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Israel Confronts Iranian Aggression and Renewed Palestinian Terror

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser - The most important and most dangerous challenge for Israel is the progress in the Iranian nuclear military program. There has been a sharp increase in the pace in which the Iranians are developing their program and the pace in which they are enriching uranium. The Iranians are moving very fast towards having the capability to have enough fissile material for several bombs within a very short period of time. This means Iran is deep into the area where it can be called a threshold nuclear country. There is a big debate among the experts about how much time it is going to take before the Iranians have the weapon itself. Some think it's going to take two years. I'm much more pessimistic because I think that the Iranians don't work in a linear way to first produce the enriched uranium and then start worrying about how to turn it into a bomb. While Israel doesn't see eye-to-eye with the Americans on returning to the Iran nuclear deal, it does cooperate with the Americans on trying to convince the Iranians that moving forward is going to be dangerous. We are in the midst of a big military exercise in which Israel cooperates with the Americans in the modeling of an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel has been facing an increase in the number of Palestinian terror attacks in the last couple of months, which have gone beyond the usual level of terrorism. This has forced Israel to launch Operation "Break the Wave" and act in ways beyond what it was doing before, mainly in the Jenin area and the northern part of Judea and Samaria. Perhaps the most disturbing issue that's happening in Israel is the rise of Palestinian nationalistic feelings and religious Islamic feelings among Israeli Arabs. The Arabs living in Israel don't go into the streets because they have some economic difficulties. This is a very minor element in the equation. The writer, Director of the Project on Regional Middle East Developments at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was formerly head of the Research Division of IDF Military Intelligence.
2022-05-26 00:00:00
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