Netanyahu on Iran Nuclear Deal: ‘There Is Still Time to Reach a…Better Deal’
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Photo by Kobi Gideon /GPO via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his criticisms of the Iran nuclear deal in an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz on This Week Sunday.
Netanyahu echoed comments he made earlier in the week, saying that the framework that was agreed to last week in Lausanne, Switzerland, doesn’t just fail to block Iran’s road to a nuclear weapon, but actually paves it. “A nuclear-armed Middle East,” Netanyahu described, would be “a global danger. I think it’s very, very bad.”
“It leaves Iran with a vast nuclear infrastructure. It lifts the sanctions on them fairly quickly and enables them to get billions of dollars into their coffers. They’re not going to use it for schools or hospitals or roads,” Netanyahu said.
“They’re going to use it to pump up their terror machine worldwide and their military machine that is busy conquering the Middle East now,” he added.
Netanyahu’s relationship with the Obama administration has been somewhat chilly in recent months, after the Israeli leader accepted an invitation from House Speaker John Boehner — and not the president himself — to speak before a joint session of Congress. That speech, shortly before Netanyahu’s own re-election bid, was criticized by some as a political move.
On This Week, however, Netanyahu said simply that on the Iran deal, he has a “legitimate difference of view” compared to Obama and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
“I think there is still time to reach a good deal, a better deal,” Netanyahu explained. “I think what is required is to hold firm, to increase the…pressures until a better deal is achieved, one that significantly rolls back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and one that doesn’t lift the restrictions on…Iran’s nuclear program until they stop their aggression in the region.”
Calling Iran “the preeminent terrorist state of our time,” Netanyahu warned that allowing the country a nuclear weapon “endangers Israel, endangers the region, endangers the world, it endangers everyone listening to me right now.”
“I think that what they don’t accept today, they can accept tomorrow,” Netanyahu said when asked how he would get Iran to agree to a tougher deal. “If I told you two years ago that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad would accept a deal…that takes out all the chemical weapons from Syria, just takes it out, not leave inspectors or beefed up inspectors…to inspect what is there but actually take out the whole stuff, you would have said that’s unrealistic.”
Netanyahu explained that the successful negotiation with Syria came as a result of pressure. “When Syria saw that…those pressures were raining down on them, they agreed…to what was not agreed before.”
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