JERUSALEM—Two former Israeli military officials have proposed that Israel launch a major attack on Iran in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Kobi Michael and Gabi Siboni, now prominent national security analysts who often appear on Israeli TV and radio, argued in a policy paper published last month that a series of airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear, military, economic, and government infrastructure are the only way to prevent Iran from rebuilding its regional terrorist network, which Israel has degraded over 15 months of war. Israel should start the attack just ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, according to the analysts—thereby minimizing the risk of diplomatic retaliation by Biden and forcing the hand of the president-elect.
“With this attack, Israel will demonstrate to the United States … its absolute refusal to accept the continuation of the Iranian nuclear program and its unwillingness to risk Iran’s breakout to a bomb,” Michael and Siboni wrote. “As several rounds of attacks on Iran will be required, [the subsequent rounds] will take place after Trump takes office and under a U.S. administration that is more sympathetic than Biden’s.”
The proposal—published by the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, a think tank in Jerusalem, and picked up by Hebrew media—is an audacious answer to Israel’s most pressing national security question: Will Trump support an attack on Iran’s nuclear program?
Few, if any, Israeli leaders have publicly doubted that Trump will support an attack on Iran, but many of the country’s national security analysts have. Even among analysts, however, few have gone as far as Michael and Siboni in calling for Israel to go it alone.
Trump has repeatedly declined to say whether he plans to attack Iran. He told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, “It’s not really [a legitimate question] because only a stupid person would answer it. Look, it’s a military strategy, and I’m not answering your questions on military strategy.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Trump and members of his transition team were in “the early stages” of deliberations over “options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes.” Trump wanted to stop Iran but also to avoid “igniting a new war, particularly one that could pull in the U.S. military,” the report stated.
In Israel, meanwhile, a consensus has emerged in favor of a decisive attack on Iran, with Zionist politicians across the political spectrum agreeing that there may never be a better opportunity. The Israeli military has in recent months smashed Iran’s missile and aerial defense capabilities and its terrorist affiliates Hamas and Hezbollah, leaving Iran exposed. Israel’s security establishment has grown increasingly confident that it can independently take out most of Iran’s nuclear program
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his associates have projected confidence that Trump is aligned with the Jewish state against its genocidal archenemy. Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military official who has advised Netanyahu during the war and met with members of Trump’s team at the Mar-a-Lago headquarters last month, put the odds of a “massive” joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program at 80 percent.
“I don’t see any scenario where Trump ties our hands,” Avivi told the Washington Free Beacon. “So the question is: Will Trump lead the attack or will we do it alone, and maybe he will provide us with additional capabilities?
But Michael and Siboni predicted that Trump will “try to make a deal.”
“And the Iranians will do what they do best and manipulate the Western negotiators and then subvert any deal they agree to,” Siboni, a researcher at the Misgav Institute and the Jerusalem Institute for National Security Studies, told the Free Beacon.
“Israel cannot allow this to happen,” he added. “We have to strike Iran now.”
Michael and Siboni anticipated that Iran would retaliate against Israel, potentially causing significant damage, at which point Trump would step in to provide U.S. military and diplomatic support. In the best case scenario, Trump would also help Israel to finish off Iran.
Michael, a researcher at the Misgav Institute and Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said that Trump might even appreciate an Israeli strike on Iran before he takes office because it would position him to deliver on his campaign promises to bring peace through strength.
“The idea is to hit the Iranians in a very severe manner that will paralyze them and create the conditions for a new nuclear deal on Trump’s terms, which will be very close to the terms sought by Israel,” Michael told the Free Beacon. “Iran will have to roll back its nuclear program and end its support for terrorism and all the other things it does as the bully of the neighborhood.”
Benny Sabati, a Iranian-born Iran researcher at INSS, agreed that Israel would be wise to attack Iran before Jan. 20. He said it reminded him of something the Iranians themselves would do.
“When they see a power vacuum, they fill it,” Sabati told the Free Beacon, citing Iran’s support for a network of anti-Israel terror groups in failed Middle Eastern states, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. “For the next week or so, there is basically no administration in Washington to say no to us. So we should use this time to our advantage.”
Sima Shine, a former senior official in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and the head of Iran research at INSS, shared her colleagues’ assessment that Israel is unlikely to get another shot at Iran under Trump. But she said it was already too late for Israel to attack its archenemy, noting that Britain, France, and Germany have already begun nuclear talks with Iran.
“Anyway, you don’t surprise the new president before he takes office,” Shine told the Free Beacon. “It’s just not done.”
Asked about the possibility that Trump would not take kindly to being pushed into a military conflict with Iran, Siboni said he preferred an angry Trump to a nuclear Iran.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “we have to do what we have to do.”
