Israel at War: Inside the Nuclear Showdown With Iran (2 page)

July 18, 2012, was a gorgeous summer day. It was bright and clear, with blue skies, white wispy clouds, and a slight breeze—the perfect day to start a vacation. The charter flight from Tel Aviv landed in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas at 4:50 p.m. local time. The more than 150 passengers—mostly Israelis but a few other nationalities as well—got off the plane and headed to the baggage claim, joking and laughing, glad to be away from the pressure cooker of the Middle East and finally on a low-cost, low-stress holiday. Nothing seemed amiss.

Waiting for them outside the terminal were several chartered tour buses. Soon the Israelis were double-checking their itineraries, finding which bus they had been assigned to, loading their luggage under the coaches, and climbing aboard. No one noticed the long-haired young man lurking in the shadows, wearing a blue-and-white T-shirt, striped shorts, a baseball cap, and sunglasses and carrying a large, bulky backpack. Even if they had, he didn’t seem threatening. In many ways he looked just like them—young and carefree, glad to be traveling, eager to get away from it all.

But moments before one of the buses—filled with forty-two Israelis—closed its doors and began to pull away, the young man with the backpack approached, tried to board, and then depressed the detonator in his hand. In a blinding flash and a deafening boom, his backpack exploded. A massive, horrific explosion ripped through the bus. The shock wave rocked the entire airport. Shattered glass, shards of molten metal, and burning human body parts flew everywhere. Flames shot out of the shell of the bus. Thick, black smoke poured into the sky and could be seen for miles in every direction.

When the smoke cleared, nearly three dozen Israelis lay terribly wounded, some bleeding profusely and shrieking in pain. Five Israelis lay dead.
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The Bulgarian bus driver was also killed instantly. All that remained of the suicide bomber was his severed head, found hundreds of yards away from the blast.

Among the dead was a pregnant Israeli woman named Kochava Shriki. Her husband, Itzik, was wounded in the blast but survived. “Those evil murderers,” said one of Kochava’s grieving sisters. “She [was] a 42-year-old pregnant woman. . . . They were just going away for a three-day vacation and they had to return in a coffin.” Said another sibling, “She was our little sister. She had no children and got pregnant after four years of treatment. The day she left for the trip, she received the news that she was pregnant.”
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One local government official described the attack as “the largest terrorist attack against Bulgaria in our modern history.”

“All the signs are pointing to Iran,” said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to evidence gathered by Israeli and American intelligence agencies. “In the past few months we’ve seen Iran try to target Israelis in Thailand, [India], Georgia, Cyprus and more. . . . The murderous Iranian terror continues to target innocent people. Iranian terror is spreading worldwide. . . . Israel will react to it with force.” Netanyahu noted that the attack came on the eighteenth anniversary of an Iranian-backed terrorist attack on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that killed eighty-five people and injured hundreds more.
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Iran’s Unanswered War

Make no mistake: Iran is already at war with Israel and with the United States.

Since the dawn of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his band of Shia Muslim radicals overthrew the pro-Western shah and came to power in Tehran, the leaders of Iran have declared war on America and “the Zionists.” They have declared America the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.” They have called for the annihilation of both. They have encouraged millions of Muslims in Iran and throughout the world to pray and chant,
“Death to America! Death to Israel!”
They have also built, funded, trained, and armed terrorist organizations to kill Americans and Israelis, seemingly with impunity.

On October 23, 1983, for example, agents of Ayatollah Khomeini used a suicide bomber to plow a truck filled with explosives into the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 Americans. The attack resulted in “the largest non-nuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the Earth,” according to a U.S. federal court judge who found the Islamic Republic of Iran guilty of perpetrating the crime. The idea for the attack came from Iran. The funding for the attack came from Iran. The driver of the truck was an Iranian. What’s more, U.S. military intelligence intercepted a message between Tehran and Damascus directing the Iranian ambassador to instruct the leader of the terrorist group “to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.” The evidence presented in federal court of Iran’s complicity in the Beirut attacks was so clear and compelling that the judge ordered Iran to pay $2.6 billion in damages to the families of the American victims. Yet despite this blatant act of war, the Reagan administration did not go to war against Iran.
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On June 25, 1996, Iranian-backed terrorists detonated a tanker truck filled with plastic explosives in front of the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, all but destroying the nearest building. The attack brutally killed 19 American military servicemen and one Saudi citizen and wounded 372 others. This case eventually went to federal court as well. The evidence of Iran’s complicity was so damning the judge ordered the Islamic Republic of Iran to pay $253 million in damages to the families of the American victims. Yet despite this blatant act of war, the Clinton administration did not go to war against Iran.
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Since 2001, Iranian-backed terrorists in Gaza have fired more than 12,700 rockets and mortars at the cities and towns along Israel’s southern border. Through Hamas and its other Palestinian terror allies, Iran has killed at least 44 Israelis and has physically injured more than 1,700 over the past decade through rocket attacks alone. At the same time, Iran has put the lives of a million innocent Israeli civilians—both Jews and Arabs—in danger and has caused everyone in southern Israel to battle the constant fear that at any moment of any day a rocket, missile, or mortar round could strike them or their children with only seconds of warning.
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In the Israeli town of Sderot, located on the border with the Gaza Strip, almost half the population has fled. Nearly everyone with the financial means to move away from Sderot has done so, seeking new homes, jobs, and lives outside of rocket range. Most small business owners have left Sderot as well. Unemployment is high. Wages are low. Those who remain are overwhelmingly poor—widows, single moms and their kids, seniors living on fixed incomes, and impoverished Holocaust survivors. Many feel forgotten and alone. Thousands suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though it’s hardly “post.” The rockets keep coming, and so do the trauma and the stress.

Lest there be any doubt what country is ultimately responsible for all these attacks, Palestinian terror leaders routinely visit Tehran and openly meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has publicly praised the Iranian regime for directly helping his terrorist organization work for “victory” over Israel.
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Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar has also publicly sung the praises of Iran’s “limitless support” of Palestinian terror attacks against the Jewish State.
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Iran also continues to provide seemingly “limitless support” to the Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon. In 2006, Hezbollah forces attacked Israeli soldiers patrolling the border. Then they launched some four thousand rockets and missiles at Israeli civilian population centers in what became known as the Second Lebanon War. For more than one month, a million Israeli citizens were forced to live in bomb shelters or flee to the south to avoid the death and destruction raining from the skies. The Israel Defense Forces struck back hard against Hezbollah and inflicted serious damage to the terror group’s infrastructure before eventually accepting a cease-fire arrangement. Yet Israel did not launch a full-blown war of retaliation directly against Iran.

Similarly, on December 27, 2008, the IDF launched a military blitz into Gaza—a brief war known in Israel as “Operation Cast Lead”—in an attempt to neutralize Hamas’s ability to barrage Israel with rocket attacks. The IDF offensive did significantly slow the rocket and mortar attacks but by no means stopped them completely. Indeed, in the last four years alone, the Iranian-backed terrorists in Gaza have fired more than one thousand rockets, missiles, and mortar rounds at southern Israel. In response, the IDF has retaliated against the terrorist cells and leaders in Gaza. The IDF has also targeted factories that make the rockets and warehouses stockpiling weapons. Thus far, however, Israel has not launched a full-blown war against Iran, the architect and originator of all these attacks.

Iran’s Nuclear Threat

However, the worst may be yet to come. Terror groups in Gaza that regularly purchase rockets, missiles, and other arms from Iran are beginning to import from Iran even larger, more powerful, more precise, and longer-range rockets and missiles, adding to the threat and the stress.

At the same time, since the Second Lebanon War, Iran has helped Hezbollah build up an arsenal of nearly sixty-five thousand rockets and missiles, many of which are far more powerful and precise than the weapons in the Hamas arsenal. Secret cables from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv back to the State Department in Washington (exposed by WikiLeaks) reveal that the Israelis anticipate Hezbollah will fire four hundred to six hundred missiles at the Jewish State every day for at least two months should a major new war begin, including one hundred missiles a day fired directly at Tel Aviv, Israel’s most populated city.
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Most worrisome of all, of course, is Iran’s highly advanced program to build nuclear warheads and the missiles and terror networks to deliver them. Based on Iran’s track record of religiously motivated violence against Israel, does anyone seriously believe Iran would not use nuclear weapons to annihilate the Jewish State if it had the chance? Does anyone seriously believe that if Iran’s leaders were armed with nuclear warheads, their genocidal ambitions could be contained or deterred?

Netanyahu sees a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat to both the Jewish people and the entire world. He believes Iran must be stopped from building atomic weapons. In the shadows, therefore, Israel is doing everything it can possibly think of to slow down if not derail Iran’s bid for the Bomb, short of all-out war. Reports of Israel’s high-stakes covert war with Iran are peppered with daring, if unconfirmed, tales of espionage, sabotage, and state-of-the-art cyber warfare. But Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders are not convinced these actions will prove decisive. Iran is getting closer and closer to having the Bomb, and Israeli leaders say they are running out of time.

As a result, Israel is steadily approaching the moment of decision, the moment so many have long feared and for which so many have long prepared: Should Israel launch a full-scale “kinetic” war involving fighter jets, submarines, precision-guided missiles, rockets, special forces, satellites, and drones to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat and topple Iran’s fanatical leadership, and if so, when?

“The Most Important Thing Is to Tell the Truth”

In the middle of Israel’s last war—“Operation Cast Lead”—I was invited to participate in a conference call with then-former Prime Minister Netanyahu and a group of conservative writers. During the call, Netanyahu, who was in the midst of his campaign to once again become prime minister, briefed us on the latest developments of the war, its roots, and how it fit into the larger geopolitical picture in the Middle East. He also provided a window into why he was running for high office again and what he intended to do if he again became Israel’s premier.

Netanyahu said he saw Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza not only as a “just war” but as a “proxy war” with radical Muslim leaders in Iran and very possibly as a prelude to a future war to stop radicals in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

“Our fight with Hamas,” he said, “is with terrorists who have backers in Iran and have shown the willingness to use any methods, including firing rockets on innocent civilians.” He added, “Israel is now the front line in the battle between militant Islam and the rest of the world . . . and there are enormous global consequences. . . . Israel cannot tolerate an Iranian forward position in Gaza.”
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Israel’s “immediate goal,” Netanyahu noted, “should be removing the threat by stopping the firing and preventing the resupply of rockets and other weaponry by Hamas.” However, Netanyahu insisted that Israel’s ultimate goal—its most important long-term objective—had to be blocking Iran from becoming the dominant regional power.

Each of us on the call had been invited to ask questions of the man who would likely be the next leader of Israel. Through the moderator, I asked what Jews, evangelical Christians, and other friends of Israel could do to help the Jewish State in its showdown with Iran, Hamas, and the forces of radical Islam.

“The most important thing is to tell the truth,” Netanyahu replied. “There is a campaign of lies against us. . . . It is important to get the facts straight. The facts do count. The facts should be spoken and written loud and clear by the friends of Israel.”

It was an intriguing answer, I thought. Netanyahu did not ask for funds. He did not ask for Americans to call the White House or their representatives in Congress and urge them to provide political support or increased military assistance for Israel. Nor did he ask for humanitarian aid, either from the U.S. government or through Jewish and Christian relief organizations. Rather, he asked us to counter the “campaign of lies” against the Jewish people, to accurately explain the truth about the enemy Israel faced, the reasons why Israel had to go to war, and the reasons why this was a “just war” using “just means.”