally impelled to speak out against what he perceives to be
existential dangers.
Dagan stepped down at the beginning of the year as a
widely lauded Mossad chief of eight years who was reappointed twice and
reportedly oversaw a string of highly successful operations – from forcing
delays in Iran’s nuclear program, through sabotaging its computers and
assassinating scientists, to setting the groundwork for an attack on a nuclear
reactor in Syria in 2007, to assassinating Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s terror
chief, in 2008.
And this man, decorated with a medal of courage and
deeply influenced by the “never again” dictate of the Holocaust – he kept a
picture on the wall of his office of his rabbi grandfather wearing a pair of
tefillin and talit kneeling before a group of Nazi officers minutes before he
was murdered – has conveyed an unchanging message of warning against an attack
on Iran.
A MAJOR counteroffensive has been launched against Dagan.
Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled (Likud), a former head of IDF Northern
command and Holocaust survivor, claims Dagan’s outspokenness “damages state
security.” Netanyahu’s associates and advisers in the Prime Minister’s Office
have reportedly accused Dagan of “sabotaging democratic institutions.” Science
and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) went one step
further on Sunday, stating that Dagan should stand trial for his comments.
Others have cynically claimed that Dagan is motivated not by the nation’s best
interests but by his personal political ambitions.
Yet if anyone seems
motivated by narrow politics it is Dagan’s critics. One might disagree with him
politically, but what damage to state security can Dagan have possibly caused by
publicly expressing support for the Saudi initiative or voicing concern over the
ramifications of a UN declaration come September? Understandably, Netanyahu and
Barak are not thrilled that they have been singled out for criticism by the
respected former Mossad chief. But to try to silence Dagan with the claim that
he is “sabotaging democratic institutions” is itself hardly the most democratic
act.
And if Dagan believes that it would be unwise for Israel to
singlehandedly attack Iran, not only does he have the right to say so, he has a
moral obligation. As Dagan has rightly pointed out, it was a collective
misconception and a lack of independent thinking that helped lead to Israel’s
unpreparedness for the Yom Kippur War. Though his critics would have us believe
otherwise, Dagan is in no way belittling the danger Iran’s Islamist regime poses
to Israel, nor has he taken the military option “off the table.”
Dagan’s
point is that if Israel worked alone – rather than in conjunction with the US
and Europe – a military strike would probably fail to halt Iran’s progress
toward a nuclear bomb. Worse, it would provide Iran with ostensible
justification for developing nuclear capability to protect itself against “a
belligerent Zionist entity.”
If Dagan’s critics think his analysis is
wrong they should explain why. That, rather than trying to question his motives
and pressing for his silence, is the way to respond to heartfelt concerns
expressed by a man with many merits and priceless experience.