Olmert, Ex-Premier of Israel, Assails Netanyahu on Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“A nation has the right to determine what it should do to defend itself,” Mr. Olmert said at a conference held in a Manhattan hotel by The Jerusalem Post. “But when at the same time we ask the United States and other countries to provide us with the means to do it, no one is entirely independent to act, irrespective of the positions and attitudes and policies of other countries.”
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Mr. Olmert said he was expressing legitimate concerns shared by most people in the Israeli security establishment, “present and past,” including many who have not spoken publicly.
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Mr. Olmert warned that Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, having likened Iran to Nazi Germany, may find themselves unable to back down from military action. “They talk too much, they talk too loud,” he said in the interview. “They are creating an atmosphere and a momentum that may go out of their control.
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Mr. Olmert said in the interview that Israel should quietly build American support behind the scenes, and not publicly declare that it will act with or without America, given its dependence on American military aid and hardware. “America is not a client state of Israel — maybe the opposite is true,” he said. “Why should we want America to be put in a situation where whatever they do will be interpreted as if they obeyed orders from Jerusalem?”
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Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel, plunged on Sunday into the country’s growing debate over Iran policy with harsh criticism of his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Drawing boos from a largely American audience in New York, he fired off a wide-ranging broadside against Mr. Netanyahu’s foreign policy, saying that the prime minister was unprepared to offer meaningful compromise to Palestinians, disrespectful to the United States and dismissive of the international community at a time when Israel particularly needs foreign support to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.