Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement yesterday claiming that a U.S. re-entry into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six other countries, “will pave Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.”
However, not everyone in Israel thinks like Netanyahu. Two former IDF officers, both with impeccable security credentials, told Times of Israel that the JCPOA wasn’t perfect but it was a good deal for Israel. Meretz MK Yair Golan and former MK Omer Barlev, who is thought likely to be a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party after the March 23 election, stand out as those likely to lead the charge in challenging the prime minister’s tactics, reports ToI (their qualifications and personal histories are fully detailed in the report). They came out of that thread within the Israeli Defense Forces that saw the JCPOA, despite Netanyahu’s infamous 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress in which he demanded that the Obama Administration not sign the deal, as being good for Israel.
“The agreement is not optimal and carries with it a number of serious weaknesses that should not be overlooked. However, after signing … it must be said that it actually reduces the direct nuclear threat to the country in the coming years, I daresay, in a dramatic fashion,” Barlev, then an opposition back-bencher for Labor, wrote in a lengthy Facebook post a few months after Netanyahu’s speech. “Anyone who claims that the agreement increases the risk from the nuclear threat is doing so out of ignorance or, alternatively, knows the conditions well and is knowingly misleading an entire public,” he added, pointing out that none of Israel’s leading newspapers had agreed to print his post as a column.
“When the agreement was signed in 2015, we, the IDF’s General Staff, read the deal and said, ‘This is not a perfect agreement, but it is a good agreement. It’s an agreement that takes the nuclear program years back.’ This is what we wanted,” Golan told ToI in an interview. “This is an extraordinary achievement.
Golan panned Netanyahu’s claims that Iran is enriching uranium secretly. “If the Iranians were enriching covertly, they could have done so with or without the agreement,” he said. “Under the regime of the JCPOA we knew, for sure, that they got rid of tons of enriched material. We knew for sure that they froze centrifuges. And as for Netanyahu’s hints that they acted covertly, I’m not saying they did not. I do not presume the Iranians to act in good faith or speak truthfully. What I am saying is that the agreement has been an amazing achievement for the State of Israel and people are not being told that.”
