Iran races for the bomb, decision time looms

AS WE emerged stunned and silent from the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem this week onto a balcony overlooking the holy city, our guide swept her hand across the vista and asked whether now we understood why the Jewish people had re-established their homeland and would fight with all their might ''that man'' who would take it all away.

The man she referred to was not Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority with which Israel has for years been engaged in stuttering peace negotiations. She was talking about the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A few days later we stood near the kibbutz Misgav Am, high in the upper Galilee, looking out over the now-peaceful agricultural plains, up to the snow-capped Mount Hermon, and down at a Lebanese village just a stone's throw away, close enough to wave. Our guide, a former brigadier general who commanded troops in the north during the war with Lebanon in 2006, said that when the Iranian-backed Hezbollah operated freely in the area before the war it was as if Iran itself had been sitting right on Israel's northern border.

Eight years after my first visit to Israel, one of the most striking things about the discussions during this week's Australia Israel Leadership Forum has been the extent to which the increasing regional dominance and nuclear arms aspiration of Iran is overshadowing and enmeshing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How would Gaza, controlled by Iranian-aligned Hamas, fit in to any peace deal struck between Israel and the Palestinian Authority?

Would any deal be possible if both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were emboldened by the backing of a nuclear-capable Iran?

At times there was a chicken-and-egg element to the debate.

Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian foreign minister and senior adviser to Abbas, insisted the growing Iranian influence was a product of the failure of the peace process, clearly implying it would fall away should a peace deal be struck.

Israeli politicians, of all persuasions, saw Iran's growing influence as both the biggest threat to Israel and the world and also a factor making a peace deal far more elusive.

Isaac Herzog, who is one of a number of declared challengers to Ehud Barak, the current leader of Israel's beleaguered Labor Party, was clear that Iran posed ''the world's biggest challenge''.

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned about the sheer unpredictability of a radical Islamist state with the bomb.

And one of the real revelations from the WikiLeaks cables has been the extent to which Arab leaders privately share Israel's concerns.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah urged the United States to strike Iran in order to ''cut the head off the snake''.

The Australia Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, who the WikiLeaks cables revealed to have been assessed by the Israeli ambassador to Australia as a ''great friend of Israel'', dismayed the Israelis on the eve of his visit this week when he told The Australian newspaper that not only should Israel, along with other nuclear states in the region, sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that it should also submit to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the nuclear weapons facilities it does not admit it has.

Even though inspections usually go hand-in-hand with treaty membership, the Israelis bridled at the implied equivalence of Israel and Iran. By the time Rudd was standing beside Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, in Jerusalem he had dropped any reference to inspections and was recognising Israel's ''unique security considerations''.

But Rudd's overriding message was the same as everyone else's - that Iran was the ''core strategic challenge faced by us all''.

There was a lot less agreement on what to do about it. Some still hold out hope that strengthened international sanctions might work. Australia has legislated sanctions against Iran greater than those required by the United Nations.

The Labor parliamentary secretary Mike Kelly, who as an army officer assisted the United Nations investigation into the oil-for-food scandal that discredited the sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime, admits the history of sanctions has been ''hit and miss''.

Kelly says the sanctions against Iran are having an effect but particularly the financial sanctions and the bans on technological exports need to be even more aggressive.

''We need to go further … both to have a real impact and to send the clear signal that Iran is marginalised in the international community,'' Kelly said.

No one would talk much about the covert operation clearly going on in an attempt to slow Iran's nuclear program - the Stuxnet computer virus that has been disrupting the nuclear facilities and the recent assassinations of two top nuclear scientists in Tehran.

But most thought that at the very least sanctions have to be combined with the credible threat of a military strike to be effective.

In fact, many senior figures argued that the only way to force Iran to halt the development of nuclear weapons was to convince the regime that the West had the stomach to launch a military strike.

But the rapidly looming question is what to do should all else fail and a nuclear-armed Iran appear inevitable, a situation analysts say could arise within months and is extremely likely to arise within years. Could the region, could the world, live with the nuclear arms race in the Middle East that would then ensue? Could Israel live with the emboldened Iranian-backed states around it? And, given the extreme reluctance of the US to get involved in any more conflicts in the region, would Israel act alone?

The questions are even tougher than those that have dogged the Arab-Israeli peace process for years, and there is far less time to find an answer.

Lenore Taylor travelled to Israel as a guest of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum.