When newly appointed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama next month, don’t expect a public spat over peace process politics.
Sources in the new government tell Newsmax that the Israeli prime minister is determined to focus all of his energy on convincing Obama that preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons dwarfs all other concerns either nation could have.
Netanyahu sees the threat from a nuclear-armed Iran as a “hinge of history,” that could fundamentally alter the world if it goes unchallenged, sources told Newsmax in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
If the world fails to meet the challenge of stopping the Iranian regime’s nuclear quest, Netanayhu believes “this could be a turning point that is irreversible.”
Should Iran succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be the first time that a radical Islamic regime dedicated to Israel’s destruction had ever acquired such massive destructive power. “We cannot assume that the normal rational calculations other actors have had for the last 50 or 60 years are going to hold true,” one source said.
What may surprise Obama the most is not Netanyahu’s iron-clad determination to stop Iran, but the fact that he and others in the new government see Iran as “a lens” through which they view all other problems in the region.
“Imagine the war in Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas in 2008 with a nuclear tripwire,” one source told Newsmax. “If you allow the mother ship to be armed in a different way, the proxies will be that much more powerful, and threats will increase by factors of magnitude.”
Several Arab states normally hostile to Israel have recently expressed a desire to cooperate with Israel to contain Iran. “Ironically, the Arabs see us increasingly as an ally,” a former top Israeli diplomat told Newsmax. “They see there are only two countries that can deal with Iran: the United States and Israel.”
Netanyahu has been warning for the past 15 years of the threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of a terrorist state.
In a 1994 book, “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists,” he forecast that terrorists would use a nuclear bomb to blow up the World Trade Center in New York.
In a 1996 address to a Joint Session of Congress in Washington, he said that the greatest threat the world was going to face in the future was a nuclear-armed Iran.
What’s new in 2009 is not only the progress Iran has made toward achieving nuclear weapons capability, but how the proximity of the threat has affected Israel’s strategic thinking.
Retired Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, a former chief of staff who was brought into the new government by Netanyahu and his coalition parties as vice prime minister, was put in charge of a new ministry of strategic affairs.
In a recent essay published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yaalon described the new strategic outlook that Netanyahu and his coalition partners appear to have adopted.
At the heart of it lies Iran.
