Israel at War: Inside the Nuclear Showdown With Iran Read Online Free Page B

say yes, given the deep political divisions and scars of past fights between the two men. Indeed, most grassroots Labor Party members were apoplectic at the idea that Barak would even consider Netanyahu’s offer. They despised Netanyahu and urged Barak to steer clear of a deal. Yet in stunning defiance of his party’s animosity, Barak said yes.
    Peres, meanwhile, is Israel’s president and at eighty-nine is both Bibi’s and Barak’s elder statesman. All three men still harbor strong disagreements over policy and politics. But all three men see the existential danger Israel faces today. Their relationships were forged in the most devastating personal crisis of Bibi’s life, and in recent years these men have found themselves working together closely to prevent Iran from getting the Bomb. 39
    How Does Netanyahu See the Enemy?
    Central to understanding how Netanyahu makes decisions is his view of the nature of the enemy Israel and the world faces. At his core, he believes the mullahs in Iran are driven by radical Islamic theology as well as by immense personal and national ambition.
    To understand the current Iranian regime, Netanyahu believes one must first understand the nature of the Islamic Revolution that occurred in 1979. At the time, and in the years that followed, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, vowed to establish a global Islamic empire with Iran as its head.
    “The governments of the world should know that . . . Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Qur’an will prevail all over the world,” Khomeini declared in January 1979, just before he returned to Tehran from exile in Paris to seize power. 40
    The following year, once in full control of Iran, Khomeini said, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world.” 41 During this time, he declared war on the United States and Israel, and every Friday when he delivered his weekly sermon in Tehran, hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims joined him in chanting, “Death to America! Death to Israel!”
    Since then, successive leaders of Iran have repeatedly vowed to annihilate the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan.”
    “It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region,” said Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2001. 42
    “One bomb is enough to destroy Israel. . . . In due time the Islamic world will have a military nuclear device,” declared then–Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that same year. 43
    “Israel must be wiped off the map,” Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, famously insisted in 2005. 44
    In 2006, Ahmadinejad added, “Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. . . . The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm . . . [because] its existence has harmed the dignity of Islamic nations.” 45
    In 2008, Ahmadinejad vowed that “the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion, and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene.” 46
    These are themes Iran’s leaders continue to hold and espouse publicly to this day. In February 2012, Supreme Leader Khamenei once again vowed publicly that the “cancerous tumor” of Israel “should be cut and will be cut” out of the Middle East. 47
    In August 2012, Ahmadinejad declared, “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the way for world justice and freedom.” 48
    Just a few days later, Khamenei reiterated that the greatest problem facing the Muslim world was how to handle Israel. “The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and . . . installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world,” Khamenei said, adding that “many of the problems facing the