Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is still desperate to paint Iran as the New Nazi Germany, locked in a mad quest for nuclear weapons to destroy Israel -- a scenario that implies that President Obama's Iran diplomacy is dithering in the face of a grave and gathering danger. “The Iranian regime is acting openly and decisively toward our destruction, and it is acting feverishly to develop a nuclear weapon to achieve this goal,” Netanyahu told a Holocaust remembrance ceremony last week, just two days after accusing the Obama Administration of giving Iran a 'freebie' in the recent nuclear talks in Istanbul. Those comments, and interviews in which Netanyahu pointedly rejected the idea that Iran's leaders were rational men, are clearly calculated to mobilize political pressure against any compromise with Iran.
But then a curious thing happened: Israel's military chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz publicly disputed Netanyahu's characterization of the Iranians. Tehran's leaders are "very rational", Gantz told the daily Haaretz, and he doubted they would actually build nuclear weapons given the choices before them. That was a de facto endorsement of Obama's policy of threatening force only if that become necessary to stop Iran building nuclear weapons, which it hasn't yet taken a decision to do so, and until then focus on sanctions and diplomacy.
Days later came an even harsher rebuke of Netanyahu, this time from Yuval Diskin, the respected recently retired head of the Shin Bet internal security service. Mr. Diskin pulled no punches, warning Israelis that Mr. Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, suffer from messianic delusions, were misleading the Israeli public about Iran, and should not be trusted. "I've seen them from up close," Diskin told a community meeting last week. "They are not messiahs, either of them, and they are not people whom I, on a personal level, trust to lead the State of Israel into an event of that scale [a confrontation with Iran]." Indeed, he warned, attacking Iran is more likely to result in Iran actually acquiring nuclear weapons.
Diskin's warnings were quickly backed by both former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and even by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Israeli public opinion polls repeatedly find that no more than one in four Israelis supports attacking Iran without U.S. backing -- Israelis, it seems, don't want to be as isolated from Western allies as Netanyahu's hardline rhetoric is. And the consensus in its military and intelligence services clearly opposes the Prime Minister's threats and apocalyptic rhetoric.
Netanyahu's troubles are good news for Obama, however, precisely because the Israeli leader has been trying to narrow the political space for diplomacy with Iran. Netanyahu knows that negotiations, in the best-case outcome, will produce a compromise well short of his bottom-line demands: It may involve an end to Iran enriching uranium to 20% purity and adoption of additional internationally verifiable safeguards against weaponization, in exchange for easing sanctions. Mr. Netanyahu has long insisted that Iran can't be trusted to exercise its NPT right to enrich uranium under international scrutiny for energy purposes -- the Israelis want Iran's entire enrichment infrastructure rolled up and removed, which is clearly not going to happen.
U.S. officials have reportedly begun moving towards accepting the principle -- which they've resisted until now -- that Iran can maintain low-level uranium enrichment under stricter international scrutiny and safeguards once it has accounted for all its previous nuclear work to the satisfaction of the IAEA. Because such an outcome would leave Iran possessing infrastructure that could be used, in the future, to build nuclear weapons if Iran broke out of the NPT, that's precisely the sort of compromise Netanyahu is trying to block.
