"The Iranian Bomb or Bombing Iran": Israel Faces A Tough Choice

Israel Mulls Its Iran Options: With considerable trepidation, the Middle East, and indeed the wider world, is awaiting Israel’s response to Iran’s massive October 1st missile barrage on the Jewish state. The White House, fearful of a wider regional war, is exerting massive (albeit mostly quiet) pressure for Jerusalem to limit its retaliation to something “proportionate” that doesn’t target either Iran’s nuclear program or its energy sites.

Israel’s own calculations are complex. Clearly, doing nothing is not an option, insofar as it would enshrine a deeply dangerous status quo – one in which Iran’s ayatollahs feel emboldened to carry out more direct attacks without worry of reprisal. A too-weak Israeli response would have the same problem, failing to sufficiently deter Tehran from further aggression. But a more serious effort targeting Iran’s oil infrastructure risks driving up global energy prices, while meaningfully impacting Iran’s extensive nuclear program is a massively complex endeavor. 

Another factor is also in play, though, and it might end up proving decisive in shaping how Israel’s ultimately responds.That is a growing conviction among Israeli observers and analysts that we are now on the precipice of an Iranian “sprint” for the bomb. 

To understand why, it’s necessary to appreciate that, for Iran, the past year has been a decidedly mixed strategic bag. To be sure, the October 7th campaign of terror carried out by Hamas, itself an important Iranian proxy, can be considered successful on a number of levels. Most directly, it dented long-standing regional perceptions of Israeli invulnerability. It also helped interrupt the regional normalization wave launched by the 2020 Abraham Accords. And it has led to a deepening isolation of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the world stage. 

But a range of negative consequences have also ensued. In spite of Iran’s wishes, the Abraham Accords have not been fundamentally derailed, and hopes remain high that they will regain momentum sooner rather than later – perhaps even through some sort of Saudi-Israeli normalization pact. Meanwhile, the U.S. military, which had increasingly “pivoted” to the Indo-Pacific in recent years as part of growing great power competition with China, has been pulled back into the region in its largest presence since the Second Gulf War two decades ago. Most of all, though, Israel’s astounding recent successes against the Islamic Republic’s chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, have effectively removed a key insurance policy for the Iranian regime. 

For over a decade, Tehran has worked diligently to build up Hezbollah’s arsenal of rockets and short-range missiles – with the unspoken understanding that, if Israel was ever to launch a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hezbollah rockets would rain down on northern Israel. The deterrent effect on Israeli decision-making was pronounced, and for years helped stave off meaningful Israeli action against either Tehran or Hezbollah itself. Now, in the wake of Israel’s systematic decapitation of Hezbollah’s top leadership, its attrition of the militia’s cadres, and its extensive aerial targeting of the group’s missile emplacements, the credibility of that threat has been severely eroded. 

All of which has convinced more and more Israeli observers that Iran’s leadership is about to undergo a pivot of its own, and shift from its long-standing strategy of incremental nuclear progress toward a full-blown drive to acquire an atomic bomb. 

That, in turn, argues strongly for Israel’s response, when it does ultimately arrive, to include the targeting of Iran’s nuclear program in some fashion – no matter how difficult such an effort might be. In other words, Israel is now contemplating the same fateful choice that former French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid out way back in 2007: either "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." 

About the Author: 

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. 

Image Credit: Creative Commons.