Podcast: Israel Should be Vigilant, but Realistic (script)

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You’re listening to Iran’s Weekly Wire; I’m Roland Elliott Brown.
 
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On Monday Iran, the US, and five other world powers reached an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.
 
US President Barack Obama announced “a comprehensive, long term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
 
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani hailed a “new chapter in history,” and a potential end to mistrust between Iran and other nations. He said that Iran has never, and will never seek nuclear weapons.
 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not convinced. He said Iran now has “a sure path to nuclear weapons.” He called the deal “a stunning historic mistake.”
 
This week, I’m going to look at Israel’s opposition to the deal, and what it might mean for the future of the Middle East.
 
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To start, I spoke to Yiftah Curiel, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in London. I asked him why Israel is so opposed to the deal.

[Yiftah Curiel] Well, as you have heard our prime minister say and other Israeli officials from the opposition as well, we are definitely unhappy with this deal. We believe that the vast infrastructure that it leaves in place, Iran's nuclear infrastructure, would enable it in the not so far future to achieve military nuclear capabilities. I think the second important point is that the deal has an expiration date. It's temporary, and we are looking into the future.

Obama says this deal closes off all possible paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon. But Israel wanted the negotiators to demand much more:

[Yiftah Curiel] We would have liked to see an actual rolling back of the nuclear infrastructure, of those nuclear sites that were built by Iran in a clandestine fashion, contravention to the UN Security Council resolutions, and to the NPT, like Natanz, like Fordow. We see that these are still going to be open and operational. We'd like to see R and D rolled back as well, which it is not under this deal, or at least not enough from the Israeli perspective. We'd like to see a situation where we don't wake up in 10 or 15 years--and that's a good scenario, assuming it doesn't happen before--we don't wake up in 10 or 15 years to a country which has all of the capabilities, and the potential, to breakout to nuclear military activity very very quickly.

Facing his critics, Israel’s leaders included, Obama says that this is not the kind of deal you make with your friends. 

He likened it to arms agreements the US once made with the Soviet Union.

But Israel sees itself, and not the US, at the sharp end of Iran’s enmity.

[Yiftah Curiel] Israel sees today what Iran is doing in the region and has been doing in the region for the past years. It is the main funder of the terror groups that are out to destroy Israel and are actively working to do so, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has carried out terror attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in the past year in lots of countries, so we are very worried about what Iran is doing today, regardless of the nuclear option, and the idea that this country with its intentions and its actions would actually get a nuclear military option is very very dangerous.

And while Hamas and Hezbollah may want to destroy Israel, Netanyahu has said a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat to the country.

Now, in Israel, Iran’s relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah is widely recognised. Fears about a nuclear-armed Iran are widespread.

But not everyone takes Netanyahu’s line on the nuclear question, or on Monday’s deal.

Here’s Carlo Strenger. He’s a professor of psychology and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He also blogs for the liberal newspaper Haaretz.

[Carlo Strenger] It was certainly clear that any decent deal at this point was better than no deal because in any case the sanctions regime would no longer have worked because Russia and China were on their way out. So first of all, on a very pragmatic line, it was important to achieve something. From the parts I have read, I think it's a fairly decent deal, in terms of being able to ensure that the previous breaches of confidence that Iran has committed on the issue will not repeat themselves, at least not that easily.

And here’s how Strenger understands Netanyahu’s motivations.

[Carlo Strenger] Netanyahu is a man who has a very strong Manichean worldview, you know, the forces of good vs. the forces of evil, and he is very much marked by a view that his father as a historian maintained throughout his very long life that Jewish leaderships throughout Jewish history have made terrible mistakes in not recognising terrible dangers to the Jewish people, and the results were absolutely catastrophic, and I think that Mr. Netanyahu is guided by a fear that the next Holocaust is around the corner. I think he actually believes that, I think it's not just a manipulation.

But the question for some Israelis is, whether this view has served Israel’s interests. After all, it has led Israel to break with the White House over the nuclear talks.

It’s also put Israel at odds with the other big powers that helped negotiate the deal.

Here’s David Menashri. He’s a Professor of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University. He also has big doubts about the Israeli government’s approach..

[David Menashri] I think what Israel has done in this story of the nuclear negotiations, all the mistakes that are possible. As an Israeli I'm a bit not happy with the conduct of the Israeli policy. I was against for many years, even the use of this term existential threat, referring to Iran. I thought that even if it's true, and it may not be true, but even if it's true, you don't have to tell the Iranians that you are scared to death. I also didn’t like this equation of the Iranian regime with the Nazi regime, I think that’s counterproductive. Right now, the Israeli government has continued its crusade against this agreement, when I think it's a lost case. I don't think we can change much by being against it.

And while Israel has been expressing its fears and quarreling with its allies,  Iran has scored a diplomatic triumph.

[David Menashri] President Rouhani deserves a lot of credit. Before his election in summer of 2013, he promised the people that he will bring them back the value of their passport. Namely that he will make them again members of the community of nations, a country with respect, dignified, and a country that many countries want to have relations with. And in fact, he achieved it. Iran is now a welcome country in the community of nations. Iran is being sought after to do business, it has the support of Russia, it is now having agreement with the European powers, the 5 + 1, China, the United States, and I think that they managed to turn the table and achieve what they have achieved.

Now that this deal is done, Israel faces a diplomatic defeat, and a new reality.

So far, Netanyahu’s response has been to warn-- cryptically--that Israel is not bound by the deal. I asked Yiftah Curiel what Netanyahu meant by that.

[Yiftah Curiel] I think that Netanyahu was reiterating Israel's position for many years now that it will defend itself by itself and it will know how to do that.

I also asked if that means Israel is still considering a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

[Yiftah Curiel] President Obama said that that option is still in the cards and Israel has said many times that it will do all that it can to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and so, yes.

Now, neither Strenger nor Menashri take a sanguine view of Iran’s intentions in the Middle East.

They are both concerned about Iran’s attacks on Israelis, and its ambitions in the region. They don’t think the deal has made it impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

But they also see real value in Obama’s break with the old way of dealing with Iran. Here’s Carlo Strenger:

[Carlo Strenger] I have always seen President Obama's relentless pushing for a deal with Iran as guided by a very positive thought, which is that he has been thinking for a long time that Iran needs to be integrated into the international community, and that the status quo is not only catastrophic for Iran's population--and I want to make a clear distinction here between the population and the regime--but is one of the main sources of tension worldwide at this point. Obama kind of hopes that once a more positive dynamic with Iran evolves, that this would benefit everyone instead of this being a zero sum game, it would gradually move into a potential win-win situation. I can see the logic of this view, and I am basically in favour of it. I’m also cautious

And here’s David Menashri:

[David Menashri] The reason that America has been so devoted to engage the Iranians is that any administration wants to show success. They tried to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian problem and they thought both the Israelis and the Palestinians are unwilling to go anywhere, they went another way. I can't blame President Obama, because president Obama made this issue of dialogue with Iran as a flag in his campaign in 2008, and he wanted to promote it. As an Israeli I would be much more interested, rather than spending so much energy negating this agreement, to see where we are going from here. 

One big question on everyone’s mind in the post-deal era is, how will Iran change?

Will a new era of diplomacy and economic ties make Iran less ideological? 

Or will a post-sanctions cash windfall make it more aggressive?  

Carlo Strenger thinks Israel should be vigilant. But he also thinks it should look at what’s going on inside Iran.

[Carlo Strenger] It should take into account that there are forces in Iran that are very very different from the hardliners that are currently calling the shots and also defining the official rhetoric. The urban population is much more open to the world, is very interested in a rapprochement with the West and had probably very little interest in the regime's confrontational approach towards its neighbors, towards Israel, and towards the West. We should at least be open to the possibility that the Iranian elites--I'm not talking about government forces, but financial, cultural, and intellectual elites--might at least to some degree lead a push toward a more mitigated Iranian stance. Israel should keep its eyes open and at least keep in mind that this enmity that started with the 1979 revolution is not something that needs to go on forever.

There’s no doubt that this deal has brought hope to many Iranians who don’t necessarily love their government. And I was keen to make that point to Yiftah Curiel. Here’s what he said:

[Yiftah Curiel] Israel has had historically great relations with Iran in the past, we had great relations with the Iranian people specifically, with many Iranian-born Jews in Israel, some immigrated from Iran, so I think we would definitely like to see a different future vis a vis the people-to-people relations, but Israel is suffering under the actions of the current regime. We don't see a more moderate Iran, we see Rouhani a week ago burning Israeli flags in a parade, we see the calls of death to Israel and death to America continuing, so I would ask these more liberal Iranians, where are the fruits of these negotiations? You ask us to sort of take your word on it, or take the word of the international community that in ten years Iran will be different.

The answer might be that these negotiations have bought Iranian reformers some time, and some opportunities that they didn’t have before. That may sound like a huge gamble to security-minded Israelis, but it looks increasingly like the least bad option.

Here’s David Menashri:

[David Menashri] Nothing can make Israel optimistic, but you have to consider realities Iran is far in its nuclear program. Even military attack cannot reverse the process. It could slow it down and postpone it for a few years. So the optimistic side of it, in political way, they achieved postponement of the nuclear program even more than military attack could have achieved. You delayed in 5 or 10 years military attack. 

Still, he can’t buy into the euphoria that has surrounded this deal in Washington and Tehran.

[David Menashri] When they call it historic achievement or agreement, I am a student of history. I studied this all my life, people who speak about historic agreement should also keep in mind that 10 yrs is in historic terms tomorrow morning, so there is not much comfort in delaying it for a few years.

Of course, from Iran’s point of view, Israel’s security concerns are built on hypocrisy: Israel remains the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East. Last year’s Gaza war showed that Israel poses its own grave threats to civilian life. 

But even these points are susceptible to the new logic of negotiation. If Iran really wants a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, if Iran really cares about civilians in Gaza, one day an Iranian official should pick up the phone and say, “Shalom!”

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That’s all from Iran’s Weekly Wire. If you want to find out more about this story, join us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit IranWire.com.