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US-Iran Nuclear Agreement: Was Netanyahu Shrewd or
Foolish?
By Uri Avnery
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, August 24, 2015
Editor's Note:
To answer Avnery's main question,
Netanyahu, as a prime minister of Israel, was not foolish. He has achieved
his goal of preventing Iran from possessing the nuclear bomb, which would
have been the only deterrent against Israeli-led NATO invasion in the
future. He has used Israel's Zionist-global power, which controls the US-EU,
to force Iran to accept the agreement. How can this be foolish?
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Uri Avnery |
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The Magician's Apprentice ONE HAS to choose:
Binyamin Netanyahu is either incredibly shrewd or incredibly foolish.
Take his Iran policy. Actually, there is little to choose from.
Netanyahu has no other policy to speak off. According to him, Iran
constitutes a mortal danger to Israel. If it obtains a nuclear weapon, God
forbid, it will use it to annihilate Israel. It must be stopped by any
means, preferably by American armed intervention. This may be
quite wrong (as I believe). But it makes sense. So what did
Netanyahu do? FOR YEARS, he alarmed the world. Every day the cry
went out: Save Israel! Prevent the destruction of the Jewish State!
Prevent a Second Holocaust! Prevent Iran from producing The Bomb!
The world did not take any notice. It was busy with many other
matters. There are crises galore everywhere, all the time. Economic
depressions. Plagues. The warming of the earth. But Netanyahu did
not let off. He used every rostrum, from the Knesset to the United States
Congress, to shout his message. At long last, a weary world paid
heed. OK, the Jews warn of the Iranian bomb? So let's do something to
prevent it. Not just something. No. Let's get all the great powers of the
world together to compel Iran to end this nonsense. And they did.
The USA, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - practically the
whole world - commanded Iran to start negotiations. There was only
one single issue: preventing Iran from getting The Bomb. Nothing else
mattered. Compared to this giant issue, everything else was insignificant.
And then something unexpected happened. Iran's political system
replaced their loudmouth president with a very different one: a
soft-spoken, eminently reasonable politician. Negotiations started, and
Iran sent an even more soft-spoken, eminently reasonable diplomat to
conduct them. The foreign ministers of the world were enchanted.
After playing a little hard-to-get, Iran accepted an agreement. The World
got, more or less, everything it wanted. No bomb for a long time. Very
intrusive inspection procedures. (They were not really needed. Up-to-date
espionage techniques can quickly detect any movements toward a bomb.)
EVERYBODY WAS happy. Everybody, that is, except Netanyahu. He was
furious. What kind of an agreement is this? The Iranians
will get the bomb. If not now, then in 15 years. Or in 25. Or in 50.
The Iranians will cheat! Persians always cheat! They can't help it! It's
in their blood! (Not like us, who built dozens of nuclear weapons in
secret. After the Holocaust, we are allowed to do things like that.)
And anyway, even if they don't get the bomb, the Iranians will get
legitimization. And money. They will support anti-Israeli terrorists, like
Hezbollah and Hamas. (Not very convincing, after Netanyahu had demanded
concentration on The Bomb, and not on anything else.) The huge
Israeli propaganda machine was set in motion. The terrible agreement is
being denounced from every rooftop. Of course we knew all the time that
Barack Obama is an anti-Semite, as is John Kerry. Now we have the proof.
Actually, the play is over. An agreement signed by the entire world
cannot be made to disappear with a puff from Bibi. It will be there, even
if the US Congress does vote against it and overrides the presidential
veto. The world is tired of Netanyahu's whims. The man got what he wanted,
so what now?! I believe that the Iranians did not want the bomb
very much anyhow. According to all available evidence, the agreement
aroused joy in the streets of Tehran. The prevalent mood seems to be:
"Thank Allah, at long last we've got rid of this whole nonsense!"
BUT THE bomb that isn't has already caused immense damage to Israel.
Much worse than if it existed in some dark cavern. All Israelis
agree that the one supreme asset Israel has is its special, unparalleled
relationship with the US. It is unique. Unique and priceless. In
military terms, Israel gets the most up-to-date weapon systems,
practically for nothing. No less important, Israel can not conduct any war
for more than a few days without an airlift of munitions and spare parts
from the US. But that is only a small element of our national
security. Even more important is the knowledge that you cannot threaten
Israel without confronting the entire might of the United States. This is
a formidable umbrella, the envy of the world. More than that,
every country in the world knows that if you want something from
Washington DC, and especially from the US Congress, you better pass
through Jerusalem and pay a price. How much is that worth? And
then there is the veto. Not the little veto Obama will use to neutralize a
Congress vote against the agreement, but the Big Veto, the one that blocks
every single UN Security Council resolution to censure Israel, even for
actions that cry to high heaven. A 49 year old occupation. Hundreds of
thousands of settlers who contravene international law. Almost daily
killings. Condemn Israel? Forget it. Sanctions against Israel?
Don't make us laugh. As long as the almighty US protects Israel, It can do
whatever it wants. All this is now put in question. Perhaps the
damage has already been done, like hidden cracks in the foundations of a
building. The scale of the damage may become apparent only in coming
years. Another hidden crack is the rift between Israel and a large
part of the Jews around the world, especially in the US. Israel claims to
be the "Nation-State of the Jewish People". All Jews throughout the world
owe it unquestioning allegiance. A mighty apparatus of "Jewish
organizations" is policing the vassals. Woe to the Jew who dares to
object. Not anymore. A rift has opened within world Jewry, that
probably cannot be repaired. Commanded to choose between their president
and Israel, many American Jews prefer their president, or just opt out.
Who is the anti-Semite who has managed to bring all this evil
about? No other than the Prime Minister of Israel himself. DOES
THIS trouble the world? Not really.
We Israelis believe that we are the center of the world.
But it ain't necessarily so. While Israel is obsessed with the
Iranian bomb, great changes are taking place in our region. The almost
forgotten 13-century old rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims has
suddenly reappeared all over. This rift, almost as old as Islam itself,
was plastered over by the artificial order established by the notorious
colonialist Sykes-Picot agreement during World War I. What is
happening now is a political earthquake. The landscape is changing
dramatically. Mountains disappear, new ones are formed. The Shiite axis,
from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Hezbollah in Lebanon is overtaking
the Sunni bloc of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Libya and Yemen are
tossed around, Egypt harkens back to its glorious Pharaonic past, and in
the middle of it all, a new power is raising its head – the Islamic
Caliphate of Daesh, which attracts Muslim youth from all over the world.
In the middle of this raging storm, Netanyahu is a man of the past, a
person whose perceptions were formed decades ago, in another world.
Instead of addressing this new world, with its great dangers and great
opportunities, he fumbles around with the non-existent Bomb.
The US and the other Western powers are
cautiously changing their stance. They are afraid of Daesh, as they should
be. They perceive that their interests are
getting closer to those of Iran and further away from those of Saudi
Arabia. The new nuclear agreement fits well into this pattern.
Netanyahu's permanent trouble-making does not. IS THIS being
discussed in Israel? Of course not. It's all about the bomb, the bomb, the
bomb. The little quarrels between the Muslims are more or less ignored.
Sunnis, Shiites – they are all the same. Anti-Semites.
Holocaust-deniers. Israel-haters. Yet there are great
opportunities. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, as well as Egypt, are
already hinting that they could cooperate with Israel. In deepest secrecy,
of course. Nobody can shake hands openly with Israel as long as the
Arab masses see every day on their TV sets the misdeeds of the settlers,
the killings of the occupation army, the humiliation of the Palestinian
brothers. Like a heavy weight tied to the leg of a swimmer, the occupation
prevents us from reacting to the changes in the region. Lately,
there have been ever-stronger rumors about secret negotiations between
Netanyahu and Hamas for an eight or ten year-long armistice, that would
amount to an unofficial peace agreement. It would create a tiny
Palestinian mini-state, while isolating even more Mahmoud Abbas and the
main body of the Palestinian people, who are committed to the Arab peace
plan. All this for what? For enlarging the settlements and
perhaps annexing another part of the West Bank ("Area C"). So is
the man shrewd or just foolish? A magician or just a magician's
apprentice?
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