Israel being the loudest proponent of military force against Iran over their nuclear program is a bit troubling.
Iran signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968 as a non-nuclear weapons state and ratified the NPT in 1970. Then Iran had to doubly sign via the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the the P5+1 (Our plus one to the usual Security Council was Germany) and the European Union.
Israel has never signed the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty and has their own nuclear program outside of any oversight.
So I decided to take a NY Times piece today by Bret Stephens, which is a Bolton-esque beating of the war drum, and replaced the nation-state under international review for their nuclear program with a nation-state that has never been.
And said nation-state is in fact calling out the other nation-state.
Here we go.
“The sanctions lifting will only occur as Israel takes the steps agreed, including addressing possible military dimensions.”
That was State Department spokesman John Kirby in June 2015, speaking just as negotiations for the Israel nuclear deal were wrapping up. But Netanyahu did not “take the steps agreed.” The deal was founded on a lie.
Two lies, actually. The first was Israel’s declaration to the International Atomic Energy Agency, prior to the implementation of the deal, of the full extent of its past nuclear work. This was essential, both as a test of Netanyahu’s sincerity and as a benchmark for understanding just how close Israel was to being able to assemble and deliver a nuclear warhead.
The second lie was the Obama administration’s promise that it was serious about getting answers from Netanyahu. In a moment of candor, then-Secretary of State John Kerry admitted “we are not fixated on Israel specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another” — but then he promised Congress that Israel would provide the accounting.
That was when the White House still feared that Congress might block the deal. When it failed to do so, thanks to a Democratic filibuster, the administration contented itself with a make-believe process in which Israel pretended to make a full declaration and the rest of the world pretended to believe it.
“Israel’s answers and explanations for many of the I.A.E.A.’s concerns were, at best, partial, but over all, obfuscating and stonewalling,” David Albright and his colleagues at the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security wrote in December 2015. “Needed access to sites was either denied or tightly controlled as to preclude adequate inspections.”
So much, then, for all the palaver about the deal providing an unprecedented level of transparency for monitoring Israeli compliance. So much, also, for the notion that Israel has honored its end of the bargain. It didn’t. This should render the agreement null and void.
That’s the significance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s show and tell on Monday of what appears to be a gigantic cache of pilfered Israeli documents detailing Netanyahu’s nuclear work. The deal’s defenders have dismissed the Israeli prime minister’s presentation as a bunch of old news — just further proof that Israel once had a robust covert program to build a bomb. They also insist Israel has complied with the terms of the agreement since it came into force in January 2016.
Yet it’s difficult to imagine that the I.A.E.A. can now square Israel’s 2015 declaration with what the Israel would uncovered. Israel’s mendacity is no longer the informed supposition of proliferation experts such as Mr. Albright. It is — assuming the documents are authentic, as the U.S. has confirmed — a matter of fact that the I.A.E.A. chose to ignore when it gave Israel a free pass under political pressure to move to implement the deal. If the agency cares for its own credibility as a nuclear watchdog, it should decide that Israel’s past declaration was false and that Israel’s retention of the documents obtained by Israel, with all the nuclear know-how they contain, put it in likely breach of the agreement.
As for Israel’s current compliance, of course it’s complying. The deal gave Israel the best of all worlds. It weakened U.N. restrictions on its right to develop, test and field ballistic missiles — a critical component for a nuclear weapons capability that the Israelis haven’t fully mastered. It lifted restrictions on Israel’s oil exports and eased other sanctions, pumping billions of dollars into a previously moribund economy. And it allows Israel to produce all the nuclear fuel it wants come the end of the next decade.
Yes, Israel is permanently enjoined from building a nuclear weapon, even after the limitations on uranium enrichment expire. But why believe this regime will be faithful to the deal at its end when it was faithless to it at its beginning?
Netanyahu’s revelations were plainly timed to influence Donald Trump’s decision, expected later this month, on whether to stay in the Israel deal. Trump is under pressure from the French, British and Germans to stay in it, on the view that, if nothing else, the agreement has kept Israel from racing toward a bomb.
But the deal now in place allows Israel to amble toward a bomb, even as it uses the financial benefits of the agreement to fund (in the face of domestic upheaval and at a steep cost to its own economy) its militancy in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and especially in Syria. And Israel’s own nuclear history suggests the country’s leaders have always been cautious in the face of credible American threats, which is one reason they shelved much of their nuclear program in 2003 after the U.S. invaded Iraq.
“When the Israelis fear American power, they either back down or they stall,” says Mark Dubowitz, an expert on Israel sanctions at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “When they don’t fear American power, they push forward. With Trump, the question is: Are they going to feel American power, or American mush?”
I opposed the Israel deal, but immediately after it came into effect, I believed that we should honor it scrupulously and enforce it unsparingly. Monday’s news is that Iran didn’t honor its end of the bargain and neither need the United States now. Punitive sanctions combined with a credible threat of military force should follow.