The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that a leading figure in Israel’s defense establishment warns of “a storm, on the horizon” regarding the security situation in the Middle East.

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, the director of political-military affairs at the Defense Ministry, reiterated the main strategic threat facing Israel in the near term:

Iran’s nuclear weapons program remains the top threat to Israeli security, he said, describing the Islamic Republic as a “horrible regime” that threatens to exterminate Israel. He referred to a past statement by former Iranian president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who said that one atomic bomb would be enough to destroy Israel.

“They’re determined to reach nuclear weapons. They want to get to a situation where [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah] Khamenei asks [Ali Akbar] Salehi, [head of the Atomic Energy Association of Iran], can we develop nuclear weapons? And the answer must be yes we can. Not in English, in Persian,” Gilad continued.

Gilad asserted that Iran was looking at “getting rid of choking international sanctions, and keeping the option of breaking out to nuclear weapons within ‘a few months.'” He likened the Iranian goal in negotiations to a “runner who can’t jump two meters, so he builds a 1.95 meter ramp.” A few months is less than than what former director of military intelligence Gen. Amos Yadlin argued would be an acceptable breakout time. Yadlin wrote at the end of April that the result of negotiations with Iran should be a breakout time “measured in a number of years and not … a number of months.” This would “allow the international community to discover a breakout to nuclear weapons” and act accordingly against Iran.

Other threats that Gilad addressed were Hezbollah and its arsenal of over 100,000 rockets and the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement. In terms of Hezbollah, Gilad said that its arsenal was built by Iran, making it “a military threat, not a terrorist one.” Gilad does not believe that the Fatah-Hamas agreement will lead to unity because “Hamas is determined to take over the PLO.”

In the January 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Emanuele Ottolenghi warned that an effect of a bad deal with Iran would be “overconfidence” that “could lead Iran to undertake exactly the kind of action in its nuclear program that Israel is likely to interpret as crossing a red line.”

[Photo: Maryland GovPics / Flickr ]