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The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)
Calling Netanyahu's Bluff
Israeli television's Channel 10 recently conducted a poll on whether to attack Iran. Forty-six percent of Israelis were opposed to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, while 32 percent supported a strike and 22 percent were undecided. These results didn't surprise me. Whether they were the so called “opinion makers,” the proverbial “man on the street,” or my taxi driver, many of the Israelis I've been meeting here in Tel Aviv were rejecting the idea of initiating a military campaign against Iran without American backing, and had very little confidence in the ability of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his sidekick, defense minister Ehud Barak, to lead them into a new Middle East war.If a similar public mood had existed in the United States at the beginning of the Iraq war, former president George W. Bush could not have counted on the support of the American people for a decision to do a "regime change" in Baghdad.
It is perhaps a testimony to the vibrancy of Israeli democracy and its free press that the country is having a real debate about Iran. Unlike the subservient role that Congress and the elite media played in the months leading to the U.S. military adventure in Mesopotamia, top Israeli newspapers, members of the national security establishment, and even its first citizen and elder statesman, President Shimon Peres—operating in a country whose security margins are clearly narrower than those of its global patron—have all expressed strong opposition to the threat by Netanyahu-Barak duo to strike at Iran without receiving a green light from Washington.
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