Prime Minsiter Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the 16th annual Saban forum at the Brookings Institute Sunday.
The Prime Minister was asked during the forum what his plans to deal with the threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons will be after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Netanyahu reiterated his longstanding position on the threat Iran poses to the State of Israel. "Israel is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That has not changed and will not change."
He said that he wanted to coordinate Israel's response to the nuclear deal western powers signed with Iran last year with Trump. "As [for] President-elect Trump, I look forward to speaking with him about what to do about this bad deal."
Trump has called the Iran deal, the JCPOA, the "worst deal ever negotiated," though he has given conflicting messages on whether he will keep the agreement or tear it up.
Netanyahu said that the deal did not end the Iranian nuclear threat. "I opposed the deal because it doesn't prevent Iran from getting nukes. It paves the way for Iran to get nuclear weapons. The problem isn't so much that Iran will break the deal, but that Iran will keep it. Because it just can walk in within a decade...to industrial scale enrichment of uranium to make the core for an arsenal of nuclear weapons."
Netanyahu also touched on the peace process, saying that the reason there is no peace is the Arab refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. "The problem we have, and the core of the conflict we have, is that the Palestinians persist in refusing to recognize the Jewish state in any boundry."
