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Yet especially with my main points of contact in the administration – first Bob
Gates and then his successor, Leon Panetta, as Secretary of Defense –our broadly
shared views, mutual respect, and the strength of the US-Israeli alliance
outweighed any of that. Neither they, nor indeed President Obama, wavered from
their commitment to the principle that Israel needed to retain our “qualitative
military advantage” over any combination of threats we might face, nor to the $3
billion package of annual US aid that underpinned it. We were even able to agree
on additional US backing for our increasingly effective range of anti-missile
systems: the Arrow, against long-range ballistic missiles, developed in
coordination with the US defense contractor Raytheon; “David’s Sling,” to target
enemy forces’ mid-range missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft; and our new Iron
Dome system, integrating sophisticated Israeli radar and guidance technology and
designed to deal with the missile threat from Hizbollah on our northern border and
Hamas in Gaza. It had not yet been used in battle. But from test firings, we were
confident it could destroy incoming rockets with nearly 90-per-cent success.

By late 2011, the issue of Iran had taken on much greater urgency. There was
still no sign the American-led diplomatic efforts were succeeding in removing the
nuclear threat. As for an American military strike, though the President
intermittently declared that “all options” remained on the table, I knew from senior
administration members that it was extremely unlikely to happen. Iran, meanwhile,
had been acquiring thousands more centrifuges, more uranium, and heavier
protection around its key sites. And the “window of vulnerability” was now only
about a year away.

Operationally and politically, at least now a majority of the key players in Israel
agreed that we had to be prepared to take military action if there was no alternative
way to rein in the Iranians. Ashkenazi’s successor as chief-of-staff, Benny Gantz,
had signed off on the attack plan. While the Iranians were getting ever closer to
nuclear-weapons capability, the strike force that we were assembling was also
better equipped, trained and prepared to mount a complex, yet almost certainly
successful, operation. The damage to Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be
considerably less than if we had acted earlier. But our intelligence analysts still
estimated we could set back the Iranians’ program by about two years.

The immediate problem turned out to be timing. A major joint military exercise
with the Americans, agreed on two years earlier, was due to take place in Israel in
April 2012. It would include Patriot missile batteries, naval vessels, and thousands

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