Netanyahu can't fly solo in Israel to attack Iran

Three decades ago, an Israeli prime minister faced his cabinet and invoked the Holocaust in an emotional appeal to approve an air strike against an Arab atomic reactor.

Menachem Begin got the nod, cautioning that a nuclear-armed Iraq under Saddam Hussein would pose a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. On June 7, 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed the nuclear facility near Baghdad.

The current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would also need ministerial backing, from his 15-member security cabinet, should he seek to attack Iran, despite Washington's warnings of the risks to the global economy and U.S. regional interests.

Precedents such as the bombing in Iraq and a similar 2007 sortie against Syria, suggest that Netanyahu, fearing for operational secrecy given Israel's talkative political culture, would count on the reduced government forum to represent cross-partisan agreement on any risky mission against Iran.

Much would hinge on whether he would deem striking Iranian nuclear sites an "operation" and thus sidestep a decade-old Israeli law requiring the full cabinet ratify the launching of a war.

"In the State of Israel, any process of a military operation, and any military move, undergoes the approval of the security cabinet and in certain cases, the full cabinet," Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Sunday when asked in an interview how a green-light to attack Iran might be given.

"In any event, the decision is not made by two people, nor three, nor eight," he told Israel's Army Radio on Sunday, alluding to media speculation that Netanyahu might make do with conferring with his defense minister, or with the foreign minister as well, or with his eight-member inner council.

U.S. President Barack Obama, with whom Netanyahu has had a frosty relationship, said on Sunday he did not believe Israel has made a decision on a course of action towards Iran. Washington, Obama said, was not taking any options off the table to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Tehran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes and has accused Israel, widely believed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, of hypocrisy. It has threatened to wipe Israel out and, more recently, to retaliate against U.S. and European sanctions on its finances and oil sales.

IN THE DARK

In 1981, Begin kept both the Knesset plenum and a key parliamentary security panel in the dark about the planned F-16 sneak attack, explaining later that he could not trust lawmakers not to leak details to the media.

The air force chief at the time, David Ivry, said the mission was approved by the security cabinet and then the full cabinet, with all present being asked to sign secrecy contracts.

"First came the approval in principle, and then the detailed discussions and briefings," Ivry told Reuters.

A briefing paper presented to Begin's cabinet ministers by Israeli military intelligence cautioned that Washington might respond to an attack against Iraq by clamping an arms embargo on Israel, according to "Tammuz in Flames," a 1993 book on the operation by Israeli journalist Shlomo Nakdimon, whose manuscript was reviewed by close Begin aides.

But with just one holdout, and over opposition by Israel's Mossad spy chief, the ministers voted in favor of the attack, which destroyed the French-built reactor without the loss of a single Israeli plane.

"The memory of the Holocaust in which six million Jews perished remained before (Begin's) eyes throughout all the discussions," Moshe Nissim, a cabinet minister at the time, wrote in his own book about the strike.

"He underscored the fact that this action was saving thousands of Israeli children from the claws of the Butcher of Baghdad," Nissim wrote.