Until recently, Israelis — leaders and citizens alike — avoided discussing in public the issue of a nuclear Iran. Such discussion was viewed as off-limits — an extension of the nation’s nuclear taboo, which holds that on nuclear matters, silence is golden. Indeed, this was the practice before Israel destroyed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 and then a quarter of a century later when Israel bombed the North Korean reactor in Syria in 2007. In both cases, no national debate preceded military action; in the Syrian case, nobody even knew what the strike was about for months.
This code of silence was shattered last June when former Mossad chief Meir Dagan decided to voice his serious concerns that the Israeli leadership — primarily Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak — was pushing the country into a dangerous and unnecessary war with Iran.
