Misjudged condition

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not stopped finding fault with the agreement recently reached by the P5+1 countries and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme.

He now tries to put a spoke in the agreeing countries’ wheel by insisting that the final agreement, due to be signed on June 30, has to contain a clear recognition by Tehran of “Israel’s right to exist”, citing an alleged recent remark by an Iranian military commander that the “destruction of Israel is non-negotiable”.

The Israeli prime minister said his country would never tolerate an agreement that “allows a country that vows to annihilate us to develop nuclear weapons”.

No compunction, of course, in declaring that he will prevent the creation of a Palestinian state while in power, which, in the final analysis, amounts to the same thing: an avowal to “annihilate” even the hope of a state for the Palestinians that his artificially created country ruthlessly disenfranchised.

The parallel conveniently escapes the prime minister.

US President Barack Obama, in an interview Monday with the US radio network NPR, said that the Israeli demand to make any nuclear deal with Iran conditional on Tehran’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist is a “fundamental misjudgement”.

Obama went on to say that the “notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear bombs... on Iran recognising Israel, is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms”, obviously an impossibility, at least for the foreseeable time, that any statesman could not fail to see.

Israel has developed the habit of seeing issues in its own warped ways. True to its habit, it did not fail this time to see all sorts of shortcomings and dangers in the agreement with Iran.

Israel’s insistence on its own way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear programme, which is military force, would sure unleash another regional conflagration that could engulf even the world.

Clearly a region in turmoil and waging wars would be the best screen for Israel’s schemes in the rest of Palestine.

What Israel fails to see, however, is that it cannot expect to be spared a fire sweeping through the entire region.