For years, Dagan was an almost satanic figure in the Arab press, portrayed as a pitiless killer of Arabs. An article published in the official Egyptian press, in 2008, charged him with “atrocities.” Yet Egypt, like Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, is deeply apprehensive about a “Shia bomb,” and in January, 2010, when a nuclear scientist named Massoud Ali Mohammadi was assassinated in Tehran, Egypt’s largest-circulation newspaper, Al Ahram, published an article calling Dagan “Israel’s superman” and “the brains” behind the killing. “Without Dagan, the Iranian nuclear program would have been complete years ago,” Ashraf Abu al-Haul, the paper’s analyst of Palestinian affairs, wrote. Dagan, al-Haul went on admiringly, has been “able to accomplish feats no man can describe, from the Iranian issue and limiting the military force of the Syrian Army to facing Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.”

This ambivalence is evident, too, on the Israeli left. In 2008, the columnist Gideon Levy criticized Channel 2 when it declared Dagan Israel’s “man of the year.” (“Our man of the year is a declared killer,” Levy wrote. “Whether by box-cutter or car bomb, his craft is killing. His killer instincts are our source of pride, the peak of our creativity.”) Three years later, after Dagan went public with his criticism of Netanyahu, Levy celebrated Dagan for his “responsible and courageous act.”

Dagan had close working relations with Sharon and with Ehud Olmert; he enjoyed no such rapport with Netanyahu, whom he came to think of as needlessly abandoning negotiations with the Palestinians and letting relations with Turkey decay. Netanyahu, for his part, was unhappy about a botched operation, in January, 2010, in which Israeli operatives carrying fake passports from other countries allegedly killed the Hamas chief of rocket procurement, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, while he was a guest at a five-star hotel in Dubai. There were no arrests, but, thanks to surveillance cameras at the hotel, the faces of the twenty-six suspected operatives were plastered all over the media.

When Dagan stepped down as director of the Mossad, a thousand intelligence officers and members of the government gathered at Tel Aviv University to celebrate his tenure. Dagan denies that he was forced out. “The Prime Minister knows I wanted to leave my post,” he said. “After eight and a half years, enough is enough.” Certainly no superlative was spared at the retirement reception. Shimon Peres, who had a monthly dinner date with Dagan, said that if the heads of all the world’s intelligence agencies were to gather they would nominate Dagan as the best of them. “Some people have a knife between their teeth,” Netanyahu said, according to the Israeli press accounts. “Meir has a rocket-propelled grenade between his teeth.” But Netanyahu’s tribute masked an incipient clash with Dagan and other security chiefs, who, in November, 2010, had told the Prime Minister and Barak, in a secret meeting, that a unilateral attack on Iran would not work and would lead to war. According to reports on Channel 10 and in Yediot Ahronot and to my own sources, the meeting took place at the Mossad in an atmosphere of whiskey, cigars, and acrimony. Barak was so angered by the opposition from Dagan, Yuval Diskin, and others that he said, “If this current command had been present in 1967, we wouldn’t have had a war.” (In 1967, the Israelis, fearing invasion, launched a preëmptive assault on Egypt and Syria.)

Just days before stepping down, Dagan began what amounted to an extended public denunciation of Netanyahu’s Iran policy. The first sally came when he told some reporters at a farewell background briefing that an Israeli attack would be too dangerous and would fail to achieve its objective. A military censor told the reporters that they could publish nothing of what had been said, but, inevitably, the story quickly got out. In the months that followed—at conferences, and in speeches and interviews—Dagan became increasingly frank in his opposition to an attack. This was astonishing. The Israelis are accustomed to holding hearings after the fact: among the most famous are the investigations following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which the military was caught off guard by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack and suffered deep losses before recovering; and the inquiry after the 1982 massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in Beirut. There were also commissions of inquiry following the second Lebanon war, in 2006, and the invasion of Gaza, in 2008. Dagan told me that the military disaster of the Yom Kippur War had always haunted him, and that it had led him to go public now.

“I was an Army captain in 1973 and I saw the discussions of our military and intelligence leaders,” he said. “None of them were stupid. This was Israel’s best team. Nevertheless, they made mistakes—mistakes that cost twenty-five hundred lives. I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I look back and I haven’t acted and spoken from my conscience.

“Don’t be mistaken, I am not a liberal by point of view,” he went on. “If I thought the use of brute force on Iran would stop the nuclear threat in the region and to Israel, that would be one thing. I am judging things from a practical point of view. . . . You have to take into consideration the following questions about an Israeli attack: What would be achieved? What about five minutes after? And what are the consequences of such an attack?”

Dagan answers those questions simply: “An Israeli bombing would lead to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy and we clearly need to have it.’ A bombing would be considered an act of war, and there would be an unpredictable counterattack against us. And the Iranians can call on their proxy, Hezbollah, which, with its rockets, can hit practically any target in Israel.”

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Dagan’s view that a unilateral Israeli strike would intensify, not diminish, the danger posed by Iran is now the general view of the dissident politicians and security chiefs. And, increasingly, Netanyahu and Barak have grown infuriated by the resistance. The statements of the national-security dissenters, Netanyahu has said, are “irresponsible and hurt the national security.” Recently, Netanyahu held a closed meeting with a group of reporters for the Israel Defense Forces radio station. According to a leaked account that appeared in Haaretz, Netanyahu alternately pounded his chest and the table in front of him as he declared, “If there is an investigative committee, I’ll say that I—I—am responsible.” He told the reporters that skeptics in the government have “been bringing me presentations prepared as if for an investigative committee. I tell them they should put away these slides, stop speaking for the historical record, and instead speak straight to the point.”

Senior Obama Administration officials say that they can’t discount Netanyahu and Barak’s threats to attack Iran unilaterally in the next few months, but that a more likely reason for the rhetoric is Israel’s desire to play “bad cop” in the international effort to pressure Iran. A kind of undeclared war has been raging between Iran and the West for many years, and the latest evidence is, on one side, the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and, on the other, the killing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, allegedly by Iran’s client Hezbollah. President Obama’s assurance to Netanyahu that his policy, when it comes to the Iranian nuclear project, is prevention, not containment, is already an Israeli victory—that is, Obama has accepted the premise that a nuclear Iran is not to be contemplated. In March, Obama backed up his statement that an Iranian bomb was “unacceptable” by telling Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, “As President of the United States I don’t bluff.”

Despite these guarantees, and despite the fact that both sides say that military and intelligence coöperation between the U.S. and Israel has never been tighter, the relationship is fraught. Netanyahu, who is so close to conservative American politicians and businessmen that he is said by some Israelis to talk with “a Republican accent,” distrusts Obama. Obama, in turn, has little doubt that the Israeli leader would greatly prefer to see Mitt Romney in the White House. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate who is one of Romney’s biggest backers, owns an Israeli daily, Israel Hayom, that is so blatantly a Netanyahu mouthpiece that some Tel Aviv liberals call it Tishreen—the official newspaper of the Assad regime, in Syria. Clearly there is a political element to the drama. “Bibi looks at Obama and sees his ideological opposite,” Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz, told me. “Obama looks at Bibi and sees Eric Cantor.”

Netanyahu distrusts Obama not only because of their initial clashes over settlements and the Palestinian question but also for reasons of personality. Obama finds Netanyahu pedantic and arrogant; Netanyahu finds Obama naïve about the realities of the Middle East and diffident about Israel. “Obama has no special feeling for us” is a familiar refrain. A senior official in Jerusalem told me, “Bibi, by nature, doesn’t trust people and Obama is not exactly Mr. Warmth.” (Another official in Netanyahu’s office, however, insisted that such sentiments do not “correctly represent the Prime Minister’s views.”)

Netanyahu also provides a historical dimension to his reluctance to rely on American promises. At a speech to AIPAC, in Washington, last March, he recounted how, in 1944, the U.S. War Department spurned a plea from the World Jewish Congress to bomb the death camps at Auschwitz. “Never again will we not be masters of the fate of our very survival,” he said. “We deeply appreciate the great alliance between our two countries. But when it comes to Israel’s survival we must always remain the masters of our fate.”

Benn and many others believe that Netanyahu has a heroic conception of himself that is hard for Obama to understand or countenance. “Bibi wants to be the prophet, the man who saw the trouble coming like no other,” Benn said. “In his mind, he is Theodor Herzl, who foresaw the trouble coming in anti-Semitic Europe. He even thinks that he foresaw 9/11, and he was the one who saw that if we left Gaza we would be hit by rockets in Ashkelon. He sees himself as the visionary, always in dialogue with the history books. It doesn’t matter to Bibi that most people are not for bombing. He argues, ‘Look at all the naïve Jews in Europe in the late thirties who didn’t go to Palestine as Zionists or to America as immigrants. They were deluded.’ ”

Netanyahu’s psychology has been shaped by Israeli history, too. In 1981, Begin, against the advice of Peres and other cabinet members, ordered his Air Force to bomb the Osirak nuclear reactor, in central Iraq. Thereafter, the policy that no country in the Middle East except Israel should get a nuclear weapon became known as “the Begin doctrine.” (Arguably, Iraq accelerated its program after the 1981 bombing and ended it only with the Gulf War, a decade later.) To be sure, such a mission in Iran would be more dangerous—there are many more installations, some of which are heavily reinforced and deep underground, and Iran’s capacity to counterattack is far stronger. Netanyahu and his aides readily acknowledge that America’s military, with its aircraft carriers, foreign bases, and Tomahawk missiles, is vastly superior to Israel’s and would have a much better chance of eliminating the Iranian nuclear installations if it ever comes to that. But Netanyahu shows little sign of trusting the President’s assurances. As one senior official told me, “The way North Korea was allowed to go nuclear sure doesn’t add to our confidence.”

Netanyahu declined to speak to me. But Moshe Ya’alon, the Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, echoed his boss’s view, telling me that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, or even the capacity to build one, “we will witness nuclear chaos.” Iran would gain such a strategic advantage that its regional rivals—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt—would build their own bombs. Iran, Ya’alon said, might hesitate to drop a bomb on Israel, but it would use a bomb “as a nuclear umbrella to intensify its rogue activities” through Hezbollah and Hamas.

Ya’alon is a tough but subtle operator, and he is known to be more reluctant than Netanyahu and Barak to launch a bombing campaign against Iran. “It is not our preference to do it ourselves,” he told me. “This is achievable without the military option, which I consider a last, last resort. But so far I don’t see that the Iranians are ready to give it up.”

But isn’t proliferation inevitable? We’ve even learned to live with a bomb in Pyongyang. “North Korea has no aspiration to impose its regime and ideology globally,” Ya’alon replied. “It wanted a nuclear weapon to defend the regime and to exercise blackmail. Even Pakistan, which is complicated and dangerous enough, does not want to impose its regime globally. Iran is unique.

“We face a fanatical, messianic, apocalyptic regime with the aspiration to defeat Western civilization,” Ya’alon said. “And in this picture Israel is the minor Satan and America is the great Satan.”

People in Netanyahu’s circle recognize that, thanks to sanctions, Iran is hurting economically, that there are serious splits among the political and religious leaderships, and that there is a complicated political and ethnic opposition there, but they believe that the acquisition of a nuclear weapon would prolong the life of the regime. Only the opposition to Netanyahu trusts the United States to continue to press effectively against an Iranian bomb. “Iran is not just a danger to Israel but a real danger to the entire world,” Shimon Peres told me when we met, in Jerusalem. “People ask if Obama will meet a commitment, and no doubt he will.” The retired general told me, “I trust Obama more than I trust Netanyahu. Obama is an honest man. He’s made some stupid mistakes in the Middle East, but he’s learned, and he’s a serious man. Before Obama, the American military establishment had no plans, no preparations for Iran; now they do. And they have new weapons, too,” including thirty-thousand-pound “bunker-buster” bombs. The Israelis have spent many millions of dollars preparing for a potential attack and have been training for months, but their Air Force is, as the security dissidents repeatedly point out, weak compared with America’s.