WASHINGTON – The atmosphere at the Israel Embassy in Washington was positive on Tuesday. Ambassador Gilad Erdan, together with his staff, waited at the entrance gate when Jake Sullivan, Barbara Leaf, and Brett McGurk of the NSC stepped out of the car. A professional photographer arrived to take pictures.
Ahead of the meeting, Erdan gave a short statement to the media at the embassy. But instead of focusing on the possible return of the US to the JCPOA, he noted that the Iran deal is just one topic that the sides will discuss.
“We are having a broad range of discussions, not only about the Vienna talks,” Ambassador Erdan said ahead of the meeting. “We made clear our opposition to the return to the JCPOA. We said that it is a flawed and bad agreement, and returning to the same deal makes it less likely to reach a better one in the future. We also made our position clear about maintaining Israel’s freedom of operation in any scenario.”
“But with that being said, we share the same goal: preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. However, our conversation today is not only about Iran, but also about regional issues such as Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians.”
There were many smiles around the table, but at the end of the day, the bottom line remained the same: the US and Israel disagree about the return to the JCPOA, and the negotiations in Vienna are moving forward.
“We came with the perception that we have many issues to discuss, and it was important for us to hedge the disagreements,” an Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post. “In addition to discussing the subject that we disagree about – returning to the JCPOA – we wanted to go ahead and speak about other regional issues in which we can enhance our cooperation
“It is not as if we swept the nuclear deal under the rug. We made our point very clear: we expressed our disagreement with returning to the original 2015 nuclear deal. Our position was that getting back to the original deal today would weaken the US leverage to negotiate a ‘longer and stronger’ agreement.”
The official noted that one of the reasons for the disagreement to returning to the 2015 JCPOA is that “it legitimizes Iran’s path to the bomb, and eventually under that agreement all restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program will be lifted.”
According to the Israeli official, the Israeli delegation told the US delegation that there is no point negotiating specific details at this moment of the “longer and stronger” deal, given that the US and Iran are negotiating a “full compliance for full compliance deal” in which both sides would rejoin the original 2015 deal.
“We told our counterparts that if the sides will negotiate the longer agreement in the future, then we would certainly voice our opinion about how it should look, and then we will be part of that conversation,” the official said. “We don’t intend to discuss it now and legitimize the return to the original JCPOA.”
The official said that the Israeli delegation was satisfied that the sides agreed to establish a working group to counter Iranian drones and missiles. “We also made it clear that Israel’s freedom of operation would be kept in any scenario,” the official said. “The objective is not to reach a crisis that would hurt the shared efforts to counter Iran. The fact that we don’t agree doesn’t mean we can’t discuss other issues.”
Meanwhile, the conversations with the US are ongoing. Erdan and Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen met on Thursday with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and deputy secretary Wendy Sherman. As of press time, the sides did not provide additional information about the meeting.
“There is the music and there is the message,” said David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations at the Washington Institute. “When it comes to the music, the Biden Administration is seeking to avoid public fights with Israel over Iran by having high-level consultations. After Covid, this is the first in-person exchange, and I expect this will deepen the conversation. When it comes to the message, it was a good sign the parties agreed publicly to a working group on precision-guided weapon systems of Iran in Lebanon and Syria, as this is a high-priority of Israel.
“Yet the biggest question is whether a key policy gap can be closed when it comes to the Iranian nuclear issue,” Makovsky continued. “Specifically, I think Israel needs to be convinced that the US is very serious about a follow-on agreement, JCPOA 2.0. If the US is able to convey that it is and it has ample economic leverage to get there, I think it will create a new context for the differences over JCPOA 1.0. If Israel thinks 2.0 is merely aspirational, it will view the return to JCPOA in a far more negative light – as a way to put an issue in the box while the US tackles other priorities around the globe. US officials insist they are very serious about 2.0, but the question is whether they have convinced their Israeli counterparts.”