In the public comments Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made about Iran in his first week in office, one needed bionic ears to hear any differences between his rhetoric and that of his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“As the government is setting out on its path, the greatest threat to Israel, the Iranian nuclear project, is reaching a critical point,” Bennett said when introducing his new government to the Knesset last week.
“Renewing the nuclear deal with Iran is a mistake that will once again lend legitimacy to one of the most discriminatory and violent regimes in the world,” he said. “Israel will not allow Iran to be equipped with nuclear weapons. Israel is not a party to the agreement and will maintain full freedom to act.”
The sound of the voice may be different – Bennett does not have the Netanyahu baritone that clothes words in greater gravitas – but the message was the same one that Netanyahu has been sounding for years.
And then again on Sunday, when Bennett chaired the first working meeting of his new cabinet, one could easily have imagined Netanyahu responding to the election of the new Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, exactly as Bennett did.
Raisi’s election, Bennett said, is “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement, and to understand who they are doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers. A regime of brutal hangmen must never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction that will enable it to not kill thousands, but millions. Israel’s position will not change on this.”
But while the rhetoric may be the same, Israel could be on the cusp of a strategic change in how it approaches the Iran issue, more particularly, how it approaches the clear intent of the US to reenter an Iranian nuclear deal.
While Netanyahu’s approach to the new deal was the same as his approach to the old deal – that Israel would not consult with the Americans negotiating the deal so as neither to give it legitimacy or be bound by it – Bennett has reportedly decided on a different tack and wants to engage the Americans to impact the terms of the deal.
Bennett lifted the Netanyahu-imposed ban on senior officials discussing the terms of the agreement with the Americans, Channel 13 reported Friday. Netanyahu had argued the ban would preserve Israel’s freedom of action because if Israel was not involved in drawing up the terms of the agreement, it would not be bound by the agreement itself and could work to scuttle it.
This change of policy comes against the background of a document written by three senior security officials, warning that unless Israel gets involved in the process, the emerging deal could be worse for Israel than the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (formal name for the Iran nuclear deal) agreed upon in 2015.
According to Amos Harel of Haaretz, the three security officials – Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, a former director of Military Intelligence; Gideon Frank, a former head of the Atomic Energy Commission; and Ariel Levite, one of Israel’s leading nuclear experts – wrote that the US, Britain, Germany and France, who are negotiating with the Iranians, want to hear Israel’s opinion on the matter, but senior officials were prevented by Netanyahu from doing so.
According to the document, the US now appears willing to lift most of the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in exchange for an Iranian willingness to retreat from only some of the steps it has taken since the US withdrew from the deal in 2018. This, the three wrote, will have dangerous implications for Israel because it means that the “warning time for a renewal of an Iranian effort to achieve the weapon will be abbreviated and will, accordingly, limit the available options for thwarting it.”
Ze’evi-Farkash, in an interview on Monday in Yediot Aharonot, said one of the motivating factors behind the document was the knowledge that “there are very senior officials in the three European countries and the US who don’t understand Israel’s silence. How can it be that an agreement is being drawn up, or at the very least a return to the 2015 agreement, on a subject that we say is the greatest threat to Israel’s security, and our voice is not heard.”
If Israel does not engage with the US and the European powers now, Ze’evi-Farkash said, they will say afterward that Jerusalem had an opportunity to influence the agreement but didn’t take advantage of it and, as a result, should now just “shut up.”
“Israel is not a part of the agreement nor obligated to it,” he said. “But we have an obligation to express our opinion to try and change at least part of the more problematic clauses there. None of this says that we support it.”
The establishment of the new government provides a unique opportunity to change tactics, Ze’evi-Farkash said. “We have to formulate a strategic plan with a senior team that can act in all the various channels and try and influence,” he said.
If, indeed, Israel adopts this tactic, and if IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi, who is currently in the US, has been given leeway from the government to discuss terms of the agreement and what Israel would like to see introduced or changed, then this would represent a significant break from the Netanyahu-era policies on Iran.
Over the years, Netanyahu has often used Holocaust imagery when discussing the Iranian nuclear program. One of his strongest arguments for going ahead with his controversial speech to Congress in 2015 against the Iranian nuclear deal was that as opposed to the 1930s, when the Jews did not have a voice to warn of impending doom, today they do, and the prime minister of the Jewish state has a sacred obligation to use that voice, regardless of whom it might rattle and annoy.
Netanyahu used a similar argument in his speech to the Knesset last week, warning that the new Bennett-Lapid government would be weak on Iran, adding that he would not remain quiet in his opposition to the Iran deal, even if the Americans wanted him to do so.
“The new American administration asked me to keep our disagreements on the nuclear issue private, not to make them public,” Netanyahu said. “I said I would not do so, and I will tell you why: Because the lessons of history are before my eyes.
“In 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to bomb the railways leading to the extermination camps and refused to bomb the gas chambers, something that could have saved millions of our people,” he said. “We hoped for others to save us, and they didn’t come. In the face of the threat of extermination, we were helpless. Our voice was not heard among the nations.”
The premise of Netanyahu’s comment is that one’s voice is heard and effective only if one shouts from the highest hilltop.
The new government appears ready to ditch that premise and try a different tack – shout inside the room in the hopes that perhaps that will have more of an impact on the eventual outcome.
To have Israeli security officials discuss the nuclear deal with the Americans in an effort to influence it is not to deprive the Jewish state of its voice; it is to use that voice not through a megaphone from the rooftops, but rather through diplomatic channels in private rooms.