Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a scathing attack on the international community for failing to stand up to those seeking to delegitimise Israel, a phenomenon he described as “one of the greatest moral failures of our time.”
He made the statement in a wide-ranging address to the Jewish Agency’s Board of Directors on Monday, as he extrapolated on the threat nuclear Iran poses to the Jewish State.
Describing Isael as “a uniquely moral country and the only country that observes human rights and fights for democracy”, he said that Iran had been clear that its nuclear aspirations were being explored with the sole intention of “destroying the Jewish State.”
He insisted that denying Israel’s right to exist was “nothing short of an effort to eradicate the Jewish State, and we should be clear about that, that it is spearheaded first by Iran”.
“The hatred that is directed against the Jews threatens the rest of the world, but the rest of the world doesn’t see it,” he added, as he commended the Bulgarian government for standing up as a lone voice of dissent amongst the international community for its recent courage in naming Iran’s “henchmen, Hezbollah” as the perpetrators of an attack against Israeli tourists on European soil last July, in its report on the Burgas bombing earlier this month.
“This is the unseen attack, but it's felt and it will be felt more and more. And they're arming their tentacles, their poisoned tentacles of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets and deadly weapons. They're threatening, I believe, not only the security of Israel but the security of every regime in the Middle East, and certainly the flow of oil from this region,” he cautioned.
Looking ahead to US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel next month, the first since assuming office following his tour during the 2008 election campaign, he said that the Iranian threat would inevitably dominate their discussions, as “stopping Iran is the number one goal of anyone seeking peace and security in the world”.
Expanding on his concerns for the region, he reflected on the challenges posed by Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities, which he described as contributing to a “tide moving in the wrong direction” in the region. “It is not moving in the direction of modernity. It is moving in the direction of early medievalism...they set the clock back. They want to turn back history. And they move.”
A third pressing concern for Israel is that of its need to “seek a realistic peace with our Palestinian neighbours”, which he said involved pursuing “a peace process and a peace result that gives and peace and gives us security”.
Seemingly invoking last November’s Egypt-brokered Gaza ceasefire, he cautioned that “peace treaties in themselves do not guarantee the continuity of peace”, for that to be established “we need actual security on the ground” as well as putting stringent negotiated conditions in place.
Talking of the necessity of achieving “a peace that is based on mutual recognition”, he said that that meant “not only that we recognise them, but that they recognise us”.
“We have the Jewish nation-state of Israel here. It's high time that the Palestinians recognize that,” he continued, as he insisted that Israel must remain “the state of the Jews” in essence, both in terms of its national identity and inherent security arrangements.
In spite of these stipulations, the Israeli Premier denied that he was placing “conditions on entering the negotiations”, as he called on the Palestinians to abandon its often-stated preconditions and return to the negotiating table with a clear idea of achieving the goal of “a workable peace”.
“I view President Obama's visit here, along with Secretary Kerry, as an opportunity to reset this and get back to the business of genuine negotiations - direct, unimpeded negotiations without preconditions between Israel and the Palestinians. That's the way to proceed towards peace,” he concluded.