JERUSALEM — Fearing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on the verge of ordering an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear plants, President Obama sent two emissaries here almost exactly a year ago to stop him. Warning that the White House could not abide an attack in the run-up to the November elections, the Americans persuaded the prime minister to give the newest sanctions time to bite, according to Americans and Israelis familiar with the tense exchanges.
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Seth Wenig/Associated Press
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday at the United Nations, where his speech gained wide attention.
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Netanyahu's U.N. Speech in 3 Minutes
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During Mr. Obama’s own visit here in March, he made clear, again, that if Iran truly got close to building a bomb, the United States would act, squashing talk of an Israeli strike since.
Now, Mr. Netanyahu sounds like a man who regrets not acting when he had the chance. In his speech this week at the United Nations, followed by a media blitz and a series of private briefings, he has only grudgingly endorsed the negotiations between the West and Iran expected to start Oct. 15 in Geneva. As leaders in Washington and Europe increasingly acknowledge that Iran will most likely retain some nuclear fuel production capability, Mr. Netanyahu set out what most experts see as unrealistic conditions — a complete dismantlement of key nuclear facilities — and has repeatedly warned against relaxing sanctions until a deal is done.
But while his United Nations address included the most explicit warning to date of a unilateral strike — “If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone” — Israeli and other analysts say that Mr. Netanyahu’s hands are now all but tied. Israel could hardly exercise its military option while the United States is negotiating, experts say, and would be hard-pressed to strike if Washington and its other allies reach a deal with Iran.
“He’s cornered — is he going to spoil the international celebration and say, ‘I think it’s not a good enough deal so I’m going to use the military option?” asked Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “If there is a good deal, it’s a good deal for him as well. If there is no deal, he can go it alone, but if there is a bad deal, what can he do? He’s trapped. That’s his nightmare.”
The prime minister’s office denied that American emissaries were ever sent here to stop Mr. Netanyahu from launching a strike. “The American position to us is clear and has always been clear: that Israel has the right to defend itself by itself against threats,” Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman said Friday afternoon, as he and Mr. Netanyahu landed in Israel after a five-day visit to the United States. Mr. Regev declined to answer questions about how close Mr. Netanyahu came last year to attacking Iran, and acknowledged that the prime minister had no way of knowing for sure what agenda Mr. Obama or members of his administration had for the visits. “I can’t tell you what the Americans were thinking -- I can tell you what messages were delivered, and it’s not true,” Mr. Regev said. “No emissaries were sent with that message.”
Now, Washington and Jerusalem have the same stated goal of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but there is a growing chasm over what might be the acceptable terms for an agreement. Mr. Netanyahu’s new mantra is “distrust, dismantle and verify,” and in an interview with NBC News he insisted on “a full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program,” something Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has made clear is unacceptable.
Israel, like the Sunni Arab gulf states, also fears that resolving the nuclear issue would remove the primary instrument for containing Iran as a regional power. Lifting sanctions would not only signal new international legitimacy for Tehran, but it would also allow Iran to rebuild its hobbled economy, giving it the means to intervene all across the region, financing radical groups and promoting its ideology.
The United States, on the other hand, sees broad benefits to a rapprochement. And while its official position is also that Iran must forgo major elements of its existing programs — including its 18,000 centrifuges, which enrich uranium, and a heavy-water reactor that could create another pathway to a bomb — Mr. Obama has not recently used the word “dismantle” in his own public comments. Instead he has simply said that Iran must prove its program is peaceful in nature, as Mr. Rouhani insists it is.
An American involved in devising the West’s negotiating strategy said, “The Israelis want to go back to where the Iranians were a decade ago.” The American continued: “No one in the U.S. disagrees with that as a goal. The question is whether it’s achievable, and whether it’s better to have a small Iranian capacity that is closely watched, or to insist on eliminating their capacity altogether.”
There is also a continuing divergence on how far Iran is today from developing a bomb.
While American and Israeli intelligence agencies largely agree on their assessments, Mr. Netanyahu has chosen an aggressive interpretation of the evidence, that Iran is a few weeks or months from producing a weapon, while the White House maintains it remains a year or two away.
Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who now leads the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said those timetables would also be the main barometer for assessing any future agreement. If the agreement leaves enough of the nuclear facilities in place that “it’s a matter of a few months, then it’s a bad agreement,” Mr. Yadlin said.
He continued, “If whatever they’re left with they need a few years for the bomb, this is a good agreement.”
“I would discuss it privately with the president of the United States, what is the acceptable deal and what is the unacceptable deal,” he added. “I think it’s more effective than an appearance on the U.N. stage that I don’t think is helping the negotiators or the policy makers to make their positions stronger.”
On Thursday, in testimony before the Senate, Wendy Sherman, who is heading the Iran negotiations for the United States, said that, “No deal is better than a bad deal.”
The substance of Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation in New York, debunking Mr. Rouhani’s moderate talk with quotations from his past, was widely praised in Israel.
But many politicians and commentators here also took issue with the prime minister’s tone, saying he made it seem as if Israel was already standing alone, outside a growing international consensus that negotiations hold promise.
“This speech should have been one of mobilization and not a speech of isolation,” said Shelly Yacimovich, the head of Israel’s Labor Party and leader of its opposition in Parliament. “This scare campaign does not benefit us.”
Amram Mitzna, a lawmaker from the Hatnua Party, a centrist part of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, said the prime minister “missed the point by describing Israel as a country which sees the use of military power as most important.” Mr. Mitzna added, “We must not in any way place ourselves as the spearhead of the fight against Iran.”
But a senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said European diplomats had privately encouraged Israeli leaders “to keep on speaking loudly about the possibility of the military option” as a tactic they believe can only improve their negotiating position.
“Europeans are clearly understanding that we need to restate the military option in order for things to move,” the senior Israeli official said. “When Netanyahu says we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, that’s exactly what he means. He does not say we will not allow Iran to have such and such a reactor and such and such enriched uranium.”
Indeed, Mr. Netanyahu pointedly refrained from setting a clear red line, as he famously did last year at the United Nations with a cartoon bomb. He argued that Iran could not be left just a few screwdriver-turns from a weapons capability.
Iran has essentially done an end run around that line, converting some of its enriched uranium to a form it says would be used to make medical isotopes, while installing thousands of new, faster centrifuges that sharply cut the time it would take to build a weapon.
This has clearly frustrated the Israelis, though Mr. Netanyahu is seeking to exploit it to underline the danger in Iran maintaining any nuclear facilities: he has included in his four conditions dismantling these advanced centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment plant.
Israeli officials and analysts said it was clear that these were “maximalist” conditions, part of what they described as a Middle East negotiating tactic of setting impossible parameters so concessions seem more significant later.
But the conditions, and the extent of Mr. Netanyahu’s berating of Mr. Rouhani, buttressed the impression that he has already dismissed the diplomatic track, and revived questions about his trust in Mr. Obama’s resolve, many people here said.
“One of the principles in diplomacy,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, is “never say no, always say, ‘Yes, but.'
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