Netanyahu's obsession with Iran goes back a long way

New Straits Times

13 hours ago

ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's nearly 20-year-old threat to strike Iran came true on Friday, as US President Donald Trump warned Teheran of further "brutal" attacks if it refuses to negotiate.
In its largest military action against Iran to date, Israel's strikes hit about 100 targets, including nuclear facilities and military command centres, and killed the armed forces' chief, top nuclear scientists and other senior figures.
The strikes came as the United States and Iran were due to meet in Oman today to pick up negotiations towards an agreement on the Islamic republic's nuclear programme.
"We are fairly close to a pretty good agreement," Trump said on Thursday, hours before news broke of the Israeli attacks.
"I don't want them going in, because I think it would blow it," Trump added, speaking of the Israelis.
But on Friday, Trump seemed unbothered by Israel's action, and on his Truth Social platform urged Iran to make a deal.
"There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end," he wrote.
Netanyahu, who has always scorned talks with Iran, paid no heed to Trump's original warning and took advantage of the seismic changes in the Middle East since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023.
"I doubt Israel would do this if the US told it not to," Menachem Merhavy, an Iran expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said.
Merhavy said the timing of the attack "makes sense because Israel has been clipping the wings of Iran for the last year and a half", in actions against Tehran-aligned groups and proxies in the region, many of whom Israel has significantly weakened.
Netanyahu said he had "ordered" the attack on Iran's nuclear programme months ago.
"It was necessary to act and I set the implementation date for the end of April 2025," Netanyahu said. "For various reasons, it did not work out."
But his obsession with Iran goes back much further than the ongoing Gaza war, sparked by an unprecedented attack by Tehran-backed Hamas.
After Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused international uproar in 2005 when he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map", Netanyahu — then an opposition leader following his first term as premier in 1996-1999 — called Tehran's nuclear programme "a serious threat for the future".
At the time, he said Israel "must do everything" to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, even if it meant striking the country's nuclear facilities as Israel had in Iraq in 1981.
Iran has consistently denied seeking atomic weapons, but after his return to power in 2009, Netanyahu repeatedly dismissed Tehran's assurances that its nuclear programme was meant for civilian purpose only, and advocated a "military option".
Netanyahu called the United Nations Security Council's 2015 approval of an agreement with world powers lifting sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear activities a "historic mistake".
In 2018, he applauded Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the agreement, effectively scrapping it.
Iran's reaction was to gradually abandon its commitments, enriching uranium to levels close to weapons-grade material and in unprecedented quantities.
This gave Netanyahu a justification to keep up the fight against Iran's nuclear programme.
All the while, Israel's Mossad spy agency worked in secret to undermine Iran's nuclear programme.
Since the start of the Gaza war, Netanyahu has said on several occasions he was seeking to "reshape the Middle East".
Late last year, Israel dealt a hard blow to Iran's so-called "axis of resistance" by crippling Lebanese armed group Hizbollah.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, another Iranian ally, helped cement the regional dominance of Israel — the Middle East's only, if undeclared, nuclear power.
But it was an Israeli response to 200 Iranian missiles last October that "changed the balance of power" between the two foes, according to statements at the time by then defence minister Yoav Gallant, after a series of Israeli strikes inside Iran — a rare direct confrontation.