In an interview with Al-Monitor, David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process, discussed his report on Israel’s secret 2007 bombing of a Syrian nuclear installation — and what the episode tells us about a potential Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The planning, execution and aftermath of Israel’s bombing of Syria’s Al Kibar reactor five years ago was described in elaborate detail this week by Makovsky in a New Yorker article.

With increasingly heated rhetoric between the US and Israel over Iran, Makovsky is concerned about the lack of “political intimacy” between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “No country is going to give another country an ironclad commitment for a war, nor should it,” Makovsky told Al-Monitor. “The question is, do [Israel and the US] have common yardsticks by which they can gauge Iranian behavior? At what part is the uranium program unacceptable if diplomacy doesn’t work?” Makovsky believes “history will condemn” Obama and Netanyahu if they can’t surpass their differences to determine a common yardstick on Iran.

The events described in Makovsky’s article have remained shrouded in speculation for the last five years in large part because Israel never publicly mentioned the bombing. According to Makovsky, this approach emerged out of advice from psychologists who had profiled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and told the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that “Assad might prefer to bury the matter” rather than face “the humiliation of having its nuclear ambitions exposed and thwarted by Israel.” That strategy apparently worked: Syria’s leaders never acknowledged that Israel had bombed a reactor, and Syria never retaliated.

Makovsky cautions against drawing easy analogies between the apparent success in Syria and the situation in Iran. Unlike in Syria, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are widely publicized and an attack would be unlikely to remain secret and avoid retaliation.