Obama won’t follow through with assurances, many Israelis fear

Distrust between Israel and the Obama administration reached a new high after the U.S. and its international partners Thursday announced some loose parameters of a framework for an agreement with Iran that left key components of a final deal — such as the timing of sanctions relief — unresolved.

Obama in successive interviews over the last few days repeatedly claimed to be extremely sensitive to Israelis’ fears about a deal with Iran that falls short of putting a complete stop to Tehran’s nuclear program.

At the same time, he said a request from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that any final deal include a clause asserting Israel’s right to exist wasn’t realistic.

“The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms,” Obama told National Public Radio in an interview Monday. “And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.”

Later in the interview, the president returned to his point that the entire deal was premised on Iran’s threat to the region and long adversarial history with the West and its allies.

“We want Iran not to have nuclear weapons precisely because we can’t bank on the nature of the regime changing,” he said. “That’s exactly why we don’t want [Iran] to have nuclear weapons. If suddenly Iran transformed itself to Germany or Sweden or France, then there would be a different set of conversations about their nuclear infrastructure.”

When asked about Netanyahu’s right-to-exist request Friday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the agreement is focused solely on the nuclear issue, which was already “complicated enough to deal with on its own.”

Skeptics of the tentative deal argue that the threat Iran poses to Israel is directly related to efforts to roll back its nuclear program because Tehran will use sanctions relief to fund its march for domination in the region.

“The infusion of cash that the Iranians are going to get in the deal is going to give them billions of dollars to pursue non-nuclear wars against their neighbors and their terror infrastructure — support for Hamas and Hezbollah that targets Israelis and others,” said The Israel Project’s Omri Ceren.

Even some Israelis, however, are arguing that Netanyahu’s insistence that any final deal include a recognition of Israel’s right to exist wasn’t realistic.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told Israel’s Army Radio on Monday that such a recognition flies in the face of Iran’s core belief system.

“The demand from the Muslim world to recognize Israel’s right to exist is almost like asking them to change their religion,” Halevy said, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“In Islam, they don’t recognize Israel’s right nor do they recognize the right of other nations to exist,” he added.

Obama tried to assuage Israelis’ fears during an interview with the New York Times’ Tom Friedman over the weekend.

“I have to respect the fears that the Israeli people have, and I understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu is expressing the deep-rooted concerns that a lot of the Israeli population feel about this, but what I can say to them is: No. 1, this is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, and No. 2, what we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” the president said.

“The combination of a diplomatic path that puts the nuclear issue to one side — while at the same time sending a clear message to the Iranians that you have to change your behavior more broadly and that we are going to protect our allies if you continue to engage in destabilizing aggressive activity — I think that’s a combination that potentially at least not only assures our friends, but starts bringing down the temperature,” he added.

But staunch critics of the deal argue the Obama administration is on weak ground when it comes to U.S. nuclear-related assurances. They point out that the U.S. persuaded Ukraine to give up its nuclear program in the 1990s in return for assurances that the U.S. would protect its territorial integrity and even signed the Budapest Memorandum promising to do so.

“The idea of anyone taking the president’s security promises seriously — you would have to be to be a sociopath to believe it,” one Israeli activist told the Washington Examiner.

Israel’s intelligence chief on Monday for the first time laid out major changes Jersusalem would like to see to the framework forged last week between Iran and a coalition that includes the United States and five other world powers.

Yuval Steinitz told reporters that Israel’s primary problem with the deal is the number of centrifuges it allows Tehran to retain — roughly 6,100, enough to continue a nuclear program — according to an account in the Wall Street Journal.

Steinitz also took issue with the framework’s agreement to allow Iran to keep its underground facility in Fordow, a site Iran secretly operated for years, open for research and development activity.

After meeting with Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs last week, Steinitz and Netanyahu identified 10 “unanswered questions” in the parameters of the new framework, specifically calling for details on Iran’s past nuclear activity and how quickly sanctions could be reinstated if Iran violates the agreement.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz tried to provide more clarity for reporters Monday, specifically noting that at the Fordow facility two-thirds of operations will be immediately disassembled, with just 10 percent of the centrifuges remaining active without uranium enrichment.

“No fissile material, no uranium is even allowed in the facility with continuous monitoring from the [International Atomic Energy Agency] and a transition of that facility over time to basically a physics laboratory and medical isotope laboratory,” Moniz said.

He also said the monitoring protocols will be unprecedented and will continue for 25 years.

“There will be insight — eyes and ears — eyes mainly, maybe some ears — on the full supply chain,” he said. “This is unprecedented, going back to the uranium mines, all the way through to the final facilities.”

But nuclear scientists have argued that Iran could easily exploit Fordow’s continued use for research and development to conduct nuclear weapons experiments.

“I’m not trying to kill any deal – I’m trying to fill a bad deal,” Netanyahu said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday.