Israel has been conducting a world-wide diplomatic campaign to challenge the US government’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report that Iran has stopped its secret nuclear weapons development programme.

In fact, Israel was sufficiently worried by the report, which was compiled by 16 US intelligence agencies, that it decided to dispatch a team of security and military experts to Washington and a number of European capitals to try to convince their governments that the mullahs in Iran are continuing their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The argument now being put out from Jerusalem to coincide with the just concluded Bush visit is that Iran did indeed stop its nuclear weapons project some four years ago, but it has now started up again.

This is the same programme that has its roots in the military understanding reached by Iranian officials and Pakistani President Zia ul Haq in 1987 and which the late Benazir Bhutto confirmed was necessitated by Pakistan’s need for ‘strategic depth’. For the Israelis, Iran is a strategic threat to their very existence, underlined by the threats from Iranian President Ahmedinejad to eliminate the Jewish state.

The NIE analysis has created tensions between the Israelis and their American allies. Earlier evidence of tension between Washington and Jerusalem includes protests from US government officials who are said to have strongly protested to their Israeli counterparts over a series of statements made by senior Israeli officials in response to the report exonerating Iran. Following the protest, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert called his cabinet colleagues and told them to hold back from from publicly criticising the report or the Bush Administration.

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