Israel bIames Iran for Middle East destabilisation

Fighting between forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad and rebels in a Druze village, as seen from Golan Heights.

Gunmen sworn to al-Qa’ida surge into battle under the noses of Is­raeli soldiers entrenched on the Golan Heights; in the Sinai, the Egyptians are still mopping up after an Islamic State offshoot killed dozens in an offensive that brushed the southern borders of Israel and Gaza.

That troubled enclave, home to a largely Palestinian population of 1.8 million, continues to seethe a year on from the war with Israel that killed nearly 2300 people and left tens of thousands of homes in ruins, few if any of which have been rebuilt.

If Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless regime in Syria is on its last legs — as the Israeli military believes — the fall of the last Baathist dictator would further destabilise neighbouring Lebanon, already buckling under the pressure of feeding two million refugees and keeping a lid on its own sectarian tensions.

In the eye of the storm that has engulfed the Middle East, Israel commands a unique position to assess the chaos unfolding on each of its terrestrial borders and is warily assessing whether to enter a fight it has avoided so far.

But here’s the thing. Ask anyone close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu what the main game is for Israel, and the answer is unequivocal: Iran.

Speak to one of the flint-eyed generals calling the shots in the Israel Defence Forces, as Inquirer did this week, and the ultimate blame for destabilising the region and arming what Israel sees as its most immediate threat, the military wing of Hezbollah, is sheeted home to the ayatollahs in distant Tehran.

The deal that seems set to be done in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear capacity only compounds the problem, in Israeli eyes. The US-led P5+1 group gave away too much to get the Iranians to the negotiating table and keep them there, critics insist.

This position not only has uncharacteristically wide political support in Israel — Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog said recently there was “no daylight’’ between him and the PM on Iran — it is also shared by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the main players on the Arab side, whose suspicion of Iran rivals that of the Israelis.

Even by Middle East standards, the geopolitics are confounding. The fault lines cut across the great doctrinal schism in Islam and have redefined what used to be the political touchstone for the Sunni Arab states of the ­Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Iran, the dominant Shia power, exerts influence in the Levant through its proxy, Hezbollah, whose militia controls most of southern Lebanon abutting the border with Israel. Hezbollah in turn has sent up to 12,000 fighters into Syria to support Assad, an Iranian project owing in part to the Shia heritage of his Alawite clan.

Iran is backing the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, who are being pounded from the air by an Arab taskforce run by the Saudis, while working with the US-backed Iraqi government to take on the Sunni extremists of ­Islamic State.

Since King Salman succeeded to the Saudi throne in January the sniping between Riyadh and oil-rich Qatar has been dialled down. (Part of the problem was Qatar’s support for Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood; Australian journalist Peter Greste became mired in the Egyptian end of that powerplay when he was arrested and spent 400 days in a Cairo ­prison.) Salman also has stepped up co-operation with Turkey and the Gulf states to arm the rebels fighting the Assad regime, posing growing challenges for Islamic State to funnel supplies and recruits into the war zone in Syria and northern Iraq, and to smuggle out the oil that’s a key earner for the jihadists.

Yes, it’s quite a bit to get the head around. Throw in what has been going down in Vienna with the P5+1, comprising the permanent nuclear-armed members of the UN Security Council as well as Germany, and you would be reaching for a calculator to tot up the agendas.

Still, the Israelis have a neat and close-to-home example to back their case that it all comes back to Iran in one way or another. It involves the Golan, captured from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967 in which Israel also seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank territories and Gaza. Forty attacks have been launched into Israel from the Syrian side since the civil war erupted four years ago. But, according to the IDF, not one was carried out by the rebels or their most effective element, al-Qa’ida-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as al-Nusra Front.

The senior army man who briefed Inquirer described this as an “amazing’’ fact. Actually, it may suggest there is something to media reports of the IDF reaching what amounts to a non-aggression pact with the insurgents, despite its trenchant denial of any such deal. (Israel does admit to providing “humanitarian’’ assistance to treat those wounded in the fighting, but insists they are overwhelmingly civilians.)

The commander’s point was that the attacks, mainly involving rocket or mortar fire, had eman­ated from regime-controlled territory, and Israel discerned the “fingerprints’’ of Hezbollah or Iranian specialists embedded with Assad’s forces. Why would regular Syrian troops bother with strikes when they had enough on their plate at home, and when they knew full well the IDF would likely retaliate lethally?

Well, it could be that Assad, in a last throw of the dice, was hoping to draw Israel into his bloody civil war and galvanise the Arab street now that he is firmly on the back foot and losing ground at an accelerating rate to the rebels.

Whatever the case, it’s fair to say that Israel perceives Iran’s hand in most of the region’s problems. While there is a glum acceptance by Israel’s political and military leadership that a deal on Iran’s nuclear program will be done — because the Americans want it, and the ayatollahs know they’re ultimately finished without sanction relief — the concern is that Barack Obama’s team has conceded too much.

The White House has been keen to emphasise that the military option of taking out Iran’s nuclear factories will come into play if the negotiations in Vienna collapse at the final hurdle of inking in the fine print of the framework agreement reached in April.

Iran is supposed to mothball two-thirds of its conventional centrifuges to enrich uranium, get rid of most of an eight-tonne nuclear fuel stockpile, convert to research use the heavy-water reactor at Arak producing plutonium, another pathway to weapons, and submit to independent inspections in return for the progressive lifting of US, EU and UN sanctions that were given enough teeth three years ago to hurt.

The sticking points for ratification included the US demand for inspections to be on an “anytime, anywhere basis’’, with the Iranians declaring military installations off-limits, and access to their nuclear scientists to sort out how close they were to getting the bomb. Netanyahu told the US congress in March that Iran had “time and again’’ showed it could not be trusted.

But Emily Landau, an expert on arms proliferation with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says the discussion about whether the Iranians would comply missed the point. They are likely to do so because they already have got most of what they want out of the negotiations, she tells Inquirer.

“We see the P5+1 backing away from demand after demand after demand,” she says. “And the sum total … is unfortunately a situation where Iran will be able to move to a ­military capability at a time of its choosing.’’

Landau says the P5+1 negotia­tors, headed by US Secretary of State John Kerry, made two fundamental errors. The first was to take the credible option of military action off the table. Back in 2003, when Iran feared it was next in line after president George W. Bush ordered US troops into Iraq, it swiftly agreed to address revelations that its civil nuclear program was a smokescreen for weapons development.

“We know that a threat of military consequences resonates with Iran, but that the military option was basically removed from the table, and with it a very serious lever of pressure that could have helped with the negotiations,’’ Landau says.

More seriously, the “goalposts shifted’’ to put a sunset provision of 10 years on the nuclear deal. Why, Landau asks. Iran won’t need to bring on line new-generation centrifuges to reduce the so-called “break time’’ to a weapon or breach anything it signed up to in Vienna; all it need do is wait.

“Why would you entertain the idea that after 10 years you would lift major restrictions, in the form of sanctions, and allow Iran to go back to doing what it was doing before?’’ she questions. “Iran always takes the long view. To the Iranians, 10 years is not a very long time at all. So the international community went from a position where it was stated they would stop Iran ever obtaining a nuclear weapon to maybe postponing this for 10 years. That’s a huge concession … so maybe the question of violations is the lesser problem than the fact they won’t even need to violate to get there.’’

Recently, one of Netanyahu’s senior advisers talked this correspondent through the Israeli government’s view of its volatile neighbourhood. He was in shirtsleeves, working through a breakfast of egg and Israeli salad at a restaurant overlooking the Knesset in Jerusalem.

Islamic State was a problem, he explained, but not a first-order one for Israel because the IDF would never run like the Iraqi army did last summer, and the jihadis had no illusion about the consequences of a direct confrontation. Western countries such as Australia had more skin in the fight because they were rightly worried about the violence their nationals serving with Islamic State and other extremist groups might unleash when they returned home.

But Hezbollah was a different matter entirely. The fighters it had blooded in the service of Assad numbered in the thousands and they would end up facing Israel with advanced weaponry and know-how. Where Hezbollah went so did its sponsor, Iran.

That’s why Israelis won’t be popping champagne over a purported nuclear containment deal involving their arch enemy, even though Iran is the only country in the region capable of challenging the IDF in the field or the air, or of threatening Israel’s population centres with heavy missile attack.

Israel’s military will be planning, preparing and training for another terrible reckoning in southern Lebanon. Should this come, it would make last summer’s bloodshed in Gaza pale. On that much at least, all sides agree.