Jerusalem- Israel’s prime minister urged President Joe Biden and Western powers to scrap an emerging nuclear deal with Iran, saying negotiators were allowing Tehran to manipulate the talks and that the deal would reward Israel’s enemies.
Yair Lapid called the emerging agreement a “bad deal” and noted that Biden had failed to honor the red lines he had previously promised to set.
“The countries of the West are drawing a red line, and the Iranians are ignoring that, and the red line is moving,” Lapid told reporters at a press conference in Jerusalem. Lapid said the emerging deal “does not meet the criteria President Biden himself set: preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state.”
Biden was eager to revive the 2015 deal, which offered sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. The original deal collapsed after former President Donald Trump withdrew from it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions with strong encouragement from Israel.
It remains unclear whether the United States and Iran will be able to reach a new agreement. But the Biden administration is expected to consider Iran’s latest offer in the coming days. As the agreement approached, Israel intensified its efforts to prevent it.
Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The Islamic Republic has increasingly claimed that the Americans are now delaying the deal, even though Tehran has spent months in back-and-forth negotiations that have previously stalled in both Vienna and Qatar.
Lapid warned that Iran would transfer billions of dollars in unfrozen funds to hostile armed groups, such as Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, that threaten Israel.
He stopped short of blaming any one power for the apparent progress in the talks, but he opened his statement on Wednesday by noting that the United States and other negotiating powers were capitulating to Iranian demands at the last minute.
The Iranians are making demands again. “The negotiators are ready to make concessions again,” Lapid said.
And he was keen to reiterate that Biden, who visited Israel last month during a trip through the Middle East, remains a staunch ally.
Israeli National Security Adviser Eyal Holata is in Washington this week for talks with Biden administration officials, and Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz will travel to the United States on Thursday for meetings with the head of the US military’s Central Command, which conducts foreign operations in the Middle East. and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Lapid will serve as Israel’s interim prime minister until the elections on November 1, when he will face former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other challengers. While the two men have deep differences, they occupy nearly identical positions when it comes to Iran. In 2015, Netanyahu, now the leader of the opposition, addressed Congress in a failed attempt to derail what would become a landmark foreign policy achievement for President Barack Obama.
Israel has long said it will not allow its regional arch foe Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and is not bound by agreements between world powers and Tehran. It also called for diplomacy to be accompanied by a “credible” threat of military action against Iran if necessary.
“We are not ready to live with a nuclear threat over our heads from a violent extremist Islamic regime,” Lapid said on Wednesday. “This will not happen. Because we will not let that happen.”
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Associated Press writer Ilan Ben-Zion contributed to this story.
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