TORONTO — There is a very narrow window of opportunity – probably no more than a year – to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program, warns a major architect of the Mideast peace process.

By 2009, Iran “could be a nuclear power, if not a nuclear weapon state,” Dennis Ross, LEFT, told an audience at Shaarei Shomayim Congregation on April 10.

“We have to create a choice for Iran: you can be a nuclear power or you can have economic well-being – but not both,” said Ross, a former U.S. special envoy to the Middle East.

Ross helped the Israelis and Palestinians reach their 1995 Interim Agreement. He facilitated Israel’s 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and brokered the Hebron Accord on redeployment in 1997.

In an informal but sobering talk presented by the synagogue’s Israel action committee, Ross said a nuclear Iran would present Israel with two possibilities: an “existential” threat, or all-out war.

In addition to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s infamous “wiped off the map” statement in relation to Israel, former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, a so-called moderate, has mused that it would “take only one bomb” to annihilate Israel, Ross noted.

“Is that their intention? Can you ignore what they say?” he asked.

He said Tehran “is marching ahead” with a nuclear program that is well beyond simply providing the country with civilian energy.

Iran currently has 3,000 centrifuges enriching raw materials, and has planned 6,000 more. “They haven’t solved the problem of operating them full time,” Ross said, “but they will.”

He later told The CJN that if Iran had a nuclear program geared toward generating only fuel or electricity, “that would be fine. But if that’s the case, you would use light-water reactors [and not] heavy-water reactors. And yet, they’re building a heavy-water reactor.”

If not stopped by next year, Iran will have “crossed the threshold of stockpiling fissionable material. Once they cross that threshold, we’re going to be in a different ball game. We have to approach this with a high degree of urgency. We’re running out of time.”

He said it’s possible to deal with the hardline regime, because it is vulnerable. Fully 85 per cent of Iran’s export revenue comes from oil, and the mullahs who run the country subsidize major parts of the domestic economy, he noted.

“This is a regime that is not very popular, and they know it. One of the ways they seek to buy social peace is to buy off the public.”

Squeezing Iran’s oil revenues can work, he claimed, with careful diplomacy involving Europe and oil-starved China. The United States could also leverage influence with Russia, which has expressed displeasure at new U.S. missile bases in eastern Europe.

He said the West must engage Iran in “relentless statecraft.”

Turning to Israeli-Palestinians relations, Ross said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas “actually believe in each other. They’re actually mutually committed to reaching an agreement,” but are handcuffed by their respective publics.

The 2006 war in Lebanon created “an acute sense of vulnerability” for Israel. And Israelis fear the West Bank, should its troops withdraw, would become another Gaza Strip, where the Islamist group Hamas seized control last year.

Palestinians, meanwhile, can’t conceive of a capital in eastern Jerusalem when they can barely get from one West Bank town to another, Ross said.

To ease public perceptions, each side could do things that are politically feasible, yet meaningful, for the other. While the Palestinian leadership has “neither the will nor capability” to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, it can work to act against incitement, Ross said.

And Israel could make it easier for Palestinians to get through checkpoints, he added.

He described the tasks ahead as “daunting but not hopeless. On almost every problem Israel faces, there is something that can be done.”

After 60 years of Israel’s existence, the lesson learned is “we don’t have to give in or give up.”