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sure she won the respect of many Israelis for taking an all-to-rare stand of
principle. She certainly won mine. But I was not alone in wondering whether it
was worth the price that she, Kadima, and the country would pay as a result: Bibi’s
return as Prime Minister in a Likud-led coalition.
Though I was not surprised when he asked me to remain as Defense Minister,
and to keep Labor inside the coalition, that was not an easy argument to make to
my reduced Knesset contingent. They saw joining Bibi, especially in a government
with the right-wing Lieberman as Foreign Minister, as a betrayal of all the efforts
that they and I had made to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Still, the decision
on whether to join the coalition ultimately rested with the party central committee,
almost every one of whose members was on a local government council. For them,
the choice was between a share of power, however limited, and the wilderness of
opposition. So we joined Bibi’s government.
I was personally in favor of our doing so, but for more complicated reasons. I
knew that Bibi’s background, his instincts and his undeniably powerful political
rhetoric were all firmly rooted on the political right. I recognized that he was often
more interested in politics than policy, and perhaps above both of those, in the
tactical maneuvering required to consolidate his political position. But I had known
him long enough to dismiss the suggestions of many of my colleagues that he was
intellectually shallow. I felt he was capable of doing what was best for Israel, and
that he had a basic pragmatism that would guide how he got there. All that,
however, was just a reason for not saying “no” when he asked me and Labor to
stay on. The reason I felt it was right to say yes had to two with specific policy
challenges. The first was to ensure there at least some peace process with the
Palestinians. But that, in turn, was in large part because I believed it would win us
the diplomatic support, especially from the Americans, needed to tackle a more
urgent threat. It again involved an enemy state trying to get nuclear weapons. But
not Syria. The Islamic theocracy of Iran.
We’d been aware for a number of years about Iranian efforts to go nuclear. The
Mossad had notched up a series of successes in delaying the Iranians from getting
there. But they were getting inexorably closer. In fact, when I’d taken over as
Defense Minister under Olmert, I formally directed the new chief-of-staff, Gaby
Ashknazi, to get to work on a plan to attack the most important facilities in the
Iranians’ nuclear network, with the aim of pushing back the point at which they
might develop a bomb by five to six years. But it became clear we didn’t have the
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