Yes, according David Samuels in what is probably the smartest and most cool-headed essay yet written on the subject:
The key fact of the American-Israeli alliance that most commentators seem eager to elide is that Israel is America's leading ally in the Middle East because it is the most powerful country in the Middle East. Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America's support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel "since 1948," when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel's rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel's surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt's rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets—not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973—25 years after the founding of the state.
To which litany Samuels might have added that in 1981 Ronald Reagan proceeded with the sale of five surveillance aircraft to... Saudi Arabia. The so-called AWACS affair saw pro-Israeli lobbyists pitted against the White House for Congressional approval of supplying one Israel's dogged enemies with military equipment -- a battle that the pro-Israel lobbyists somehow managed to lose. (But what are facts against the suasive subtleties of what Samuels rightly calls "dim-witted theories about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy"?)
The analysis on offer here would do Machiavelli proud (I mean no disrespect in describing it that way), and Samuels' main point is that, as in any traditional client-patron relationship, what is made public and what is concealed depends on either side's correlated -- but by no means identical -- national interest. It's in the American national interest to pretend to act as a restraining force on Israeli belligerence, while it's in the Israeli national interest to pretend to heed this force. A pas de deux -- or folie a deux, as is often the case -- ensues in which the patron estimates the client as only good as its ability to "project destabilizing power throughout the region" and offer territorial concessions as bargaining chips to keep the relationship relevant and justifiable to the rest of the world (see formerly the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza, or still the Golan Heights and the West Bank).
Part of the elegance of Samuels' theory is that it also explains the Bush administration's failure to stop Iran's centrifugal dreams militarily, despite an approval rating that could not have gone lower if it had, a rather convenient flight path from right next door, and a sworn commitment not to leave this grave concern to the next administration (which it has done).
Israel is perfectly poised to do the deed. It has the overwhelming popular domestic support to protect itself from a threatening neighbor. It knows that no charm offensive is going to improve its image in the world, especially now that it's elected an eccentric and overstocked right-wing government and has heard and seen, post-Gaza, that anti-Semitism is once more "understandable" in Europe (to quote British playwright Ken Loach). No other Arab state wants the mullahs to have the bomb, and if we use the term "state" loosely, this includes the Palestinian Authority, or at least the reasonable Fatah-led sections of it. (A vaporized Jerusalem is a vaporized Ramallah, unless the hidden imam turns to be Dr. Manhattan of the Watchmen.) A nuclear Iran means that of all of Israel's outward attention will be diverted from the subject of the Occupied Territories, whereas, as Samuels puts it, eliminating the former keeps the attention firmly on the latter. (One notes that the Netanyahu government can easily downplay Palestinian statehood while up-playing Persian WMD.) Israel's intelligence is much better than ours, and its pilots have got the experience and know-how when it comes to waging preemptive strikes on reactors, so much so that the present writer was not long informed (by an Israeli who would know) of just how far along a reactor could be before being bombed with no threat of radiation fallout to the surrounding civilian population.
But Samuels' most important point is also his most cynical one. In the event that Israel struck Iran's bomb program and effectively eliminated it, a display of overwhelming conventional military force -- the inevitability of which is the only leverage against a therefore not-so-likely Iranian counterattack -- would signal Israel's primacy in the Levant again after two bad, consecutive wars (one a humiliating catastrophe in Lebanon, the other a Pyrrhic victory in Gaza). Buffeting Iran means hitting Hamas and Hezbollah where they cash their checks; in effect, taking the war to the Soviets instead of to its marginal but rebarbative guerrilla proxies. It also means destroying the illusion of Iran as a real counterweight to Israel's supremacy. (A country that, as one of my friends puts it, has the conventional military force of the Rhode Island National Guard is easily shown to be a paper tiger.) Last but not least, Israel's authority in global chancelleries would be more or less the equivalent of what it was in the wake of the Six-Day War.
The proposition can be stated negatively, too. If Israel tries and fails, what does it lose? The world still hates it. The Iranians still want to see it "wiped off the map, or "erased from the pages of time" (in either translation, upsetting most Israelis' weekend plans). The Iranians get a bomb they would have got anyway. The Palestinians still suffer. Its client state relationship with the U.S. is just as fraught as it would have been had it done nothing.
When Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, retired to teaching at the staff college, he would propose problems to his students with the injunction, "And I want no Jewish solutions here." "What he meant," as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has written, "was that he wanted his battles, in the field or on the sand table, won through daring, dash and ferocity, rather than through the traditional Jewish virtues of subtlety, cunning and patience."
If Samuels is to be believed, Israel will exercise both options on the nettlesome Iranian problem.
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