Netanyahu blamed for 'bad deal' with Iran


July 7, 2015
Sarah Benton

1) BBC: Iran nuclear talks: Deal ‘within reach’ as deadline nears, July 7th;
2) Ha’aretz: Netanyahu prepares to fight world over Iran deal, July 7th;
3) IB Times: Iran nuclear talks: Serious differences emerge over arms embargo as deadline looms, July 6th;
4) Ynet news: Lapid slams Netanyahu on emergent Iran deal, July 6th;


US Secretary of State John Kerry, UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the Iranian nuclear talks in Vienna, 6 July 2015.


Iran nuclear talks: Deal ‘within reach’ as deadline nears

BBC news, Middle East
July 07, 2015

Representatives from both sides said a comprehensive deal was closer than ever before
Iran nuclear crisis

World powers and Iran will continue to work towards a comprehensive nuclear deal even though they are likely to miss Tuesday’s deadline, officials say.

Negotiations took place late into the night in the Austrian capital, Vienna, with foreign ministers grappling to resolve outstanding differences.

However, US officials said the midnight (22:00 GMT) deadline might slip and that an agreement was not yet assured.

The talks have intensified since the previous deadline was missed last week.

The so-called P5+1 – the US, UK, France, China and Russia plus Germany – want Iran to scale back its sensitive nuclear activities to ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.
Iran, which wants crippling international sanctions lifted, has always insisted that its nuclear work is peaceful.

‘Within reach’

Representatives from both sides said a deal was closer than ever before as they arrived at Vienna’s Palais Coburg hotel on Monday. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters: “The comprehensive agreement is within reach.”

There are still several issues to reconcile before a nuclear deal can be reached
Progress has been made – one Iranian newspaper reported that there was agreement on the main body of the accord and four of the five annexes. But several sticking points remain, including limits on nuclear research and development and guidelines for inspections.

Tehran is also demanding that the UN ban on the import and export of conventional arms and ballistic missiles be lifted as part of any deal, a senior Iranian official said on Monday.
The text of a new UN Security Council resolution is being drafted, but the US and its European allies oppose lifting the arms embargo because Iran has been accused of fomenting unrest in the Middle East. Russia and China have expressed support.

US Secretary of State John Kerry wants an agreement finalised by Wednesday at the latest so that it can be submitted to the US Congress for approval by Thursday. If a deal is presented later, the review period will double from 30 days to 60.

Journalists are gathered outside the Palais Coburg hotel, awaiting a breakthrough
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was “certainly possible” that Tuesday’s deadline might slip, while state department spokesman John Kirby insisted that Tuesday was merely “an extension of basically seven days of the parameters” of the framework accord agreed in Lausanne in April.

But he added: “Everybody is still, I think, rowing on the oars here to try to get a deal done. But it’s got to be the right deal.”

An Iranian official told reporters: “If we pass 9 July, this may not be the end of the world.”

Officials from the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meanwhile held “intense discussions” with officials in Tehran about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme.

The IAEA has said Iran has failed to give a satisfactory explanation of its research at a military site into detonators that could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon or explained studies that could help calculate the explosive yield of one.



Netanyahu prepares to fight world over Iran deal

With communications between Washington and Jerusalem all but severed, Netanyahu is hedging his bets and preparing to fight Obama on Capitol Hill once a nuclear deal is announced.

By Barak Ravid, Ha’aretz
July 07, 2015

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing for a world war. The reason, what else, is Iran’s nuclear program. This offensive will not involve jet fighters descending on the nuclear facilities in Natanz or Fordo, but rather a frontal charge on Capitol Hill. Netanyahu’s goal was and remains to enlist enough members from both houses of Congress to vote against the nuclear deal with Iran when President Obama puts it on the docket.

An Israeli source noted that Netanyahu seems optimistic about his chances. According to the source, Netanyahu recently told Jewish-American leaders that the battle is not lost. Those who heard the prime minister’s remarks say that it is hard to tell if he actually believes his own words or is only using the rhetoric to try and rally the troops. Either way, Netanyahu conveyed to his interlocutors that he believes that with the right steps, enough Democratic lawmakers with enough political clout can be swayed to stop the deal in its tracks.

The question remains of when the opening shot of this war will be fired. The assessment among Netanyahu and the Israeli establishment is that a comprehensive deal with Iran is a matter of days to a few weeks away. The issues that remain to be resolved between Iran and world powers cast in a doubtful shadow the chances of reaching a deal by the July 9 deadline – the final date Obama can submit the agreement to Congress before it takes its summer recess a month later.

If no deal emerges by July 9 there is a possibility that the White House will choose to continue negotiations without presenting any deal until Congress reconvenes on September 9. The rationale for this is the White House’s desire to give Congress the minimum 30 day oversight period stipulated by law to examine the deal’s wording. Should it be presented before Congress returns from recess, the deal’s detractors will have double the time to plan for its demise in Congress.

Israel is not completely in the dark about the talks in Vienna, but it has relatively limited information regarding the developments from recent weeks. On occasion a French or British diplomat will pass on a snippet of information, and once every few days National Security Advisor Yossi Cohen receives a succinct briefing from U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman or from EU representative Helga Schmidt, but Israeli officials closely involved in the Iranian issue admit that Israel does not have the full picture and that uncertainty in Jerusalem is amassing.

One of the main reasons Israel finds itself in such a bind stems from the fact that communications between Netanyahu and Obama administration officials have been almost non-existent over the last three weeks. The last time the two sides spoke in-depth about the issue was during Yossi Cohen’s mid-June visit to Washington D.C. Cohen met with his counterpart, Susan Rice, as well as Sherman, who heads the U.S. negotiation team, but besides reiterating the regular disagreement between the two nations, no progress was made on the issue. Cohen returned much the same as he had left.

Communications between Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry have also been all but severed in recent weeks. Since arriving in Vienna 10 days ago for the latest round of talks with Iran, Kerry has not spoken with Netanyahu even once. Netanyahu for his part made little to no effort to get Kerry on the phone either.

Both sides have come to understand that at this point of the talks they have little to talk about. The positions are known and both sides have abandoned the pretense of trying to convince each other. All that is left for Obama and Netanyahu to do now is gear up with helmets and flak jackets, and prepare for the political and media battle that will take Washington by storm the moment a deal is announced.



Iran nuclear talks: Serious differences emerge over arms embargo as deadline looms

By Joe Millis, IB Times
July 6, 2015

Serious differences have emerged in talks between Iran and the world powers as yet another deadline looms in negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme.

A final deal was supposed to have been reached by 30 June, but this was extended to 7 July – and even this deadline looks likely to slip.

And an Iranian demand for the immediate lifting of a UN arms embargo is being strongly opposed by the US.

The lifting of the embargo would, suggested an Iranian official, be parallel to and separate from the nuclear deal being discussed with the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.

A draft deal, agreed in April 2015, said “important restrictions on conventional arms and ballistic missiles” would be incorporated in any new U.N. guidelines for Iran, adding that “a new UN Security Council resolution” would be needed to endorse any deal.

Iran views the sanctions and embargoes as unjust and illegal, and has insisted that these crippling actions be lifted.

Although Russia and China support for lifting the embargo, the US says it could allow Tehran to send arms to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled government. Washington also fears the arms would reach Iran’s other allies in the region, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“The ministerial meeting between Iran and the [six] showed there are still serious differences,” a source close to the Iranian negotiating team told the state news agency IRNA. “But both sides are also serious to resolve the differences.”

US will refuse to compromise and failure not ruled out

The US has indicated that it will refuse to compromise. “There’s no appetite for that on our part,” one Western official was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying. “They say there is no reason to connect it with the nuclear issue, a view that is difficult to accept.”

A German diplomat said: “We should not underestimate that important questions remain unresolved.

“If there is no movement on decisive points, a failure is not ruled out.”

It looks increasingly likely that yet another deadline will pass without an accord.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been in Vienna since 30 June, said the negotiations “could go either way if the hard choices get made in the next couple of days, and made quickly, we could get an agreement this week. But if they are not made, we will not.”

And an Iranian diplomat, briefing Western journalists in Vienna, said: “We are not committed to any deadline,” and urged the West to “make decisions”.

Deal worse than North Korea’s

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is vehemently opposed to what he calls a “bad deal”, is gearing up for a fight with the Obama administration and is seeking to get it voted down in the US Congress.

Speaking at Israel’s cabinet meeting on 6 July, Netanyahu said: “The deal being formed in Vienna is not a breakthrough, it’s a breakdown… it will pave the way for Iran to produce multiple nuclear weapons, and will bring it hundreds of billions of dollars, which Iran will use to further aggression and terrorist exploits, both in the region and around the world.

“It’s a bad deal. It’s not any better, and is even worse, than the deal made with North Korea, which led to a nuclear arsenal in North Korea. But here we are talking about both an unconventional and large conventional threat to Israel, the region’s states, and the world as a whole.”



Not so friendly now: Yair Lapid and PM Netanyahu in 2014.  Photo by Oren Nachshon

Lapid slams Netanyahu on emergent Iran deal

Yesh Atid chairman says PM is to blame for lack of Israeli influence on agreement, says gov’t betrayed its people by striking down conversions law.

By Attila Somfalvi, Ynet news
July 06, 2015

Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid slammed the developing agreement on Iran’s nuclear program on Monday, saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to blame for the current impasse in the talks.

In a studio interview with Ynet, Lapid said the emergent accord was a bad deal: “We have to fight (the deal) until the last moment if possible because this is a bad agreement for the state of Israel, I think there is no coalition and opposition in opposing this agreement.”

Lapid spoke to the toothless nature of any deal without snap inspections. “You can’t have an agreement without snap inspections,” he said. “The inspectors should have the ability to pop up from the ground and say, ‘we want to see that you are not developing anything that is forbidden behind closed doors.’

“Instead you have a committee and you have to ask the Iranians for permission before you go to inspect them.

“The Israeli Prime Minister is not to be blamed for the agreement, but is to blame for not being part of it,” he added.

Lapid said the better option for Israel would have been to take an active role in the formation of the agreement. “We should have had a delegation in Vienna, we should have been participants – a nation with possible influence in the agreement,” he argued.

The relationship between Netanyahu and the current American administration kept Israel from exerting influence, according to Lapid. “We should have had an open channel of communication with the American administration,” he said.

“We don’t have all this due to the relations Netanyahu has not only with the American administration but also with the P5+1 including China, Russia, France, Germany and UK.” According to Lapid, “none of them were willing to listen due to Netanyahu’s foreign policy.”

Lapid accused Netanyahu of failing to prevent a bad deal. “We went to the citizens of Israel and said, ‘I’ll prevent an agreement,'” said Lapid. “You didn’t prevent an agreement. You have to go home.”

Lapid did however promise that when and if an agreement was signed, his party would fight it alongside the government.

Both US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif released statements on Saturday alluding to progress in the talks, as the July 7 deadline for an accord rapidly approaches.

Lapid also had criticism for other recent government actions. Regarding the government’s decision on Sunday to strike down a reform that was meant to enable easier conversions to Judaism, Lapid said Israel had betrayed three groups of Israelis.

The first group was women, he said. “A woman who goes to family court is in a worse position than yesterday; she becomes a second-class citizen before the courts.

“The second betrayal is of 300,000 Israeli citizens who are told, ‘we’ll draft you into the army and you’ll die in Operation Protective Edge, but in life you are second-class citizens and your conversion will not occur.

“The third betrayal is of world Jewry. On the one hand we’re trying to recruit American Jews in particular in the battle against Iran’s nuclear program, to assist in Israel’s security, but yesterday we told them that their rabbis are not rabbis, their conversions are not conversions, their synagogues are not synagogues. Israel declares them to be second-class Jews.”

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