David Remnick on Iran and Israel

THE NEW YORKER

LETTER FROM TEL AVIV

THE VEGETARIAN

A notorious spymaster becomes a dissident.

by David RemnickSEPTEMBER 3, 2012

Meir Dagan has become the most outspoken critic of Netanyahu’s position on Iran.

Earlier this month, a liberal Israeli novelist published a liberal polemic in a liberal newspaper. The article, by David Grossman, ran in the op-ed section of Haaretz, and decried Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s fevered declarations that he might soon order a unilateral strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear facilities. Grossman warned of Netanyahu’s “megalomaniacal” vision. He asked why Israelis, faced with what “could turn out to be the biggest mistake ever” by their government, were absorbing the news with such “fatalistic resignation”: “How will we face ourselves and our children when we are asked why we kept silent?” he wrote. “Why didn’t we set up a single symbolic protest tent in front of the Prime Minister’s Residence to warn against the potential disaster heading our way?”

The article inspired no protests, no tents. A generation ago, Grossman’s vivid reporting on the Palestinians for the weekly Koteret Rashit awakened many Israelis to the dehumanizing abuses of occupation. A fluent Arabic speaker, Grossman went into the refugee camps and villages of the West Bank, quoted the voiceless, and revealed to his Israeli readers the humiliations being inflicted in their name. But these days more than twice as many Israelis call themselves right-wing as call themselves left-wing; the symbol of the Israeli pioneer long ago shifted from the kibbutznik to the settler. Although there is still ideological complexity and debate in Israel, the heartfelt polemics of liberal novelists no longer have much sway.

Since early last year, however, Israelis have witnessed a very different kind of dissidence, of a variety almost unknown since the founding of the state. As Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, routinely speak of an imminent “existential threat” from Tehran, comparable to that of the Nazis in 1939, and warn that the Iranian nuclear program is fast approaching a “zone of immunity,” a growing number of leading intelligence and military officials, active and retired, have made plain their opposition to a unilateral Israeli strike. They include the Army Chief of Staff, the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, the heads of the two main intelligence agencies, the Mossad (Israel’s C.I.A.) and Shin Bet (its F.B.I.), President Shimon Peres, and members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, including the Intelligence Minister. Apart from Peres, these men are anything but liberals; most have impeccable hard-line credentials. The insiders are more muted in their language than the “exes,” but there is no question that together they present Netanyahu and Barak with a formidable barrier to an attack. A poll this month in Israel showed that sixty-one per cent of Jewish Israelis opposed a unilateral strike and twenty-seven per cent were in favor.

The most outspoken of the high-level “dissidents,” such as Yuval Diskin, who was the head of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, accuse Netanyahu and Barak of behaving with “messianic” fervor. “I have no trust in the current Israeli leadership,” Diskin told a public gathering recently, warning that “one of the results of an Israeli attack on Iran could be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian program.” Earlier this month, Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, a former head of military intelligence, told the Jerusalem Post that an Israeli attack would lack legitimacy, unite a fractured Iranian leadership, and make it “clear that they need a bomb now so that we cannot attack them again.”

These opponents believe that both Netanyahu and Barak, who repeatedly invoke the Holocaust and the eliminationist rhetoric of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are frightening the public and alienating the Obama Administration. “Barak’s phrase ‘the zone of immunity’ is pure bullshit,” a retired Israeli general told me. “I heard the same phrase from him in 2010 and 2011,” he went on. “Intelligence is something that is always debatable. Remember, we had a kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years just beyond our border and we didn’t know where he was. Are we really sure we know everything about the Iranian nuclear program?” Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, an opposition leader and former Defense Minister, addressed Netanyahu directly in the Knesset, saying, “Over the past few months, Israel has waged an extensive and relentless p.r. campaign with the sole objective of preparing the ground for a premature military adventure. This p.r. campaign has deeply penetrated the ‘zone of immunity’ of our national security, threatens to weaken our deterrence, and our relations with our best friends. Mr. Prime Minister, you want a crude, rude, unprecedented, reckless, and risky intervention in the U.S. elections. Tell us whom you serve and for what?”

One morning recently, I took a cab to a sleek new residential tower on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv and asked at the reception desk for Meir Dagan. I was not entirely surprised that the security man gave me the once-over. From 2002 until January, 2011, Dagan was the director of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations—the Mossad. The Mossad, which has its headquarters just north of Tel Aviv, is charged with a range of tasks, from counterterrorism to foreign espionage and covert operations, including assassinations. Only Isser Harel, who led the operation that, in 1960, discovered Adolf Eichmann living in Argentina, kidnapped him, and brought him to trial in Jerusalem, served longer as Israel’s spymaster. Dagan is known as a ruthless agent; his career is said to have included operations of all kinds—car bombing, poisoning, cyberwar. He was also the earliest of the dissident security chiefs and is arguably the most authoritative.

A ludicrously young, unarmed security guard materialized and rode with me in the elevator. I rang the bell and Dagan opened the door. He was a startling sight. He is not much taller than five feet and nearly that wide around. He is sixty-seven and has bowed legs, stubby, muscular arms, and a bald, egg-like dome. He wore severe steel glasses, faded jeans, and a polo shirt the color of a Concord grape. His grin is sly and sardonic, and not without a trace of menace. He clearly eats plenty, but he does not eat meat. (“It’s because of a gruesome event in 1985. I cannot even smell meat or touch it.”) He collects swords. Various military exploits have left what he calls “their memorials”: a bullet in the chest, a bad leg and back, and “metal pieces in my body here and there.” In general, he makes plain that his health is not good. He smokes a pipe, listens to classical music, and paints, like a dentist on weekends. The apartment is decorated with his canvases. They are naïve, sentimental, Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of Tabriz. “I get pleasure from this,” he said. “It helps me relax.” Since leaving the Mossad, Dagan has been living both in Tel Aviv and in the northern countryside, and, for the first time, he has been making private-sector money, in the energy business. “It’s not bad,” he said. “It seems that you can make quite a bit without working very much.”

Dagan was born in 1945, on the floor of a train, as his family was being deported from the Soviet Union to a Nazi detention camp in Poland. His name then was Meir Huberman. Some members of the family died in the Holocaust, and Dagan kept in his office a photograph of his maternal grandfather on the day he was killed, in 1942, in the Polish town of Lukow. The picture shows a bearded, terrified man on his knees, draped in a prayer shawl, his arms up in supplication, as Nazi soldiers stand around with mocking expressions, truncheons and rifles at the ready. In 1950, the family sailed for Israel aboard a cattle boat that nearly capsized in a storm. They lived at first in a transit camp, in Lod, and then settled in the town of Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, where Dagan’s parents ran a laundromat.

After graduating from high school, Dagan trained as a paratrooper. He used to go around throwing a knife into trees. While he was fighting in Gaza during the Six-Day War, in 1967, his jeep hit a mine. The explosion shattered his leg. As a soldier, Dagan won the attentions of Ariel Sharon, and, in 1970, Sharon, who was then the head of the Army’s Southern Command, ordered him to create a special “elimination” unit, dedicated to hunting down suspected terrorists in Gaza. Dagan is wary of discussing the details of his life, especially his life in the military and intelligence, but accounts in the Israeli press, particularly Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot, are abundant. Dagan and his men often dressed as Palestinian taxi-drivers or farmers to infiltrate terror cells and, often, to kill. One of his decorations was for disarming and killing a Palestinian fighter who was wielding a live grenade. Sharon once said, “Dagan’s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.” Sometimes, one article claims, Dagan went on raids with a Doberman named Fanny. A soldier who served with him told Yediot Ahronot that Dagan would “wake up in the morning, leave his room, take a piss with one hand and shoot at soda cans with the other.”

As an elder of the security establishment, however, Dagan knows well enough to dismiss any trace of a “colorful” biography. And, to be fair, there is every possibility that the stories of his career contain elements of myth. (“It’s really bullshit. Life and people are much more complicated.”) Above all, Dagan is eager to dispel the image of the mindless warrior. When Ilana Dayan, a reporter for Channel 2, asked him recently how he felt when he went on lethal missions, he said, “There is no joy in taking lives. Anyone who enjoys it is a psychopath.”

Far from everything is known about Dagan’s career. Two reporters for Yediot Ahronot, Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir, once investigated a story that, before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which was aimed at rooting out Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dagan led a secret unit across the border whose mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion. Military censors killed the story, Sarna told me. Dagan acknowledges the censorship but denies the thrust of the story.

Dagan worked in various military and security jobs until 2002, when Sharon, then Prime Minister, grew frustrated with what he saw as a lack of initiative in the intelligence leadership and appointed Dagan the director of the Mossad. Dagan, a shrewd bureaucratic infighter, managed to increase the Mossad’s budgets, expand aggressive (and sometimes violent) operations abroad, and develop the agency’s technological capacities. Under his leadership, the Mossad was credited with a string of high-stakes operations. There was the discovery, in 2007, of what the Mossad determined was a Syrian nuclear installation built with North Korean help; the Israelis bombed the plant the following year, though they have never admitted it publicly. In 2008, the Mossad engineered the car bombing, in Damascus, of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s leading terror operative.

The singular focus of Dagan’s work was Iran’s nuclear program. Since the mid-nineties, Israeli intelligence had been convinced that Iran had embarked on a set of redundant projects that would take it through the steps of procurement, enrichment, and, possibly, weaponization. The work was methodical and unrushed, intended to evade the attention of inspectors and the sanctions of Iran’s enemies. “Iran learned the lessons of North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and Iraq,” Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence, told me. “The Iranians are very sophisticated. This strategy, in a way, is to be appreciated. It is unusually sound. It is designed not to achieve nuclear weapons as soon as possible but to achieve them as safely as possible.” Under Dagan’s direction, and in coöperation with Western intelligence agencies, the Mossad is believed to have been involved in all the main efforts to sabotage Iran’s progress: the cyberwar project called Stuxnet; the assassination of leading researchers and bureaucrats involved in the nuclear projects; the penetration of procurement networks and then the sale of defective equipment designed to derail installations. The Mossad has also encouraged defections and recruited agents in Iran. Dagan believes that the West and Israel, which has had nuclear weapons for decades, should do all they can to foment regime change by supporting the Iranian opposition.

For years, Dagan was an almost satanic figure in the Arab press, portrayed as a pitiless killer of Arabs. An article published in the official Egyptian press, in 2008, charged him with “atrocities.” Yet Egypt, like Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, is deeply apprehensive about a “Shia bomb,” and in January, 2010, when a nuclear scientist named Massoud Ali Mohammadi was assassinated in Tehran, Egypt’s largest-circulation newspaper, Al Ahram, published an article calling Dagan “Israel’s superman” and “the brains” behind the killing. “Without Dagan, the Iranian nuclear program would have been complete years ago,” Ashraf Abu al-Haul, the paper’s analyst of Palestinian affairs, wrote. Dagan, al-Haul went on admiringly, has been “able to accomplish feats no man can describe, from the Iranian issue and limiting the military force of the Syrian Army to facing Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.”

This ambivalence is evident, too, on the Israeli left. In 2008, the columnist Gideon Levy criticized Channel 2 when it declared Dagan Israel’s “man of the year.” (“Our man of the year is a declared killer,” Levy wrote. “Whether by box-cutter or car bomb, his craft is killing. His killer instincts are our source of pride, the peak of our creativity.”) Three years later, after Dagan went public with his criticism of Netanyahu, Levy celebrated Dagan for his “responsible and courageous act.”

Dagan had close working relations with Sharon and with Ehud Olmert; he enjoyed no such rapport with Netanyahu, whom he came to think of as needlessly abandoning negotiations with the Palestinians and letting relations with Turkey decay. Netanyahu, for his part, was unhappy about a botched operation, in January, 2010, in which Israeli operatives carrying fake passports from other countries allegedly killed the Hamas chief of rocket procurement, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, while he was a guest at a five-star hotel in Dubai. There were no arrests, but, thanks to surveillance cameras at the hotel, the faces of the twenty-six suspected operatives were plastered all over the media.

When Dagan stepped down as director of the Mossad, a thousand intelligence officers and members of the government gathered at Tel Aviv University to celebrate his tenure. Dagan denies that he was forced out. “The Prime Minister knows I wanted to leave my post,” he said. “After eight and a half years, enough is enough.” Certainly no superlative was spared at the retirement reception. Shimon Peres, who had a monthly dinner date with Dagan, said that if the heads of all the world’s intelligence agencies were to gather they would nominate Dagan as the best of them. “Some people have a knife between their teeth,” Netanyahu said, according to the Israeli press accounts. “Meir has a rocket-propelled grenade between his teeth.” But Netanyahu’s tribute masked an incipient clash with Dagan and other security chiefs, who, in November, 2010, had told the Prime Minister and Barak, in a secret meeting, that a unilateral attack on Iran would not work and would lead to war. According to reports on Channel 10 and in Yediot Ahronot and to my own sources, the meeting took place at the Mossad in an atmosphere of whiskey, cigars, and acrimony. Barak was so angered by the opposition from Dagan, Yuval Diskin, and others that he said, “If this current command had been present in 1967, we wouldn’t have had a war.” (In 1967, the Israelis, fearing invasion, launched a preëmptive assault on Egypt and Syria.)

Just days before stepping down, Dagan began what amounted to an extended public denunciation of Netanyahu’s Iran policy. The first sally came when he told some reporters at a farewell background briefing that an Israeli attack would be too dangerous and would fail to achieve its objective. A military censor told the reporters that they could publish nothing of what had been said, but, inevitably, the story quickly got out. In the months that followed—at conferences, and in speeches and interviews—Dagan became increasingly frank in his opposition to an attack. This was astonishing. The Israelis are accustomed to holding hearings after the fact: among the most famous are the investigations following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which the military was caught off guard by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack and suffered deep losses before recovering; and the inquiry after the 1982 massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in Beirut. There were also commissions of inquiry following the second Lebanon war, in 2006, and the invasion of Gaza, in 2008. Dagan told me that the military disaster of the Yom Kippur War had always haunted him, and that it had led him to go public now.

“I was an Army captain in 1973 and I saw the discussions of our military and intelligence leaders,” he said. “None of them were stupid. This was Israel’s best team. Nevertheless, they made mistakes—mistakes that cost twenty-five hundred lives. I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I look back and I haven’t acted and spoken from my conscience.

“Don’t be mistaken, I am not a liberal by point of view,” he went on. “If I thought the use of brute force on Iran would stop the nuclear threat in the region and to Israel, that would be one thing. I am judging things from a practical point of view. . . . You have to take into consideration the following questions about an Israeli attack: What would be achieved? What about five minutes after? And what are the consequences of such an attack?”

Dagan answers those questions simply: “An Israeli bombing would lead to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy and we clearly need to have it.’ A bombing would be considered an act of war, and there would be an unpredictable counterattack against us. And the Iranians can call on their proxy, Hezbollah, which, with its rockets, can hit practically any target in Israel.”

Dagan’s view that a unilateral Israeli strike would intensify, not diminish, the danger posed by Iran is now the general view of the dissident politicians and security chiefs. And, increasingly, Netanyahu and Barak have grown infuriated by the resistance. The statements of the national-security dissenters, Netanyahu has said, are “irresponsible and hurt the national security.” Recently, Netanyahu held a closed meeting with a group of reporters for the Israel Defense Forces radio station. According to a leaked account that appeared in Haaretz, Netanyahu alternately pounded his chest and the table in front of him as he declared, “If there is an investigative committee, I’ll say that I—I—am responsible.” He told the reporters that skeptics in the government have “been bringing me presentations prepared as if for an investigative committee. I tell them they should put away these slides, stop speaking for the historical record, and instead speak straight to the point.”

Senior Obama Administration officials say that they can’t discount Netanyahu and Barak’s threats to attack Iran unilaterally in the next few months, but that a more likely reason for the rhetoric is Israel’s desire to play “bad cop” in the international effort to pressure Iran. A kind of undeclared war has been raging between Iran and the West for many years, and the latest evidence is, on one side, the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and, on the other, the killing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, allegedly by Iran’s client Hezbollah. President Obama’s assurance to Netanyahu that his policy, when it comes to the Iranian nuclear project, is prevention, not containment, is already an Israeli victory—that is, Obama has accepted the premise that a nuclear Iran is not to be contemplated. In March, Obama backed up his statement that an Iranian bomb was “unacceptable” by telling Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, “As President of the United States I don’t bluff.”

Despite these guarantees, and despite the fact that both sides say that military and intelligence coöperation between the U.S. and Israel has never been tighter, the relationship is fraught. Netanyahu, who is so close to conservative American politicians and businessmen that he is said by some Israelis to talk with “a Republican accent,” distrusts Obama. Obama, in turn, has little doubt that the Israeli leader would greatly prefer to see Mitt Romney in the White House. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate who is one of Romney’s biggest backers, owns an Israeli daily, Israel Hayom, that is so blatantly a Netanyahu mouthpiece that some Tel Aviv liberals call itTishreen—the official newspaper of the Assad regime, in Syria. Clearly there is a political element to the drama. “Bibi looks at Obama and sees his ideological opposite,” Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, told me. “Obama looks at Bibi and sees Eric Cantor.”

Netanyahu distrusts Obama not only because of their initial clashes over settlements and the Palestinian question but also for reasons of personality. Obama finds Netanyahu pedantic and arrogant; Netanyahu finds Obama naïve about the realities of the Middle East and diffident about Israel. “Obama has no special feeling for us” is a familiar refrain. A senior official in Jerusalem told me, “Bibi, by nature, doesn’t trust people and Obama is not exactly Mr. Warmth.” (Another official in Netanyahu’s office, however, insisted that such sentiments do not “correctly represent the Prime Minister’s views.”)

Netanyahu also provides a historical dimension to his reluctance to rely on American promises. At a speech to AIPAC, in Washington, last March, he recounted how, in 1944, the U.S. War Department spurned a plea from the World Jewish Congress to bomb the death camps at Auschwitz. “Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our very survival,” he said. “We deeply appreciate the great alliance between our two countries. But when it comes to Israel’s survival we must always remain the masters of our fate.”

Benn and many others believe that Netanyahu has a heroic conception of himself that is hard for Obama to understand or countenance. “Bibi wants to be the prophet, the man who saw the trouble coming like no other,” Benn said. “In his mind, he is Theodor Herzl, who foresaw the trouble coming in anti-Semitic Europe. He even thinks that he foresaw 9/11, and he was the one who saw that if we left Gaza we would be hit by rockets in Ashkelon. He sees himself as the visionary, always in dialogue with the history books. It doesn’t matter to Bibi that most people are not for bombing. He argues, ‘Look at all the naïve Jews in Europe in the late thirties who didn’t go to Palestine as Zionists or to America as immigrants. They were deluded.’ ”

Netanyahu’s psychology has been shaped by Israeli history, too. In 1981, Begin, against the advice of Peres and other cabinet members, ordered his Air Force to bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor, in central Iraq. Thereafter, the policy that no country in the Middle East except Israel should get a nuclear weapon became known as “the Begin doctrine.” (Arguably, Iraq accelerated its program after the 1981 bombing and ended it only with the Gulf War, a decade later.) To be sure, such a mission in Iran would be more dangerous—there are many more installations, some of which are heavily reinforced and deep underground, and Iran’s capacity to counterattack is far stronger. Netanyahu and his aides readily acknowledge that America’s military, with its aircraft carriers, foreign bases, and Tomahawk missiles, is vastly superior to Israel’s and would have a much better chance of eliminating the Iranian nuclear installations if it ever comes to that. But Netanyahu shows little sign of trusting the President’s assurances. As one senior official told me, “The way North Korea was allowed to go nuclear sure doesn’t add to our confidence.”

Netanyahu declined to speak to me. But Moshe Ya’alon, the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, echoed his boss’s view, telling me that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, or even the capacity to build one, “we will witness nuclear chaos.” Iran would gain such a strategic advantage that its regional rivals—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt—would build their own bombs. Iran, Ya’alon said, might hesitate to drop a bomb on Israel, but it would use a bomb “as a nuclear umbrella to intensify its rogue activities” through Hezbollah and Hamas.

Ya’alon is a tough but subtle operator, and he is known to be more reluctant than Netanyahu and Barak to launch a bombing campaign against Iran. “It is not our preference to do it ourselves,” he told me. “This is achievable without the military option, which I consider a last, last resort. But so far I don’t see that the Iranians are ready to give it up.”

But isn’t proliferation inevitable? We’ve even learned to live with a bomb in Pyongyang. “North Korea has no aspiration to impose its regime and ideology globally,” Ya’alon replied. “It wanted a nuclear weapon to defend the regime and to exercise blackmail. Even Pakistan, which is complicated and dangerous enough, does not want to impose its regime globally. Iran is unique.

“We face a fanatical, messianic, apocalyptic regime with the aspiration to defeat Western civilization,” Ya’alon said. “And in this picture Israel is the minor Satan and America is the great Satan.”

People in Netanyahu’s circle recognize that, thanks to sanctions, Iran is hurting economically, that there are serious splits among the political and religious leaderships, and that there is a complicated political and ethnic opposition there, but they believe that the acquisition of a nuclear weapon would prolong the life of the regime. Only the opposition to Netanyahu trusts the United States to continue to press effectively against an Iranian bomb. “Iran is not just a danger to Israel but a real danger to the entire world,” Shimon Peres told me when we met, in Jerusalem. “People ask if Obama will meet a commitment, and no doubt he will.” The retired general told me, “I trust Obama more than I trust Netanyahu. Obama is an honest man. He’s made some stupid mistakes in the Middle East, but he’s learned, and he’s a serious man. Before Obama, the American military establishment had no plans, no preparations for Iran; now they do. And they have new weapons, too,” including thirty-thousand-pound “bunker-buster” bombs. The Israelis have spent many millions of dollars preparing for a potential attack and have been training for months, but their Air Force is, as the security dissidents repeatedly point out, weak compared with America’s.

For Netanyahu, reliance on the United States smacks of timidity and a repudiation of national purpose. As Moshe Halbertal, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, put it to me one morning in Jerusalem, “If Netanyahu fails, in his terms the entire raison d’être of Israel falls apart—meaning, if we cannot face up to the new Hitler, who am I? Who are we? At this point, he would have to be courageous not to attack Iran.”

In the meantime, Netanyahu has all but given up on making even marginal progress on the Palestinian question. Around his office there is a free-floating slogan: “Iran is the great stage. Everything else is management.” His bellicose rhetoric tends to overshadow one political crisis after another, whether it is the increasing influence of the ultra-Orthodox or the power of a small number of families at the center of the economy or violence directed against Arabs in the West Bank or west Jerusalem. He faces minimal electoral pressure. The Labor Party is small and somnambulant. The left is quiet and diminished. “Netanyahu has numbed Israel,” Halbertal said. “Israel is numb.”

Many Israelis on the left argue that, while Iran and proliferation are undoubtedly dangerous, the occupation, which has lasted since 1967, is the country’s true existential threat. But, since the West Bank is relatively calm, and there are no negotiations between Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, the issue all but disappears from public consciousness, as if behind a tall fence. “The Palestinian issue, for most people, is utterly boring,” Avi Issacharoff, who covers Palestinian affairs for Haaretz, told me. “The trouble the Palestinians are facing is that, when things are quiet, no one cares. People care only when there is violence, when there is terror.”

Beneath the illusory semblance of normality, people know that the settlements are steadily becoming irreversible. And the military itself is becoming more and more heavily populated by religious Zionists—soldiers and officers who would be, at best, reluctant to follow orders to dismantle Yitzhar or Givat Ze’ev or Beitar Illit. In 1990, only two per cent of the infantry’s officer training corps was religious; now the figure is forty-two per cent. “People here fail to understand this profound change,” Amos Harel, a journalist writing a book on the Army, said. “They still think of an army of kibbutzniks, the way it used to be.”

In the cafés and apartments of Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem, it is easy to block out all that is going on nearby: the grinding civil war in Syria just beyond the Golan; the chaotic assembly of foreign jihadis in the Sinai; the contentious politics of Cairo; the geopolitical clash between Turkey and Iran; the accumulating rage of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the very real possibility of a third intifada. “There is a good life here and, at the same time, the feeling of a party on the Titanic, a kind of deep melancholy running under it all,” Avishai Margalit, a political philosopher at the Hebrew University, told me. “There is silence and yet this desire to talk. It’s like in a Pinter play: underneath all the clichés there is something deeply threatening to the fabric of things.”

Netanyahu bolsters his argument for urgent action in Iran by describing the regime as irrational and determined to destroy Israel. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Ahmadinejad have made plenty of statements to warrant Israeli anxiety. Khamenei has referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumor.” Just last week, Ahmadinejad told a crowd at Tehran University, “The existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to all humanity.” He has called the Holocaust a “myth”; in 2005, he said that Israel ought to be “wiped off the map.”

Yet the dissidents in the national-security establishment have a somewhat cooler view of the Iranians. Dagan believes that the Iranian leadership, for all its religious fervor and anti-Semitic rhetoric, operates on a level of rational self-preservation. He told me that Iran’s nuclear project is indeed designed as a potential “umbrella” to protect Hezbollah and other client groups, but it is also “an insurance policy against any intervention in Iran.” The Iranian leadership sees certain markers in its history—the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 and U.S. support of the Shah; the development of an atom bomb in Israel; the eight-year war with Iraq, in which the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein—and acts according to its own “version of rational,” Dagan said.

“In 2003, as the United States invaded Iraq, Iran felt under siege,” he went on. “The great Satan was at their borders and threatening. . . . The Iranians learned from North Korea, Pakistan, and India that a state with a nuclear weapon will not suffer interference the way a state without one does.”

Dagan is no less anxious than Netanyahu about a nuclear Iran, but his language is less emotional, his analysis different. “It’s too serious to just casually tie it to the Holocaust,” he said. “There are thousands of Jews in Iran, and no one touches them. They don’t suffer there as Jews. I don’t think the Iranian regime is anti-Semitic in that sense.” Dagan agrees that the current regime’s rhetoric is hateful: “This started with Ayatollah Khomeini, comparing us to dogs and monkeys.” But, he said, “remember, when Ahmadinejad says these things he is not talking to the United States or to Europeans. He does it to please certain groups in Iran. Ahmadinejad is not stupid. Don’t be mistaken. He is a very capable bureaucrat. In university, he was an engineer and he was a capable manager. Does he take a radical-Islamist approach? Of course. And the Iranians see Israel as a state established through wrongdoing and they see it as a menace to the region. They see Israel as spreading a Western ideology and as a threat to groups under its umbrella.”

Dagan, after years of studying intelligence reports on Iran, believes that the regime is suffering not only from internal splits and economic pressure but also from the political changes in the region: the ascendance of Turkey, the destabilization of Syria’s Alawite regime, the reluctance of the Iraqi government to relinquish its ties to the West. Iran, he said, has failed in its ambition to lead the Muslim world. “The Iranians are receptive to pressure,” he said. “In 2003, when they felt the U.S. might turn on them, they stalled their nuclear project to an extent. They also discovered that they are not able to maintain any level of secrecy.”

Dagan believes that Iran had resumed its nuclear project by 2005, when it was clear that the U.S. had no interest in a fight, but, perhaps out of faith in his own tactics as Mossad director, he believes that covert, economic, and diplomatic pressure—particularly with American support—should allay the need for a unilateral strike. “I have no doubt in my mind that the Iranians are moving on their nuclear program, but I don’t share the point of view that they are speeding there,” he said. “The Iranian nuclear issue is not an Iran-Israel issue; it is more related to the entire region and to the international community.”

The morning I met with Dagan, Haaretz had published a long interview, by Ari Shavit, with an unnamed Israeli “decision-maker,” who warned yet again that the leadership could not wait much longer. One of the many giveaway details in the piece was that the decision-maker was a great military strategist who had a black grand piano in his living room. Few Israelis could miss the hint: this was Ehud Barak, talking gravely behind a flimsy scrim. (“A single atom bomb is enough to finish off the Zionist story.”)

Dagan smiled. Then he said, “As for the ‘man who knows how to play the piano,’ if you look back at his career, every major strategic approach when he was Prime Minister was a failure: his meetings with Arafat at Camp David, his attempt to make peace with Assad of Syria, his retreat from Lebanon, which brought Hezbollah to our borders. And there are other examples. I’m not under the influence of such a renowned, clever man.”

Dagan is more at ease talking about the Americans than about his former bosses in the Israeli leadership. He warns the Israeli government “not to surprise” the United States and has confidence in Obama’s assurances. “I don’t think the U.S. will act because of Israeli interests,” he said. “The U.S. acts according to U.S. interests, and it has strong economic and political interests in the region, beyond, or regardless of, Israel. And when a President of the United States makes an open declaration about policy it is to protect, first of all, the interests not of Israel but of the United States.”

As we were talking, Dagan interrupted himself and motioned to the spread of dates, nuts, and candy that he had laid out on the coffee table in front of us. “Look!” he said, with a mock-wounded expression. “You haven’t touched a thing!”

It is not clear what the security dissidents will do next. One of them told me that he was organizing a group to decide: A petition? A public meeting? Dagan seemed not to care so long as he could continue speaking out. “Look, this is not a liberal environment, the neighborhood is very tough,” he said. “After thirty-three years in the military and intelligence, you discover not only the nice side of human nature. You discover it is possible to get dragged into something and then it is hard to explain why it all happened. It’s easy to go from being a victim to being an oppressor. You always have to pay attention to your internal moral compass and ask the right questions.

“I believe in the end that the Iranians are going to have to make a hard decision and choose between continuing their nuclear project or surviving as an Islamic regime. They have serious internal problems. Even though they are defying the international community and there are enough fanatics pursuing the nuclear program, in the end they are not stupid. Ayatollah Khomeini saw Saddam Hussein as the devil, but he finally signed a ceasefire with him. He ‘drank the cup of poison,’ as he put it. But he signed because the public demanded it. We have to think about how to influence the people making these decisions. And we cannot be hasty.” ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_remnick?printable=true&currentPage=all&pink=q7n0jP#ixzz25Kq4kAHd