TEL AVIV
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak sat down this week with The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth. Excerpts:
Q. An Israeli was killed this week in the south by someone from the Sinai. How do you see the situation in the Sinai?
A. It was another terror attack on our project to build a fence [between Israel and Egypt]. We have a crash program now to build a fence to block the flood of workers from Eritrea and North Sudan and terrorists and smugglers into Israel. This [incident] follows another rocket attack near Eilat from Sinai. That’s dangerous because it means a loss of grip on the Sinai by the Egyptian authorities, and the terrorists abuse this. We are determined to stop the infiltration and to deal with terrorist attacks and the launching of rockets into Israel from Sinai.
What’s your view of the outcome of the Egyptian elections?
It’s up to the Egyptian people. We expect whomever will be elected to establish a government that will live up to the international commitments of Egypt, including the peace treaty with Israel and keeping law and order in the Sinai.
This week nuclear talks between the “P5 + 1” [United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany] and Iran resumed in Russia. Do you hold out any hope for these talks?
We hope that we’ll wake up and there will be an agreement to end the Iranian nuclear weapons program. But we are too realistic. Sanctions are working better than in the past; diplomacy is more determined. But if I have to ask myself whether this will convince the ayatollahs to sit around the table and decide that the time has come to put an end to the military nuclear program, I don’t think that’s the case. They still feel there is room for maneuver. There is still a need both to ratchet up the sanctions and to heighten significantly the demands on the Iranians that would put an end to enrichment, would take all the enriched uranium out of the country, and would close and dismantle the installation at Fordow.
Close the installation at Fordow?
Close and dismantle it. I would expect the P5 + 1 — this is now the third meeting in Moscow. There was a meeting in Baghdad and Istanbul before this. By the third meeting in a negotiation, you know whether the other party intends to reach an agreement or, alternatively, whether he is trying to play for time to avoid a decision. It seems to me that the Iranians keep defying and deceiving the whole world. But it’s up to the participants in the negotiations to reach this conclusion. We cannot afford to spend another three rounds of this nature just to allow the Iranians to keep maneuvering.
How much more time can you allow?
I don’t want to pretend to set timelines for the world. But we have said loud and clear that it cannot be a matter of weeks but it [also] cannot be a matter of years.
Do you know when the Iranian nuclear program will have gone too far to be able to do anything about it?
Everyone knows that the Iranians are trying to reach nuclear military capability. We all know that, until now, [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei did not order the actual building of weapons or explosive devices. Because they think that if they try to break out toward nuclear military capability, probably America or Israel or someone else will contemplate what to do about stopping it. They are trying to reach a certain kind of physical immunity against surgical attacks by burying [facilities] deep into the ground, spreading the sites over different parts of the country, producing more and more centrifuges, and accumulating more low-enriched uranium. So they are trying to reach a certain redundancy, or what I call the “zone of immunity.”
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