By Daniel Levy (published by APN with permission from the author)
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu can claim a victory of sorts by having set the agenda and received wall to wall coverage of his congressional speech and by succeeding in making his message rather than empty seats the story. The speech is likely to play well at home and his re-election prospects will not have been harmed by today’s events. But that is probably where the good news ends.
Netanyahu’s speech was rhetorically skilful but his attempt to punch holes in a prospective nuclear deal as well as to define a morning after narrative regarding Iran fails to stand up to post-speech scrutiny. Netanyahu’s tactics seem to be to focus on a possible ten year sunset clause to a deal and to encourage Congress to make that a deal breaker. At the same time Netanyahu seemed to be preparing for a post-deal reality and demanding that Iran continue to be treated exclusively as a terror state. For Netanyahu to claim that after ten years Iran would be free to do as it pleases on an nuclear programme was intentionally misleading - as an NPT member Iran (unlike Israel) would continue to be subject to a range of restrictions that prevent WMD development. The weakness of Netanyahu’s push-back is that he is wrong about the negotiations, wrong about Iran, and wrong about the alternatives.
If Netanyahu was attempting to extend an olive branch to the Obama administration in the early part of his speech then that was more than withdrawn when Bibi appeared to depict not only the President and his negotiating team but also the entire constellation of P5+1 world powers as naïve waif for believing either that Iran can change or for failing to secure a better deal. But on closer inspection it is Netanyahu’s case that makes no sense. On the one hand he says the regime has been around for thirty-six years and will not change in the next ten, while on the other he claims that the regime is so fragile and vulnerable to pressure that it is on the brink of collapse. Netanyahu argues that more pressure and insistence can deliver a better deal, but decades of negotiations say otherwise. When negotiations cease and sanctions increase Iran has upped its enrichment capacity and has been able to secure better terms. The deal under discussion would put a stop to that. But Netanyahu continues to fabricate an alternative that exists in speeches only.
From previously insisting the nuclear issue be treated as a standalone Netanyahu now wants to introduce other issues as conditions for a deal, including Iran’s regional role. When a grand bargain was presented in the past, it was rejected by Israelis, a position Netanyahu never disowned until it seems today. The implementation of the Joint Plan of Action proves that a deal can hold and be implemented puncturing yet another Netanyahu talking point.
And while Iran should win no plaudits for its regional role the attempt to depict it as the font of all evil is so reductionist as to be absurd. Netanyahu’s terrifying depiction of the consequences of a nuclear Iran in the region should be filed alongside his testimony in support of the Iraq war and its positive knock-on effects for the Middle-East. Netanyahu’s assertions of Iran’s genocidal intentions would be news to the twenty-five thousand Jews who continue to live safely inside the Islamic Republic, the largest community outside Israel in the region. If he is looking for regional states with a history of expansionism he might look closer to home. Finally, Netanyahu’s riff on the threat to non-proliferation was worthy of an Oscar award for Chutzpah.
Netanyahu’s call to follow the path less travelled should be seized upon by Congress and the administration to move ahead with a deal that offers the best prospect for insuring a verifiable freeze and partial roll-back of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme offers the path towards non-proliferation and greater regional stability. That is the path less travelled, not the tired re-heated rhetoric of Bibi doing doomsday and dissing diplomacy. Finally, it is hard to think of a worse idea than an Israeli Prime Minister owning a campaign whose logical end point is to send America off to another Middle-Eastern war.
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Daniel Levy is the head of the Middle East and & North Africa programme at ECFR. He is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Daniel's full bio and contact information is available here.