Currently a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University, Ben Shabbat served as NSC chief from 2017 until August, during former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s term and the first two months of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s term.
He discussed a number of issues in a wide-ranging interview by email, from Iran to Ukraine to Hezbollah to the Abraham Accords, though he declined to answer questions about operational issues.
Q: Recently, those experts and former officials who said that the JCPOA nuclear deal was bad to have said that the US exiting the deal was also a bad move – because there was no Plan B of what to do without the deal – and that this freed up Iran to progress further with its nuclear program. Do you agree? And now that there is a high probability of a new agreement, how should Israel act?
BS: An agreement is not the end, an agreement is the means! The goal is to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons or from becoming a “threshold state” with nuclear weapons. Any agreement that does not ensure this is a means that is not serving the ends, and is, therefore, not a good one. READ MORE
