The new US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, wanted to be reassuring towards Israel. Asked on February 8 on the American channel CNN, he estimated that President Biden would soon reach Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been waiting for this first phone call since January 20. This delay is however exceptional: it took only two days for Barack Obama after his re-election, in 2012, to call the Israeli prime minister, despite an appalling personal relationship. Just like Donald Trump, two days after taking office in 2017.
This is causing embarrassment in Tel Aviv, at a time when Mr. Netanyahu wishes to weigh on the main diplomatic emergency of the Democratic administration. It has a narrow window to save what can be saved from the 2015 Iranian international nuclear deal. Israel has long denounced this “deal”, and sees these talks as a short-term incentive. , for Tehran, to continue its nuclear escalation, and to multiply regional incidents.
This Iranian threat, Israel’s military intelligence drew up in its annual forecast report, Monday, February 8, a contrasting and useful picture – an analytical effort that stays away from political recommendations. In particular by notifying the World, this body does not echo the statements of the Israeli army chief of staff Aviv Kochavi, who aroused criticism at the end of January by publicly denouncing the international agreement of 2015 and any attempt to revert to it, even in price adjustments.
Knowledge accumulation
Unlike Mr. Kochavi, he does not claim that Tehran is determined to obtain and use a nuclear weapon. As for the time needed to cross this threshold, if Iran chooses, this body of the army is not alarmist. He fixes it at a little less than two years, taking into account not only the production of highly enriched uranium (which can be accumulated in a few months), but also the actual assembly of a warhead and a thruster.
This period, the same body of the army estimated at less than a year in January 2020. Its extension may be the result of recent attacks attributed to the Hebrew state in Iran, which notably targeted, in July, an underground site of advanced centrifuges in Natanz then, in December, a physicist presented by Israel as the historical director of the military branch of the Iranian nuclear power, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. A senior officer also told the Israeli press on Monday that Washington would warn its ally sufficiently in advance of a possible failure of talks with Iran, so that Israel could prepare a military response.
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