JERUSALEM — One day after Israeli newspapers reported that the nation’s top general had said economic and diplomatic pressures against Iran were beginning to succeed, his superior, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, said Thursday that the chances “appear low” that the Iranian government would bow to international pressure and halt its nuclear program.
The remarks by Israel’s top defense officials added to uncertainty over the unity of the nation’s leadership in its approach to Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel fears is aimed at producing weapons. While Israeli officials insisted Thursday that there was no disagreement, the comments by Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to Israeli journalists did not appear to line up completely either with the tone of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or the assessment of Mr. Barak.
“The truth must be told: The chance that this level of pressures will make Iran respond to the international demand to halt the program in an irreversible manner — the chance of that appears low,” Mr. Barak said during an Independence Day celebration in Herzliya. “I will be happy to be proved wrong. But that is my best assessment, and it is based on years of tracking Iranian maneuvering and on historical precedents of North Korea and Pakistan.”
Mr. Barak’s remarks came even as top officials tried to erase the perception of disagreement over Iran. The day began with General Gantz’s telling reporters “there is really no distance” between his view and that of the prime minister, according to an aide who was with him. But it was unclear whether the general was being pressed to walk back from his comments, if he felt his message was misconstrued or if it was all part of a broader strategy of trying to offer dual messages for different audiences.
In any case, the discrepancies, however slight, were self-evident.
In an interview published Wednesday in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, General Gantz described the Iranian government as “very rational.” Mr. Netanyahu had told CNN on Tuesday that he would not count “on Iran’s rational behavior.”
General Gantz said Thursday morning that he thought Iran would ultimately decide against building a weapon because of sanctions and the threat of a military strike from multiple nations; hours later, Mr. Barak said he thought it unlikely that the sanctions would succeed and that he did not see Iran as “rational in the Western sense of the word, meaning people seeking a status quo and the outlines of a solution to problems in a peaceful manner.”
Mr. Barak’s extensive foreign policy comments were quite unusual, given that they were offered during what was billed as a holiday toast, but hewed closely to the positions he has long stated regarding Iran and its nuclear program. He also warned of “a nuclear arms race” with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and “even the new Egypt,” calling Iran “a challenge for all the world.”
General Gantz, meanwhile, hinted Thursday that Israel had international backing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying: “The military force is ready. Not only our forces, but other forces as well.”
Michael Herzog, a retired brigadier general and former chief of staff to Mr. Barak, said that there was “a difference of nuances” in the leaders’ approaches, noting that the ministers have said the timeline should be measured in weeks or months, not years, while General Gantz said 2012 was not necessarily “go, no-go.”
“Implicitly, in what he says, we shouldn’t rush,” Mr. Herzog said of General Gantz. “When you listen to Barak talking about the zone of immunity, you get the sense that it’s rather urgent. When you listen to him, you get the sense that it’s not something that has to be decided and implemented tomorrow morning.”
Aides to all three leaders insisted that there was no disagreement on Iran. An aide in General Gantz’s office said that his words had been taken out of context and that he sought out a reporter for The Associated Press at an Independence Day event Thursday morning “to correct that wrong image or that wrong headline.”
“The headlines that were trying to be made that there’s difference of opinions between the leaders, and that’s not true,” the aide said. “They both view Iran in the same way. There is really no difference in the fact that Iran is the main threat for Israel and Israel is ready to cope with Iran.”
The prime minister’s office appeared to be satisfied with the clarification. “We’ve noted in his comments that he says there is no difference,” said one top official. Similarly, a senior aide to Mr. Barak said “the minister of defense and the chief of staff are completely on the same page.”
Amos Yadlin, a former chief of military intelligence, attributed any distinctions to the fact that “you hear different music from the political level and the professional level.”
“He speaks very much like Bibi and Barak on the need of credible military capability if all the other options are exhausted,” said Mr. Yadlin, who now runs Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, using the prime minister’s nickname. “He was very cautious. He didn’t speak against the government, he didn’t speak against the idea of ‘if worse comes to worse.’ If anyone tried to make that here is another general that is going against the government, this is not the case.”
Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, said the apparent disagreement on rationality could be explained: “The Iranians have irrational goals, which they may try and advance in a rational way.”
“This is one of those subjects where every word and nuance is sometimes interpreted to mean a lot more than it does,” said Mr. Gold, author of “The Rise of a Nuclear Iran.”
Amos Harel, the Haaretz defense correspondent who conducted the original interview with General Gantz, said he thought reports of disunity between the prime minister and general were overblown. “From an Israeli perspective, it would appear that such analysis is a little far-reaching and not sensitive enough to the nuances of the debate in Israel,” Mr. Harel wrote in an article about Mr. Barak’s comments posted Thursday.
Several experts in Israeli politics and foreign policy noted that the comments came in General Gantz’s first round of major interviews since taking the helm of the Israel Defense Force 15 months ago, suggesting that perhaps he is not as practiced in the art of public statements as his superiors.
“He’s a very cautious guy, soft-spoken; he doesn’t do much politics — so maybe he said it and he didn’t mean it,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the BESA strategic affairs institute at Bar Ilan University.
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