Obama adviser urges Israel not to strike at Iran | The Times of Israel - 0 views
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The US on Tuesday urged Israel not to strike at Iran so long as the international community’s diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis over Tehran’s rogue nuclear program continue.
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Speaking two days after world powers signed an interim deal with Iran in Geneva, and in the wake of blistering criticism of the deal from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama’s close aide and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes encouraged Israel to give the negotiations a chance, and warned that military action could be counterproductive. Asked in an interview with Israel’s Channel 10 news whether the US was asking Israel to refrain from launching military action to thwart Iran’s march to the bomb, Rhodes said first that “Israel’s a sovereign nation and will make its own decisions about its self-defense.”
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Rhodes acknowledged that the relationship between the US and Israeli leaderships over the handling of the Iran crisis was in one of its more strained periods, but said there had been “ups and downs” in the past and he was confident that the two sides would “weather” the storm. He also said the administration did not consider that “the time was right” for Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran. Among other factors, such a move could divide the P5+1 countries, Rhodes claimed. Still, he noted, “Israel can express its view, of course, as a sovereign nation.” Rhodes said he thought it unlikely that Iran would be stripped of all elements of its nuclear activity in the way that Libya had been. In separate comments to Channel 2 news, he also said that, in a permanent accord, provided Iran met all of the international community’s concerns over its program, it might be allowed to retain “a limited enrichment capacity.”
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I'm all for a deeper rift in U.S.-Israeli relations. It has been only unyielding U.S. support that has enabled Israel to avoid behaving like a civilized nation in the Mideast. Israel is the *only* nation on the planet that claims it has a legal right to keep the lands it seized in the 1967 war and to prevent the return of 750,000 native Palestinians it drove out of what is now Israel during the campaign of terrorism that drove the Brits out of Palestine to establish Israel.