The speech to the US Congress was classic Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister used his opportunity on the world stage to stir up powerful emotions while offering nothing new of substance. He sought to whip up a whirlwind of fear for his own benefit.
It was also disgusting that no one asked Netanyahu about Israel’s nuclear progamme. He ruthlessly criticised the details of the proposed inspections for Iran’s nuclear progamme, while he is the head of a government that has a nuclear programme, which has not been seen by any international agency, and has developed nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu knew that the invitation from the Republican leadership was designed to try and wreck the current negotiations with Iran, but he also knew that all Israel would be watching the show on TV and the standing ovation by the US Congress would do him a lot of good in the elections scheduled for March 17. The publicity from the speech has deeply frustrated Israeli opposition leaders in the revitalised opposition parties fighting Netanyahu under the joint alliance called the Zionist Union. Labour leader Isaac Herzog and Hatnuah leader Tzipi Livni have bitterly criticised Netanyahu’s record in alienating Israel from many of its previous friends, and regard themselves as no less patriotic than their errant prime minister.
They are furious that Netanyahu has used his speech to present many Democrat friends of Israel with a false option of choosing between either supporting Obama’s plan or agreeing with Israel and its new Republican friends.
Netanyahu knows that the US President Barack Obama will have a tough sell for any future deal with Iran. There is no natural sympathy from the democratic and secular America for the Islamic Republic of Iran, and decades of hostility have increased this division into deep suspicion.
Obama will have to go to the US Congress and the public with an argument that takes note of the mutual suspicion and hatred between Tehran and Washington, but at the same time make the point that a deal is better than no deal. This will not be easy and Netanyahu used this opportunity to cause Obama as much grief as possible.
He shamelessly used the horror of Nazi Germany to garner sympathy for modern day Israel, when he said “Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem ... So, too, Iran’s regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.”
Strategic chasm
Netanyahu comes to the problem of Iran’s nuclear progamme with a very different objective from the Americans. Obama has repeated many times that he will do whatever it takes to “prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”. Netanyahu argues that Iran must be stopped from having the “capability” that would let it become a “threshold nuclear state”.
In his speech Netanyahu took that argument to the next level, contending that any accord that leaves Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in place “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb”.
With that claim, Netanyahu has widened a once-semantic difference into a strategic chasm. The New York Times commented that if Obama goes ahead with the deal now on the table, this strategic gap threatens to imperil the American-Israeli relationship for years to come. But if Obama does not do the deal, he may be passing up the most audacious diplomatic gamble by an American leader since president Richard Nixon’s opening to China. Obama slammed the Israeli offering saying that it offered “nothing new” and he passionately argued that leaving the situation as it is would be much worse than having an internationally agreed deal.
“The alternative that the prime minister offers is ‘no deal’,” said Obama after Netanyahu’s speech, adding “in which case Iran will immediately begin once again pursuing its nuclear programme, accelerate its nuclear programme without us having any insight into what they are doing and without constraint”.
Kerry’s silence
He made the point that sanctions alone (as it has been the case for some years) have not been sufficient to stop Iran’s nuclear programme, and Iran needs an alternative path with which to pursue its place in the world.
Nonetheless, the administration has serious problems. It cannot fight back against Netanyahu’s allegations with facts because the negotiations are still very much live and necessarily secret as all parties work out what to give and take. US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Switzerland with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif trying to finish the total package. This gives Netanyahu an invaluable opportunity to talk up his threats. He has said that US is making concession after concession, which infuriates Kerry, but he cannot respond with any details of the deal in progress, and is reduced to citing the confidentiality of the talks.
This silence from the administration is costing them support, so when the deal finally comes to Congress it will have to pack quite a punch to have enough impact to win back the doubters who have been frightened by Netanyahu, as well as the much wider constituency that has heard nothing but bad things about Iran for decades and will need to be convinced that any deal is worthwhile.