AND ON THE ISRAELI FRONT

An editorial in The New York Times warned late Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to portray Iran’s recent diplomatic overtures as a smokescreen to obscure its alleged nuclear weapons program could lead, by undermining international diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue, to the use of force against Iran. Hours earlier, during his address at the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu had ridiculed a 2005 New York Times editorial on the purported success of diplomacy in North Korea. 

Netanyahu’s “aggressive speech” Tuesday to the UN, the paper argued, used “sarcasm and combative words” in an attempt to show that Iranian President Hasan Rouhani is in truth a “smooth-talking charlatan… determined to continue building a nuclear weapons arsenal.”  

Although it acknowledged the “legitimate reasons to be wary of any Iranian overtures” — including the fact that “Iran hid its nuclear program from United Nations inspectors for nearly 20 years” and has developed missile technology likely designed to deliver a nuclear payload — the paper took Netanyahu and his allies in the US Congress to task for being “so blinded by distrust of Iran that they exaggerate the threat” and could prevent President Barack Obama from “taking advantage of new diplomatic openings and sabotage the best chance to establish a new relationship since the 1979 Iranian revolution.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-sabotaging-diplomacy-ny-times-warns

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Yachimovich steps up attack on ‘isolationist’ Netanyahu

Opposition head says Israel does not stand alone against Iran, Islamic Republic is no existential threat, and ‘we should not poke a finger’ in the eye of our best ally, the US

Labor Party leader, Shelly Yachimovich, at a press conference, May 5, 2013, appropriating Benjamin Netanyahu's nuclear bomb to highlight the financial plight of Israel's middle classes (photo credit: Flash90)

Israel’s opposition leader, Shelly Yachimovich, stepped up her criticism Wednesday of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his handling of the Iran crisis, accusing him of “poking a finger in the eye” of the United States, and isolating Israel. 

Speaking on Israel Radio, the Labor Party chairwoman stressed that she shared the “consensus” that Israel “must do everything in our power to ensure” that Iran not attain nuclear weapons. But while Netanyahu, in a tough speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, said Israel would “stand alone” to thwart Iran if necessary, she said Israel was “not alone” in facing the Iranian threat. Many other Middle Eastern states feel even more threatened than Israel, she noted, and the United States was “a full partner” in the struggle.  

Only a day before the UN speech, when Netanyahu was hosted by President Barack Obama at the White House, she pointed out, the president again committed the US to preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons — and the president stressed, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, that the “military option” was still on the table, Yachimovich noted.

Given that context, the prime minister’s UN address should have been “a speech of recruitment [of support], not of isolation.” Israel, she went on, needed to work “hand in hand” with the US, and “not by poking a finger in the eye” of its greatest ally.

She also disagreed with Netanyahu’s assertion that the Iranian nuclear drive constituted a mortal challenge to Israel and the Jewish people. “Iran is not an existential threat to the Jewish people or the Zionist enterprise,” she said. “We are not facing a holocaust.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/yachimovich-steps-up-attack-on-isolationist-netanyahu