TEHRAN – Mossad chief David Barnea issued a warning shot against the 2015 Iran nuclear deal while the European Union, together with Iran and the United States, were engaged in a flurry of diplomatic efforts to get the nuclear deal revived. 

In a rare public assessment carried by Hebrew-language media, the Israeli spymaster said resuscitating the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is “very bad for Israel” and would amount to a “strategic disaster” for Tel Aviv. 

Barnea repeated claims often typical of Israel’s political echelons that Tel Aviv will not be obligated by the terms of a revived JCPOA and will act in whatever ways it sees fit to counter the threat allegedly posed by Iran. 

“The Mossad is preparing and knows how to remove that threat,” Barnea said. “If we don’t take action, Israel will be in danger.”

On Sunday, Barnea headed to Washington to participate in behind-closed-doors meetings on the JCPOA. But before he left Israel, he drew a rebuke from Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, laying bare the differences of opinions among Israeli leaders on how to proceed regarding Israel’s stance on the JCPOA. 

These differences are not limited to the JCPOA but rather to the assessment of the threats facing Israel. While current Israeli officials highlight what they call the Iranian threat, many influential figures in Israel, including former military officials, believe that the greatest threat Israel faces is internal lack of solidarity, not the JCPOA. 

In a rare joint TV interview, five former chiefs of staff of Israel’s army - Ehud Barak, Gabi Ashkenazi, Benny Gantz, Moshe Ya'alon, and Gadi Eisenkot – spoke with Israel’s Channel 12 about their decades-long efforts to counter Iran’s nuclear program. Many of them acknowledged that a breakdown in internal social cohesion presents a greater threat to Israel than Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state, according to the Times of Israel. 

Ya'alon said there had been no conventional existential threat to Israel for years. “There is an internal existential threat,” he added. 

Eisenkot and Barak agreed with him, and Gantz and Ashkenazi did not dissent.

Eisenkot said the thing that most endangers Israel is the lack of solidarity in Israeli society. Barak agreed with that, saying that “all living chiefs of staff, almost all living Mossad heads and all living Shin Bet chiefs would agree on this.”

He added that all the people who are involved in, or were at the head of the security apparatus, understand today that there is a more serious threat to the future of Israel than from Iran, Hezbollah, or Hamas. “This threat is what is happening within us — the risk of losing the internal cohesion, the internal solidarity and slipping into a situation with fanatics on the one hand and those who lose faith in Zionism on the other,” Barak said.

Despite their acknowledgment that the greatest threats to Israel come from within not from Iran, Israeli officials continue to cover up their internal weaknesses by attacking the JCPOA. On Sunday, the Israeli prime minister issued a new barrage of criticism against the nuclear deal, calling it a “bad” one for Israel.
 
“This agreement is a bad one. It was not good when it was signed in 2015. Today the dangers inherent in it are even greater. It is closer to its end date, and Iran is in a different place technologically,” Lapid told reporters.