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US chief of staff arrives in Israel | The Times of Israel.

Martin Dempsey to hold high-level talks with IDF commander and prime minister

By Times of Israel staff August 12, 2013, 4:09 pm

Israeli Chief of Staff Benny Gantz (R) and US military chief Martin Dempsey (L) in Tel Aviv on October 29, 2012. (photo credit: Roni Schutzer/FLASH90)

US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived in Israel on Monday for a series of meetings with IDF top brass, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

In what is his third visit to Israel, Dempsey will be the guest of IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and will hold discussions on regional cooperation and strengthening military ties between Israel and the US.

Last week, Gen. Mark Welsh, the chief of staff of the US Air Force, completed a secret visit to Israel that was only reported after he had left the country. Welsh was in Israel August 4 to 8 as the guest of the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel. During his visit, Welsh met with senior officers and defense personnel, including Gantz, and was hosted at air force bases throughout the country.

With at least some Lebanese Hezbollah forces tied down in the fighting in Syria, and the organization experiencing political blowback in Lebanon for its support of the Assad regime, the US may be concerned that Israeli leaders believe the cost of an Iran strike — especially in terms of rocket strikes on Israeli cities from across the border — has dropped.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu upped his rhetoric against Iran’s nuclear program, citing Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s anti-Israel oratory as proof of his hawkish views.

“Two days ago, the president of Iran said that ‘Israel is a wound in the Muslim body.’ The president of Iran might have changed, but the regime’s intentions did not,” Netanyahu said at the time. “Iran intends to develop nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons in order to annihilate the State of Israel, and that’s a danger not only for us or the Middle East, but for the whole world. We are all responsible for preventing it.”

A report by the US-based Institute for Science and International Security two weeks ago said that Iran could break out to a nuclear bomb by mid-2014 if it went ahead with a plan to install thousands of new centrifuges.

Last August, Dempsey demonstrated the gap between the Israeli and American sense of urgency over the Iranian nuclear program when he told a press conference in London that an Israeli strike would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear program. I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

He said that intelligence was inconclusive when it came to Iran’s intentions. An American-led international sanctions regime “could be undone if [Iran] was attacked prematurely,” he added.