To Netanyahu, Peace with Iran Is an Existential Threat [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.niacouncil.org/what-netanyahu-doesnt-talk-about-when-he-talks-about-iran/

To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace between the US and Iran is an existential threat. By now, it should be clear to all: It’s not an Iranian nuclear bomb he fears, but a US-Iran deal.

In a tweet earlier this morning, the Prime Minister said as much: “We are strongly opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and Iran that could endanger Israel’s very existence.”

So we have gone from Netanyahu declaring an Iranian bomb an existential threat to Israel, to a deal between the world powers and Iran an existential threat.

And it’s not the specifics of the deal that is the problem, but the very notion of a deal involving the US and Iran. In fact, his Minister of Defense declared that any deal would be a threat.

Netanyahu’s hypocrisy is astounding. As I describe in A Single Roll of the Dice — Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, Netanyahu has always opposed diplomacy with Iran. Not because he feared it would fail, but precisely because he feared it would work. When President Obama took office in 2009 and began his outreach to Tehran, Netanyahu launched a campaign to undermine Obama centered on four key areas.

First, he pressed Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran before talks began, presumably to ensure that the escalatory measure would ensure that diplomacy never took off at all. Second, he pressed Obama to adopt the Bush administration’s completely unrealistic goal to eliminate all Iranian uranium enrichment. Again, such a measure would ensure that diplomacy never took place — the breakthrough in diplomacy took place once the US dropped that demand.