On September 1st, Turbowicz told the White House that preparations were almost complete. Israel informed one other country’s intelligence service before the strike—Britain’s MI6—but did not share the exact timing of the attack with either country.

On September 5th, the security cabinet deliberated for the last time, and voted to strike. (The only minister to abstain from voting was Avi Dichter.) The cabinet also voted to grant Olmert, Barak, and Livni sole power to approve the military approach and the timing of the strike. Barak and Olmert had made several handwritten amendments to the text of the resolution that ordered the strike, explicitly indicating the potential for war. After the cabinet session, Olmert, Barak, and Livni reconvened in the briefing room adjacent to Olmert’s office. The chief of staff came into the room and recommended attacking that night, using the Skinny Shkedi approach. After the chief of staff left, Olmert, Barak, and Livni voted unanimously to proceed.

Just before midnight on September 5, 2007, four F-15s and four F-16s took off from Israeli Air Force bases, including Ramat David, southeast of Haifa. After flying north along the Mediterranean Coast, the planes turned east and followed the Syrian-Turkish border, to avoid detection by radar. Using standard electronic scrambling tools, the Israelis blinded Syria’s air-defense system. In Tel Aviv, in a room of the underground I.A.F. command-and-control center known as “the pit,” Olmert, Barak, Livni, and senior security officials followed the planes by radar. The room would serve as a bunker for Olmert in the event that the strike sparked a war; the Israelis had also prepared a military contingency plan.

General Shkedi tracked the pilots by audio in an adjacent room. Sometime between 12:40 and 12:53 A.M., the pilots uttered the computer-generated code word of the day, “Arizona,” indicating that seventeen tons of explosives had been dropped on their target. “There was a sense of elation,” one participant recalled. “The reactor was destroyed and we did not lose a pilot.”

The next day, the Syrian Arab News Agency announced that Israeli planes had entered Syrian airspace but had been repelled: “Air-defense units confronted them and forced them to leave after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage.” The Israelis say that not a single Syrian air-defense missile was launched. At least ten, and perhaps as many as three dozen, workers were killed in the strike.

As the planes returned to their bases, Olmert went to his secondary office, at the Kirya defense complex, in Tel Aviv, and asked to be connected to Bush, who was in Australia. “I just want to report to you that something that existed doesn’t exist anymore,” Olmert told him. “It was done with complete success.”

Syria has consistently denied that it had a reactor, and the responses from its administration officials have been contradictory. Three weeks after the strike, President Assad told the BBC that Israeli warplanes had attacked an unused military building and said that Damascus reserved “the right to retaliate,” though not necessarily in a “bomb for bomb” manner. Meanwhile, Bashar Ja’afari, the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, continued to insist that nothing was bombed in Syria and that Israeli planes “were encountered by our air defense fire” and were forced to drop their ammunition and fuel tanks.

“Nobody in Syria believed that Israel did this,” Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert who is a fellow at the Washington Institute and was in Damascus at the time, told me. “People believed the regime.” Syrians were incredulous on two accounts, Tabler said: that Assad had secretly built a reactor and that Israel had demolished it. Even as confirmation of some sort of strike came out in the world press, Syria did not strike back. This reinforced Israel’s initial psychological reading: as long as Assad could deny the existence of the reactor, he would not feel pressured to retaliate.

The Israelis helped secure that zone of denial. They briefed their regional allies, including Egypt and Jordan, and urged their leaders to refrain from making public statements about the strike. Olmert flew to Moscow to brief Russia, which has close ties with Assad. Dick Cheney was eager to expose the flagrant role of North Korea in the Syrian project and argued for disclosure. But Condoleezza Rice, keen to preserve the six-party diplomatic talks with North Korea, urged that the request for silence be honored. She prevailed.

On October 23rd, Olmert met Erdogan in London to brief him on the attack and on Israel’s motives. During the meeting, Olmert asked Erdogan to gauge Syrian interest in re-starting peace negotiations. Assad agreed to indirect peace talks, which began in Ankara in February, 2008; they ended that December, when Syria and Turkey withdrew in protest over Israel’s war against Gaza. Israelis say the two sides never discussed the Al Kibar strike.

As the months went by, and the odds of Syrian retaliation diminished, Bush asked Olmert for permission to tell certain senators and representatives what had happened. Details had begun to leak out, and members of the congressional intelligence committees were upset that they had not been briefed. Moreover, there was a fierce debate within the Administration over the decision not to go public about North Korea’s role in the construction of the Syrian reactor. Olmert relented; in Israel, however, official restrictions remain.

After rebuffing repeated requests by the I.A.E.A. to visit the site, Syria ultimately permitted a small group of inspectors, including Olli Heinonen, to visit for one day in June, 2008. The inspectors found particles of man-made uranium in the samples, which Syria claimed were the residue of the bombing. In 2009, the inspectors reported that graphite had also been found at the site; Syria again issued a denial. In its most recent report, the I.A.E.A. concluded that the site was “very likely” a nuclear reactor.

When I met with Heinonen this past spring, he told me that the site had been cleaned up before the inspectors’ visit. His statement echoed a cable, released by WikiLeaks in 2010 to an Israeli daily, that Condoleezza Rice sent to State Department representatives around the world on April 25, 2008, after the congressional briefing. “Syria’s concealment and lies about what happened for months now after the Israeli air strike is compelling proof that it has something to hide,” Rice wrote. “In fact, after the attack on the site, Syria went to great lengths to clean up the site and destroy evidence of what was really there.” Syria’s cleanup effort was also monitored and confirmed by I.D.F. satellites.

Heinonen said that one of the inspectors’ escorts at the site was General Mohammed Suleiman, who served as a primary regime contact on various issues related to Iran. An Israeli general called him the head of the Syrian “shadow army,” meaning he dealt with issues unrelated to Syria’s conventional Army, such as transferring Iranian weapons to Hezbollah. Israeli officials say that Suleiman, a fellow-Alawite and longtime friend of the Assad family, was believed to be one of the very few senior regime officials who knew of the reactor’s existence.

On August 1, 2008, Suleiman was killed by snipers while hosting a dinner at his weekend home overlooking the sea at the Syrian port city of Tartus. The operation is believed to have been carried out jointly by the Mossad and the Shayetet 13, or Flotilla 13, an élite commando unit of the Israeli Navy that specializes in sea-to-land incursions and counterterrorism. Nobody else was injured. Israel has never acknowledged the assassination.

Olmert’s poll numbers did not recover after the fallout of the 2006 war, and the rest of his term as Prime Minister was marred by corruption charges, even as he continued Palestinian peace talks with Abbas. In July, 2008, he announced that he would resign his position, and he left office after elections the following February. This July, Olmert was cleared of charges of receiving illicit cash payments and of double-billing Israeli organizations for travel expenses, but convicted on breach of trust. He faces another trial on corruption charges related to a Jerusalem real-estate deal, but some recent polls show that if Olmert were to head a new centrist coalition it would run strongly against Netanyahu’s party. If he is acquitted of the final charge, many analysts in Israel expect him to attempt a political comeback, though he has denied it in public.

For Israel, the raid on Al Kibar was an unparalleled success. The Begin doctrine was reaffirmed, and neither Syria nor Hezbollah has encroached on Israel since. The pressing question today is whether the lessons of that success can be applied to Iran, which has insisted, against all evidence, that its nuclear ambitions are limited to civilian purposes, and whether Israel and the U.S. view the threat the same way.

Barak is a leading proponent of a possible unilateral strike on Iran. In his public statements and in private conversations, he has referred to the “sword on Israel’s neck”—the prospect of a regional neighbor and an outspoken enemy of the state acquiring the ability to destroy it. He cites a May 20th statement by Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, that his country is committed to the “full annihilation of Israel.” Olmert told me, “Israel cannot tolerate an enemy with militarized nuclear power. We did not tolerate it in the past, whether it was in Iraq or Syria, and we cannot tolerate it in Iran.”

A nuclear Iran also poses a considerable threat to American interests. “The entire world has an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” President Obama said in a speech on March 4, 2012. “An Iranian nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of a terrorist organization. It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions. It would embolden a regime that has brutalized its own people, and it would embolden Iran’s proxies, who have carried out terrorist attacks from the Levant to southwest Asia.” It would also undermine American credibility. Nuclear nonproliferation is a signature issue for Obama and has been for the U.S. since the Second World War. The last three Administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have pledged that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear program.

Yet the situation in Iran differs fundamentally from the Syrian case. The Syrian affair was known to only a small number of officials in Damascus, Israel, and Washington, whereas the prospect of striking Iran’s nuclear program has been vigorously discussed in public. Experts have pointed to the risk of civilian casualties and prolonged retaliation. What’s more, a key Iranian site lies deep underground outside the holy city of Qom, and it is strongly fortified; an attack on it would run a higher risk of failure. A strike might set back the Iranian program, but for how long, and at what cost? Some Israeli officials have expressed concern that a strike would only provide Iran with justification to pursue its nuclear program.

The issue in Israel is whether the Americans have sufficient resolve to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama has declared, “I don’t bluff,” and has said that all options are on the table, including the use of force. So far, efforts by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany have focussed on diplomacy and U.S.-led sanctions on Iran’s export of oil and other economic sectors. Israel may not be so patient. “Israel often believes it stands alone,” one official who deals with national-security issues told me. “If there are differences with the U.S. over Iran, Israel will assume, as it has in the past, that whoever’s national security is most directly impacted will have to act even if the other does not agree.”

Olmert was more cautious. “Each case must be examined separately,” he said. “The Iraqi case was different from the Syrian case, and the Syrian case is different from the Iranian case.” Olmert placed himself in the camp of former high-ranking officials, including Ashkenazi, Dagan, and Diskin, who are openly opposed to unilateral Israeli action against Iran; he has publicly urged Netanyahu not to pursue that approach. “Worse comes to worst, and all options have been tried, then, naturally, it may force Israel to act to defend its existence,” he told me. “But it must be clear that we tried with the international community, and particularly with the United States, to act together before we resort to the last option of an Israeli military operation.”

As in 2007, Israel is likely to assess the situation in Iran with an eye to its own security. Speaking to Israel’s National Security College in July, 2012, Barak declared, “I am well aware of the depth and complexities involved in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, I am certain beyond any doubt that dealing with that challenge” of a nuclear-armed Iran “from the hour of its emergence—if it emerges—will be far more complicated, far more dangerous, and far more costly in human lives and resources.” ♦