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Updated Thursday, February 9, 2012 11:35 am TWN, AFP

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Israel plays politics with Iran strike talk

JERUSALEM -- Israel is pursuing a studied ambiguity on whether it will attack Iran, keeping its options open on how to rein in Tehran's alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, Israeli experts say.

Speculation about an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities has reached fever pitch in recent weeks, driven by comments from Israeli officials and a slew of articles in the international media.

Israel, like much of the international community, accuses Tehran of using its nuclear program to mask a weapons drive, a charge denied by Iran.

And the Jewish state, the sole, if undeclared, nuclear power in the region, has made clear it sees a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat that it will prevent at all costs.

But experts say Israel's rhetoric about a military strike could be seen as a strategy to obviate the need for an attack by piling on the pressure on Iran and the international community.

Political science professor Yehezkel Dror's book “Israeli Statecraft” analyzes various ways Israel could confront Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions and says that bellicose rumblings from the Jewish state serve a range of purposes.

“Israel certainly wants other countries to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons, and is surely using the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran as one of the means to convince them to do so,” he told AFP.

By brandishing the threat of military action, Israel targets policy-makers both in Tehran and the West, Dror says, using “a very accepted means of creating deterrence, as well as a motivating force.”

Israel's saber rattling appears to have stepped up, with Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon warning that no Iranian facility, however reinforced, is immune to Israeli attack.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also said to have asked officials to stop “blabbing” about such an attack, warning it could create the impression an attack was imminent or be seen as undermining tough new European sanctions against Tehran.

For Israeli military and intelligence writer Ronen Bergman, the attack rhetoric is a good way for the Jewish state to preemptively justify an eventual military operation.

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