Familiar refrain … Benjamin Netanyahu possibly faces the most critical decision of his career. Whether he should act alone or be advised by his strongest ally. Photo: AFP
JERUSALEM – Addressing a joint meeting of the US Congress in 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then in his first term in office, launched into what would become a familiar refrain.
Warning that Iran was trying to acquire atomic weapons, Mr Netanyahu urged the United States to ”stop the nuclearisation of terrorist states”.
”The deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close,” Mr Netanyahu said. ”Ddeterrence by itself may not be sufficient. Deterrence must now be reinforced with prevention – immediate and effective prevention… Time is running out.”
And 16 years later, after tirelessly raising the alarm about Iran’s nuclear program, Mr Netanyahu seems to have finally rallied the West to his cause, successfully thrusting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions to the top of the international agenda.
In his second term in office he possibly faces the most critical decision of his career, weighing whether to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, over the objections of his staunchest ally in Washington. Israel’s next moves, as international sanctions on Iran gather steam, are expected to be the focus of Mr Netanyahu’s meeting on Monday with President Barack Obama at the White House.
While the Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, has warned that Iran’s nuclear program could soon enter a ”zone of immunity” in which its facilities would be protected underground from military strikes, those close to Mr Netanyahu say he views the problem in more fundamental terms. They say he approaches the Iranian challenge with a sense of history and a conviction that he is fighting to prevent another Holocaust, a modern-day threat of annihilation against the Jewish state.
Calls by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for the dissolution of Israel, his denial of the Holocaust and his support for militant groups sworn to Israel’s destruction have led Mr Netanyahu to depict him as another Hitler.
Iranian scholars have disputed Mr Netanyahu’s characterisation of the Iranian threat, saying Mr Ahmadinejad was misquoted in threatening to ”wipe Israel off the map”. They say that Tehran’s aim is actually the collapse of the Israeli government and its replacement by Palestinian rule, rather than a new genocide against the Israeli people. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly stressed this point, although he also has said that he is implacably opposed to Zionism and the existence of the Israeli state.
The US has no hard evidence that Iran has made a decision to build nuclear weapons, according to military and intelligence officers. But as Mr Netanyahu jockeys with Washington, which has urged restraint to allow international sanctions to take effect, he has stressed that while Israel seeks the support of other nations, it cannot forfeit freedom of action when it comes to self-defence. In his speech to parliament last month, Mr Netanyahu said: ”Ultimately, when it comes to a threat to our very existence, we must not abandon our future to others. When it comes to our fate, we must rely only on ourselves.”
The Editor-in-chief of the liberal daily Haaretz, Aluf Benn, said Mr Netanyahu had succeeded in shifting the diplomatic conversation after the Obama administration had been focused on peace efforts with the Palestinians.
”He did a very good job of changing the world’s priorities,” Mr Benn said, ”and he achieved that by saber rattling vis-a-vis Iran. The problem is that you can reach a point when the political price of not going to war becomes too much to bear.”
The Washington Post
