On Friday, Israel bitterly smashed the claim that its leadership now supports last year’s nuclear deal as suggested by US President Barack Obama. Not only does Israel not accept Obama’s assertion, but the Israeli Defense Ministry compared the year-old accord to the Munich Agreement signed by European countries in 1938 in capitulation to Nazi Germany.
The remarks come in response to Obama’s statement on Thursday that Israeli defense officials are now secretly celebrating the deal signed by world powers in recognition of the nuclear control regime’s effectiveness.
"The Israeli defense establishment believes that agreements have value only if they are based on the existing reality, but they have no value if the facts on the ground are the complete opposition of those the deal is based upon," the Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Another top government minister close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated the country’s offense with the nuclear deal led by the Obama administration. "I don’t know to which Israelis he (Obama) spoke recently, but I can promise you that the position of the prime minister, the defense minister and of most senior officials in the defense establishment has not changed," Tzachi Hanegbi said in an interview with The Times of Israel.
"The opposite is the case. The time that has elapsed since the deal was signed proved all our worries that, regrettably, we were justified before the deal was made," said Hanegbi, a minister who works in the Office of the Prime Minister and who formerly chaired the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees.
Last summer, the deal between Iran and leading world powers led Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to compare the deal to the 1938 Munich Agreement calling it a "total capitulation to unrestrained terrorism and violence in the international arena."
One year later, Liberman’s Defense Ministry employed identical rhetoric in rebuking Obama’s claim that Israel feels safer in the wake of the nuclear arrangement with Iran.
"The Munich Agreement didn’t prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust precisely because its basis, according to which Nazi Germany could be a partner for some sort of agreement, was flawed, and because the leaders of the world ignored the explicit statements of Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany’s leaders," the ministry said.
"These things are also true about Iran, which also clearly states openly that its aim is to destroy the state of Israel," it said, pointing to a recent State Department report that determined that Iran is the number one state sponsor of worldwide terrorism.
The Defense Ministry closed by saying that the Iran nuclear deal "only damages the uncompromising struggle we must make against terrorist states like Iran."
