Not Exactly A Surprise ..

Netanyahu calls on Trump to unpick Iran nuclear deal

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is hopeful that the new US administration will take a harder line on Iran

Israel pushed Iran’s nuclear programme to the top of President Trump’s foreign policy agenda last night, in the first phone call between the country’s leaders since Mr Trump’s inauguration.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is hopeful that the new US administration will take a harder line on Iran. He has long criticised the 2015 Iran nuclear pact spearheaded by President Obama, which Mr Trump has pledged to “tear up”.

In a sign of the increased support Mr Trump appears willing to give to Israel, the White House said yesterday that it was at the “beginning” of discussing plans to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. The US, like most countries, has long kept its embassy in Tel Aviv to avoid taking sides in the dispute over the holy city, which is claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr Trump has promised to move it, an action that Palestinian officials said would effectively end the peace process. Husam Zumlot, an adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said: “For decades we’ve accepted that the road to peace goes through Washington. This will be the end of what you’ve been building for a quarter century.”

During last night’s phone call — described as a “very warm conversation” by Mr Netanyahu — the leaders agreed that peace between Israel and the Palestinians must be “negotiated directly between the two parties” and to “closely consult on a range of regional issues, including addressing the threats posed by Iran,” the White House said. Mr Netanyahu, who accepted an invitation from the president to visit Washington next month, said that there would be “no daylight between the United States and Israel” in their vision for the region.

At a cabinet meeting before the call, the prime minister had said: “I would like to make it clear, contrary to reports that I have read, that stopping the Iranian threat . . . continues to be a supreme goal of the state of Israel.”

He also made an unusual public appeal to Iranians in a video posted on Facebook on Saturday night. “You have a proud history. You have a rich culture. Tragically, you are shackled by a theocratic tyranny,” he said in the two-and-a-half-minute clip, recorded in English with Farsi subtitles.

Mr Netanyahu went on to mention the protests after the disputed 2009 election in which scores of Iranians were killed. “I’ll never forget the images of brave young students hungry for change gunned down in the streets of Tehran,” he said.

The message is unlikely to find a large audience in Iran, where Israel is not held in high regard. Instead it was a signal of Mr Netanyahu’s priorities in the Trump era. Israel considers Iran its main regional foe, both because of its nuclear work and its patronage of militant groups such as Hezbollah. Mr Netanyahu spent years threatening to carry out airstrikes against its atomic facilities and the issue came to dominate Israeli politics. He once answered a question about the high cost of apartments by invoking the threat from Iran.

These threats became moot in the summer of 2015 when Iran signed the nuclear pact with six world powers. The deal, reached after years of talks, offered Tehran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for strict limits on its nuclear activities.

Mr Netanyahu had strongly opposed the deal, the centrepiece of Mr Obama’s foreign policy. Its passage was a major diplomatic defeat and he quickly dropped the subject — until now.

On the campaign trail Mr Trump promised repeatedly to “tear up” the deal. His closest aides are similarly critical. Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, predicted that it would lead to a “large regional war.”

Jared Kushner, the president’s influential son-in-law, is also thought to oppose the agreement. The president said last week that Mr Kushner, whose family donates heavily to Israeli causes, would serve as his Middle East peace negotiator. The Justice Department ruled on Friday that his appointment as a senior White House adviser would not violate federal anti-nepotism laws.

Mr Trump’s cabinet nominees took a more restrained stance in their confirmation hearings earlier this month. James Mattis, the defence secretary, called it an “imperfect arms control agreement”. The president’s choice for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wants to review the deal. Neither man supports tearing it up.

Analysts say it is unlikely that Mr Netanyahu will push to scrap the agreement altogether. Israeli spies have recently advised him not to: while they think that the deal is flawed, they also believe that it has delayed Iran’s nuclear programme and made it easier to monitor. The municipal planning committee in Jerusalem yesterday approved plans for 556 new homes in three neighbourhoods beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The United Nations, and much of the world, considers such construction to be illegal.

The plans were originally tabled in December, days after the UN security council approved a resolution that condemned Israeli settlements, but Mr Netanyahu delayed the measure, afraid of how Mr Obama might respond.

Meir Turgeman, head of the planning committee, said it was no coincidence that the homes were approved on the first working day after Mr Trump took office.

“I hope an era has ended,” Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, said after the vote yesterday. “From now on, we will continue to build and develop Jerusalem for the benefit of its residents.”

Mr Turgeman said that he would advance plans for thousands of other homes in the coming weeks.

Some of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners want to go even further. Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, has already drafted a bill to annex Ma’ale Adumim, one of the largest settlements in the occupied West Bank. Such a move would prompt a furious reaction from the Palestinians and from many of Israel’s closest allies, particularly in Europe. The bill was scheduled for a cabinet vote yesterday but Mr Netanyahu postponed the debate.

Analysis

Binyamin Netanyahu’s disagreements with President Obama were open and bitter, and most particularly so over the nuclear deal with Iran (Richard Spencer writes).

It is easy to forget how real the possibility of conflict with Iran was, whether stemming from an Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities or an American one, when Mr Obama took office.

Israeli leaders, and some American officials, were scathing of the attempts — led by the European Union — to negotiate with Tehran. However, back-channel talks were under way between the State Department and Iranian diplomats in Oman.

That eventually led to the deal under which most of Iran’s centrifuge programme would be dismantled and put in storage, and its stocks of low-enriched uranium transferred, in return for a gradual lifting of sanctions.

Mr Netanyahu was furious. He had publicly campaigned against any deal that did not scrap the nuclear programme altogether, most famously in 2012 when he used a cartoon of a bomb at the UN general assembly to illustrate his “red lines”. After the deal, he used an address to the US Congress to lay into President Obama, an unprecedented snub.

It all seemed too late. The American foreign policy establishment largely backed the deal and the debate has since focused on how far, and not whether, America and Iran will co-operate on a range of issues, such as fighting Islamic State.

With Mr Trump vociferously attacking the deal and appointing hardline supporters of Israel to key positions, Mr Netanyahu sees an opening, even though he probably knows the deal will not be completely ripped up.