Israel Matzav

Netanyahu a loser?

BREAKING: Netanyahu to foreign press: Israel has a lot of friends & allies but when they are mistaken it is my duty & obligation to say so
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) November 24, 2013

Buzzfeed's Sheera Frenkel says Prime Minister Netanyahu is a loser as a result of this morning's P 5+1 deal with Iran.

Confusion over the deal was quickly replaced with anger as Israelis woke to the news of the deal, reached in the early hours in Geneva, which provides Iran with much-needed sanctions relief in exchange for reductions in its enrichment program.

“All he needed to do was stop Iran. That’s all we elected him to do for us, and we elected him twice in a row on that promise,” Israeli schoolteacher Mordechai Ben Yishai told Israel’s army radio Sunday morning. “As far as I’m concerned he failed. He was all hot air and no results.”

Iran has been the focus - if not the defining obsession - of Netanyahu’s political career. One of his first speeches in parliament as a lawmaker in 1997, five years before the nuclear crisis began, was about stopping Iran from obtaining atomic weapons. Campaign posters from his last two election runs featured frightening images of Israel under siege from a nuclear Iran.

His speeches often focus on an Iranian bomb as an “existential threat” to the State of Israel.

Just days before he was reelected as prime minister in January, Netanyahu told a delegation of U.S. senators: “My priority, if I’m elected for a next term as prime minister, will be first to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” At last year’s United Nations general assembly, Netanyahu even held up a placard with a comical cartoon bomb, complete with a fuse, representing Iran’s progress towards obtaining weapons capability.

“There is no doubt that Netanyahu is a big loser in the Iran deal,” said Gil Hoffman, political editor at the Jerusalem Post. “His whole political career is built on two things: number one is that he persuaded Israelis that only he could protect them from Iran, and number two is his image as someone who could speak to the world in his perfect English in a persuasive way better than any other Israelis. And here he failed.”

While Netanyahu could have stressed that the deal reached in Geneva was a six-month interim deal, and that efforts were still being made to secure more of Israel’s demands on the permanent deal, he instead lambasted the entire effort as a “disaster.”

“It just goes to show how singular minded, how obsessive Netanyahu is about Iran, that he can’t see any of the positives of this diplomacy or at least spin it that way to his constituency,” an Israeli Foreign Ministry official said. “This is what we call blind diplomacy and in the long run, it harms Israel’s interests abroad.”

Yes, Netanyahu has failed. But not for the reasons Frenkel thinks. He should have attacked Iran a long time ago and did not have the backbone to do it.

With all the talk about his 'political rivals,' one cabinet minister after another has closed ranks around Netanyahu today. Yaalon. Bennett. Liberman. Lapid. All have backed Netanyahu today. So who hasn't? Buzi Herzog? What did you expect him to say?

And then there's this from the incomparable Allen West:

This is not diplomacy, this is abject surrender and appeasement. Iran loses nothing, not a single facility, not any capability to enrich uranium, but we have conceded the one best non-military option: economic sanctions.

President Bill Clinton promised the same in regards to North Korea, and did that have any effect? Not to mention that North Korea has taken an 85-year-old Korean War veteran into detention, and of course we have done nothing.

Iran has held American Christian minister, Saeed Abedini, in prison for nearly a year, and President Obama said nothing about his fate, nor demanded his release. Israel and Saudi Arabia have lost all trust and confidence in America as a credible ally.

Secretary Kerry said the objective is “to require Iran to prove the peaceful nature of its nuclear program.” Yeah, right. We have fallen for the biggest deception ever. Perhaps these inept progressives should study the model for Islamic totalitarian negotiations, Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. As well, they need to understand the principle of taquiyya – lying to “infidels” to promote the advancement of Islamic conquest and objectives.

The goal of the sanctions was to bring Iran to its knees and force them to surrender their march towards a nuclear weapon capability — not to get them to negotiate. The agreed-upon measures are in effect for six months, then what?

Moshe Feiglin goes even further. 

The Iranian version of the Munich Agreement was just signed in Geneva. Like Czechoslovakia in 1938, which was not party to the Western powers' discussions that effectively brought about its demise, Israel today watches from the sidelines as its existential interest is being sacrificed by the West. Any rational person understands that we are in the midst of a process that will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran.

...

In response to this new Munich Agreement, we must adopt a new/old strategy: the same strategy with which Menachem Begin solved the nuclear Iraq problem. Israel must immediately announce the cessation of all ties and dialogue with the Western powers on the Iranian nuclear issue. The world must understand that this game is over. Israel cannot consider itself bound by this agreement and from this morning, assumes exclusive responsibility for dealing with Iran.

My sense is that Israelis are furious about this agreement. But none of them are blaming Netanyahu for it. Blame will instead be laid at Washington's doorstep. And we all fear that all too soon, we will find out that was the right place to lay it.

Labels: Allen West, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Moshe Feiglin, P 5+1

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:08 PM