The dissonance among Israel’s leaders, alongside their bombastic solemn pledges against Iran gaining a nuclear weapon, is obstructing clear decisions on three cardinal issues:
- Whether or not to go along with the deal shaping up between the Biden administration and the Iranian regime headed by President Ibrahim Raisi. In other words, should the four-month-old Bennett government stick to Binyamin Netanyahu’s blanket opposition to any accord with Iran?
- How close is Iran to becoming a nuclear threshold power?
- What role do the Abraham Accords serve in the current situation: They were set up as a concerted US-Israel-Gulf Arab front against Iran and its allies, such as Syria. Now, its members are defecting, following Saud Arabia in establishing neighborly relations with Tehran. Could this become a bridge between Tehran and Jerusalem?
These unresolved questions are the subjects of public arguments, political and personal, in the public domain. So who in fact should decide on answers, when the borders among the government’s mostly untried leaders are not clearly defined?
On Oc. 7 DEBKAfile revealed secret talks afoot among the US, Russia, Iran and Israel on a deal for Israel’s acceptance of Iran’s nuclear threshold state in return for US-Russian guarantees against Tehran leaping towards making a bomb. Our sources believed that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was willing to abandon the taboo his predecessor Netanyahu had exercised against diplomacy with Iran; he appeared to be on the way to seeking the guarantees that were proposed from Washington and at his forthcoming meeting on Oct. 22 with President Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Judging by the way he speaks with two voices, Bennett may still be dithering between opposing positions. READ MORE
