Skip to footer

Bomb Iran? Why 5 top Israeli figures don't want to do it.

Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet

Oded Balilty/AP/File
In this May 2005 file photo, Yuval Diskin arrives for a meeting at the President's residence in Jerusalem.

  • By Christa Case Bryant Staff writer

Mr. Diskin served as director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, from 2005 to 2011 and is reportedly close with former Mossad chief Dagan. While he remained largely quiet for nearly a year after Dagan first spoke out against an Israeli strike, he didn’t mince words when he spoke out in April 2012.

“There’s a false image being presented to the public and that’s what bothers me," he said. 

“[Netanyahu and Barak] are giving the sense that if Israel doesn’t act, Iran will have nuclear weapons. This part of the sentence apparently has an element of truth. But in the second part of the sentence, they turn to the – sorry for the expression – the ‘stupid public’ or the layman public... and tell them if Israel acts, there won’t be [an Iranian] nuclear program. And that’s the incorrect part of the sentence.” 

The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported at the time that Diskin had clashed with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak while in office, was bitter that Netanyahu had pushed him out of his job, and saw the two leaders as being “messianic” and not to be trusted to make prudent decisions on Iran. 

2 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.