Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu characterized the agreement signed with Iran early Sunday morning as a historic mistake.
Directly contrasting US President Barack Obama who praised the agreement as opening a "new path toward a world that is more secure," Netanyahu – speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting -- said the world has become more dangerous as a result.
For the first time, he said, the leading powers of the world agreed to uranium enrichment in Iran, while removing sanctions that it has taken years to build up in exchange for "cosmetic Iranian concession that are possible to do away with in a matter of weeks.""What was agreed last night in Geneva is not a historic agreement, it is a historic mistake," he said. "Today the world has become much more dangerous because the most dangerous regime in the world took a significant step to getting the most dangerous weapon in the world."
Netanyahu said the consequences of this deal threaten many countries, including Israel. He reiterated what he has said in the past, that Israel is not obligated by the agreement.
"Iran is committed to Israel's destruction, and Israel has the right and the obligation to defend itself by itself against any threat" he said. "I want to make clear as the prime minister of Israel, Israel will not allow Iran to develop a military nuclear capability."
Netanyahu's government denounced world powers' nuclear agreement with Iran on Sunday as a "bad deal" to which Israel would not be bound.
Yet Israeli officials stopped short of threatening unilateral military action that could further isolate the Jewish state and imperil its bedrock alliance with Washington, saying more time was needed to assess the agreement.
"This is a bad deal. It grants Iran exactly what it wanted - both a significant easing in sanctions and preservation of the most significant parts of its nuclear program," an official in Netanyahu's office said.
Netanyahu's sentiments were echoed by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, who called the deal a "historic mistake" and a "surrender to the Iranian charm and smiles offensive, and to Iranian fraud, which is aimed at gaining time, without the Iranian nuclear program being substantially harmed."
Speaking from Canada, where he is attending a conference of defense ministers, Ya'alon said the agreement "allows Iran to enter the family nations despite being the most active and flourishing activator of terrorism in the world, which sends its deadly and uncurbed deadly arms across the globe, first and foremost against Western states, as regime representative sit at the able in Geneva."
The Iranian nuclear program threatens not only Israel and other Middle East countries, but also world peace, Ya'alon warned. "To leave in the regime's hands capabilities for continuing the nuclear program means that the world today is a less safe place. Instead of rolling the program back, the regime in Tehran has gained time, which will allow it on the one hand to seek a nuclear bomb, and on the other, breathing space due to the lightening of sanctions," the defense minister continued.
Hours ago, before the deal was signed, the regime in Tehran was facing heavy economic pressure that threatened its existence, and which could have forced it to choose between survival and continuing the program, Ya'alon stated.
"But now, due to short-term considerations and a lack of determination by the West, the Iranian regime is receiving legitimacy for continuing the military nuclear project, and its global terrorist activities, while its international isolation is lifted and its economy is strengthened," he added.
Aimed at ending a dangerous standoff, the agreement between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia was nailed down after more than four days of negotiations in the Swiss city of Geneva.
But the deal still appeared to fall far short of Netanyahu's demand for a total rollback of the Iranian nuclear program.
"You stand and shout out until you're blue in the face, and you try to understand why they're not listening. The world wanted an agreement," Finance Minister Yair Lapid, a member of Netanyahu's security cabinet, told Israel's Army Radio.
"We also said that a diplomatic accord would be good. A diplomatic accord is certainly better than war, a diplomatic accord is better than a situation of permanent confrontation - just not this agreement."
Lapid said that Israel had to pore over the deal: "For example, we still don't understand exactly what stepping up the monitoring (on Iran's facilities) means. This is a detailed matter. God really is in the small details."
President Shimon Peres said that the deal was temporary, not permanent and would be better discussed after seeing its results.
"Like all nations we also prefer a diplomatic solution over any other solution," Peres said.
"I turn to the Iranian people and say: We are not your enemies and you do not have to be your enemies. We have never threatened you so why are you threatening us?
Peres urged the Iranians to chose peace and to turn Iran into a responsible nation that is not involved in terror and is not a nuclear threat.
Economic Minister Naftali Bennett, another security cabinet member, told Army Radio in a separate interview: "Israel does not see itself as bound by this bad, this very bad agreement that has been signed."
Neither Lapid nor Bennett would be drawn on how Israel might respond. Israel, which is widely assumed to have the Middle East's sole atomic arsenal, sees a mortal menace in a nuclear-armed Iran and has at times threatened to launch a preemptive war against its arch-foe.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the Geneva deal required the Netanyahu government to conduct a strategic review.
Asked on Israel Radio whether he felt cheated by the United States for its role in the deal, Lieberman said: "Heaven forbid."
Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On on Sunday praised the agreement while criticizing the Israeli government for overlooking important components of the deal.
“The Israeli government ministers’ assault on the agreement takes attention away from the fact that clauses of the deal include the most important goal which was the dismantling and rolling back of the fast track to the bomb,” she said.
“The main sanctions that will remain imposed on Iran and the tight supervision by IAEA inspectors who will visit nuclear sites daily are indicative of the fact that this is not just an American achievement, but also an Israeli achievement,” the Meretz chief said. “This is because the goal of supervision, similar to sanctions, is to encumber the race to the bomb and remove the possibility that Iran could fool the international community without anyone taking notice.”
The deputy speaker of parliament, Likud MK Moshe Feiglin, said on Saturday the interim agreement signed between Iran and the Western powers was tantamount to the Munich Agreement of the late 1930s.
“Like Czechoslovakia at that time, which was not party to the discussions that effectively sentenced it to death, Israel today watches from the sidelines how its existential interest is being sacrificed by the Western powers,” Feiglin said.
“Any rational person understands that we are in the midst of a process leading to a nuclear-armed Iran,” he said. “For years I have warned about the dangers of the strategy adopted by Israel towards the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Feiglin said that entrusting foreign powers to secure Israel’s defense interests is “disastrous” and “much worse than that which led to the Yom Kippur War.”
The lawmaker called on the Israeli government to declare an immediate end to all contacts with the West over the Iranian question and to make clear that it would not be bound by the agreement signed.
Knesset member Eli Yishai reacted Sunday morning to the deal: "the world's countries only saw the economic interests of the deal, and not their obligation to the security of Israel."
He stressed that Israel "has to no one to trust besides god and ourselves".
Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein said "Today more than ever we have been reminded that we can rely only on ourselves.
He said said it would not be long before the world powers who signed the deal with Iran realize that they made a mistake.
Referring to the Holocaust, Edelstein said: "We can only hope that history will not repeat itself."
MK Ayelet Shaked (Bayit Yehudi) said that EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and US Secretary of State John Kerry were offering Iran sanctions without demanding one centrifuge to be dismantled. "Iran can decide to create a nuclear bomb whenever it wants to," she said.
Deputy Defense Minister and Likud faction leader Danny Danon said that the agreement was excellent for Iran but dangerous for the world.
"All options are still on the table and Israel has the obligation and the ability to defend itself," Danon said.
Home Front Defence Minister Gilad Erdan, a security cabinet member, said the nuclear deal "makes it much more difficult, in the diplomatic sphere, to talk about a military option".
Israel's coming steps, Erdan said on Army Radio, would be to continue monitoring events in Iran along with an attempt to coordinate future moves with the United States and the other five powers that sealed Sunday's deal.
Security sources said Netanyahu has urged Israel's intelligence organs to spare no expense in crafting assessments of the situation in Iran and weighing Israel's options.
"We have six months now, and there are significant improvements that can be made in these six months," Erdan said, looking ahead to a final agreement.
Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, speaking on Israeli television, said Israel "may have lost the battle over the interim agreement (but) we have not lost the war over denying Iran a military nuclear capability."
Uzi Rabi, head of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, said Israel's immediate options were unlikely to include a military attack.
Instead, he said, "Israel should focus on a concerted intelligence effort" to expose any violations of the deal.
Jerusalem post
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