Israel Says It’s Not Seeking U.S. Intervention in Syria, Despite Chemical Arms

A senior Israeli official said Sunday that Israel was not urging the United States to take military action in Syria, despite intelligence assessments asserting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad recently used chemical weapons in the civil war gripping its country.

 The official, Yuval Steinitz, the minister of strategic and intelligence affairs and international relations, also said that his government saw no comparison between American policy toward Syria and the Obama administration’s announced intention to stop Iran from gaining nuclear capability.

“We never asked, nor did we encourage, the United States to take military action in Syria,” Mr. Steinitz said at a conference in New York sponsored by The Jerusalem Post. “And we are not making any comparison or linkage with Iran, which is a completely different matter.”

Last week, the research chief of Israeli military intelligence, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, said he had evidence that Mr. Assad’s government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the past month.

Then, on Thursday, the White House told Congressional leaders that the nation’s intelligence agencies had determined, “with varying degrees of confidence,” that Mr. Assad’s government had used sarin, a chemical agent, on a small scale. President Obama said last summer that use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that, if crossed, could prompt the United States to intervene, but administration officials made clear that more conclusive evidence would be necessary before any action would be taken.

Some Israeli officials and analysts suggested that Mr. Assad was testing Mr. Obama and that failure to act could send a signal to Iran that American threats were not to be taken seriously.

But Mr. Steinitz said the situations in the two countries were not comparable. Syria was engaged in a civil war with terrible humanitarian consequences internally; Iran’s nuclear program, he contended, posed devastating, even existential, threats to Israel and much of the region and world.

“It is problem No. 1 of our generation,” he said of Iran’s nuclear program, comparing it, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often done, to the threat posed by the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s.

Mr. Steinitz said that recent visits to Israel by top American officials, including President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, had shown the deep level of cooperation between the two countries, especially on the matter of Iran. But, he added, Israel had made clear to the visitors that it could not hand off such a significant security issue to anyone — even its closest ally — and that it had to be able to handle the threat on its own.

Iran says its nuclear program is aimed at energy generation, not weapons.

The questions of Syria, where more than 70,000 civilians have been killed, and of Iranian nuclear ambition hovered over much of the conference at which Mr. Steinitz spoke. Meir Dagan, a past head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, said he doubted that chemical weapons used in Syria, which he described as limited, had been authorized by Mr. Assad. Therefore, he said, he understood American caution about intervening.

Mr. Dagan also endorsed a statement made by an earlier speaker, Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, who said Israel’s strategic situation was better than it had been in many years because its neighbors all faced internal turmoil and none posed a conventional threat to Israel.

Mr. Olmert, who began his political life as a conservative and has moved more to the left in recent years, used his analysis of Israel’s strategic position to argue that its policy toward the Palestinians was “dramatically inadequate,” given the risk the occupation of the West Bank poses to Israel’s desire to be a Jewish democratic state.

He warned that Israel faced diplomatic isolation unless it moved decisively to help the Palestinians establish their own state. His statements were met with a mix of boos and cheers from the audience, mainly American Jews.

Mr. Dagan, the former Mossad chief, said in an interview afterward that he agreed the Palestinian issue needed far more attention than it was getting.

“For its own benefit, Israel should open a serious dialogue with the Palestinians,” he said. “It’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to establish such a dialogue. We are on the giving side, they are on the receiving side.”

Mr. Dagan added that there should be two tracks, one directly with Palestinian leaders and the other quietly through the Arab world, which, he said, shared Israel’s concerns about Iran.

“It’s in our interest to widen our dialogue with the Palestinians to the Saudis and the rest of the Arab countries,” he said. “That would widen what we would receive. Israel can have a secret dialogue with those countries.”

One result of that, Mr. Dagan said, was that the Palestinians would feel more secure in any deal that was struck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/middleeast/israel-says-its-not-asking-us-to-intervene-in-syria.html?_r=0