The answer for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is war against Iran

Philip Stephens ( FT.com)

 A statesman would have made his country a partner in the talks, not an angry voice on the side

Irony is not Benjamin Netanyahu’s strong suit. Israel’s prime minister was in Washington this week to issue another of his apocalyptic warnings about Iran’s nuclear programme. He left at home the crude diagram of an Iranian bomb he had waved aloft at the UN in 2012. Yet this latest theatre offered another reminder that no one has been so diligent as its present leader in disarming the state of Israel.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Netanyahu won warm applause from his Republican friends in the US Congress. House Speaker John Boehner never misses an opportunity to embarrass President Barack Obama. Many Democrats stayed away. What should worry Israelis is that beyond Capitol Hill no one else is listening. The bellicose intransigence that Mr Netanyahu has made his trademark lost him the backing of Europeans long ago. By traducing Mr Obama in the company of Republicans he shattered trust with the White House.

There lies one irony. Mr Netanyahu has stripped himself of credibility. Whatever this Israeli government now says — sensible or otherwise — about the indisputable risks of any nuclear deal with Tehran will be generally discounted as the raving of someone forever set on another Middle East war. A statesman would have made Israel a partner to the six-power talks. Angry shouting from the sidelines has left Mr Netanyahu, well, alone on the sidelines.

Israel’s drift towards isolation is not just about Iran. The rising swell of opinion pushing the international community towards formal recognition of Palestinian statehood at the UN can be traced directly to the headlong expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas would have to make big concessions in any serious peace negotiation. It has been given a free pass. Why should it move when the Israeli leader openly scorns US peace efforts and, week by week, shows contempt for the notion of two states by grabbing more Palestinian land?

Nothing if not immodest, Mr Netanyahu called his US trip a “fateful, even historic, mission”. He styles himself a latter day Winston Churchill — a vanity happily indulged by Mr Boehner. Many Israelis take a different view. Opposition politicians charged he had poisoned relations with the US in an effort to grab headlines two weeks ahead of a general election that he could yet lose to Labor’s Isaac Herzog.

More tellingly, an array of former senior officials and generals from the country’s security establishment said the grandstanding was a “clear and present danger to the security of the state of Israel”. The rift with Mr Obama, they stated, had imperilled bipartisan US support for Israel and made an enemy of its most vital friend.

These Israeli grandees might have added that by turning Iran into a partisan issue Mr Netanyahu has actually made it easier for Mr Obama to strike a framework deal with Iran before the end March deadline. US support for Israel does not mean Americans are content to see an Israeli prime minister trying to propel their president into a war. Most, I would guess, have had enough of military adventures in the Middle East. As for the other parties to the six-power talks, Mr Netanyahu’s latest volley will have simply confirmed long accumulated preconceptions.

The Israeli leader openly scorns US peace efforts and shows contempt for the notion of two states by grabbing more Palestinian land

A second irony, of course, is that the Israeli prime minister is right when he says that the outline bargain on the table with Iran is fraught with risks. Tehran’s role as a sponsor of Hizbollah and vital prop for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad tells you all you need to know about the regime. A promise to reduce its stocks of uranium, scale down enrichment and submit to international scrutiny and inspection is not a guarantee that the regime will not seek to make a bomb.

Mr Netanyahu says the alternative is to ratchet up sanctions until Iran abjures all nuclear activity, civilian as well as military. He knows, though, that is fantasy. Both the means and the end are implausible. Sanctions would never force Tehran to make such a commitment, nor stop it from building a bomb.

No, what the Israeli leader really wants is a US-led war against Iran. What he also fails to say is that a new Middle East conflagration would be even less likely to snuff out Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Bombing Iran would more likely convince hardliners that a nuclear capability was the only sure guarantee against US-imposed regime change.

Iran has mastered the nuclear cycle. It also has what the experts call a “breakout capability”; sufficient material to produce at least one device, probably several. The knowledge cannot be bombed away. Nor, unless air attacks are open-ended, can outside powers prevent Iran from building new nuclear facilities secure against such raids.

Facing the severe pain of sanctions, compounded by the sharp fall in oil prices, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has offered the west an opening that might change the dynamics of the relationship. For his part, Mr Obama is ready to accept a deal sufficiently robust to provide one year’s notice of any attempt to build a bomb.

Susan Rice, Mr Obama’s national security adviser, says the US approach is to “distrust but verify”. That is not a bad summation. If the terms are nailed down — and there is still no certainty Tehran will accept them — such a bargain will be an imperfect compromise with one of the world’s more unpleasant and dangerous regimes. That would be a lot better than a futile war.

philip.stephens@ft.com

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