Asked if he was one of the Israeli defense officials who President Barack Obama claimed considered the nuclear deal with Iran a success, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Thursday that he didn’t know any security officials who felt that way.
After a wide-ranging presentation at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that partially dealt with Iran’s growing threat to the Middle East, Ya’alon was interviewed by the institute’s director, Robert Satloff.
Satloff referred to Obama’s claim in August that the “Israeli military and intelligence community — the country that was most opposed to this deal … acknowledges this has been a game-changer.” He then asked Ya’alon: “You offered a pretty strong critique of this so I think it’s fair to say you’re not one of those national security figures that he was talking about. Is that correct?”
“I don’t know about any of them,” Ya’alon responded. “Because I personally said that there is the good news about the deal is the technological delay in the project, but I added something else, that this is the only good news.”
Earlier during the presentation, the former defense minister said:
As you know, we don’t share any border with Iran, we don’t occupy any Iranian territory whatsoever, and they still call to wipe Israel of the map of the earth. And this is in the backdrop of the deal, which in a way, yes, there’s a delay in the technological clock of the Iranian nuclear project. This is the entire achievement; the entire consequences are very bad.
First of all the Iranian regime keeps the indigenous capabilities to produce a bomb. And they’ll be able to do it whenever they decide but even obeying the deal, the agreement, they will be allowed to it within a decade, fifteen years. Still a big issue to discuss here between Israel and the United States, about what should be done in order to prevent a military nuclear Iran, one way or another.
The exchange starts at the 40:00 mark in the video recording of the event.
[Photo: Washington Institute for Near East Policy ]