by David Horovitz
The Obama administration claimed Israel was misrepresenting its deal with the ayatollahs. Reports from Geneva indicate Israel’s concerns were all too accurate
In an op-ed on February 9, I suggested that Israel’s opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, should stand alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Congress on March 3, to underline “their common conviction that the regime in Tehran cannot be appeased and must be faced down.”
On
Monday evening, as details of the looming US-led deal with Iran emerged
from Geneva, Israel’s most respected Middle East affairs analyst,
Channel 2 commentator Ehud Ya’ari, made precisely the same suggestion.
So problematic are the reported terms of the deal, Ya’ari indicated,
that Israel’s two leading contenders in the March 17 elections,
Netanyahu and Herzog, need to put aside their differences and make plain
to US legislators that the need to thwart such an accord crosses party
lines in Israel and stands as a consensual imperative.
After anonymous sources in Jerusalem leaked to
Israeli reporters in recent weeks the ostensible terms of the deal
being hammered out, various spokespeople for the Obama administration
contended that the Netanyahu government was misrepresenting the
specifics for narrow political ends. They sneered that Israel didn’t
actually know what the terms were. And they made the acknowledgement —
the astounding acknowledgement for a United States whose key
regional ally is directly and relentlessly threatened with destruction
by Iran — that the Obama administration is consequently no longer sharing with Jerusalem all sensitive details of the Iran talks.
And yet among the terms of the deal being reported by the Associated Press from Geneva on Monday are precisely those that were asserted in recent weeks by the Israeli sources, precisely
those that were scoffed at by the Administration. Centrally, Iran is to
be allowed to keep 6,500 centrifuges spinning, and there will be a
sunset clause providing for an end to intrusive inspections in some
10-15 years. If anything, indeed, some of the terms reported by the AP
are even more worrying than those that were leaked in Jerusalem: “The
idea would be to reward Iran for good behavior over the last years of
any agreement,” the AP said, “gradually lifting constraints on its
uranium enrichment program and slowly easing economic sanctions.” There
is also no indication of restrictions on Iran’s missile development —
its potential delivery systems.
In his TV commentary on Monday night, Ya’ari
highlighted that the deal could further embolden Iran as it expands its
influence throughout this region, and he noted that the isolation of
Iran even by Israel’s key allies was already cracking, with the firmly
pro-Israel foreign minister of Australia, Julie Bishop, announcing an
imminent visit to Tehran — the first Australian foreign minister to make
such a trip in a decade.
Ya’ari also noted that the International
Atomic Energy Agency has made clear that it lacks the tools to
effectively monitor the kind of nuclear program that Iran will be
allowed to maintain under the emerging deal — incapable, that is, of
ensuring that Iran does not fool the West as it has done in the past.
The devil of such deals is generally in the
detail. But the devil, here, is in the principle as well — the principle
that the P5+1 is about to legitimize Iran as a nuclear threshold state.
From there, it will be capable of rapidly breaking out to the bomb,
well aware that the international community lacks the will to stop it.
The Obama administration would evidently like
to believe that 10-15 years from now, the ayatollahs will be gone, Iran
will have a different leadership, and the threat of what Netanyahu has
repeatedly called “the most dangerous regime in the world attaining the
most dangerous weapon in the world” will have passed.
But if the deal now taking shape is indeed
finalized, the chances of the regime being ousted from within, or
effectively confronted from without, will drastically recede. This deal,
indeed, will help cement the ayatollahs in power, with dire
consequences for Israel, relatively moderate Arab states, and the free
world.
It goes without saying that this weekend’s
developments in Geneva have only bolstered Netanyahu’s determination to
sound the alarm before Congress next Tuesday. It’s also still clearer
today why the Obama administration has been so anxious to query his
motives and seek to discredit his concerns.
I headlined my February 9 op-ed “Who to believe on Iran: Obama or Netanyahu?” I think we know now.
David Horovitz
Source: http://www.timesofisrael.com/now-we-know-who-to-believe-on-iran/
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