WarSclerotic

Israeli state officials disappointed with Obama meeting – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Senior officials claim US views Iranian issue in the context of 2012 election year; assert it’s now certain Washington will not strike Islamic Republic

Attila Somflavi

Israeli state officials were disappointed Tuesday with the results of the Netanyahu-Obama meeting at the White House on Monday. “There were no surprises,” a senior state official said. “It was clear from recent months that there are differences between ourselves and the Americans. We have different perspectives when it comes to the question of time and red lines.”

It was claimed that the Americans view the Iranian issue in the context of the upcoming presidential elections. “It’s a bad message for the issue and a good message for the Iranians,” a state official said.

Related stories:

• Netanyahu: A nuclear Iran must be stopped 
  
• US officials: It appears Israel yet to decide on Iran attack
  
• Obama says US ‘won’t hesitate to use force on Iran’
  

“We want the Americans to change their rhetoric vis-à-vis the Iranians. The US says that when Khamenei decides to make a bomb that would be crossing a red line. How do we know for sure he’s made the decision? What happens after that? There will be a new discussion on whether this is credible or not.”

Netanyahu and Obama meet in White House (Photo: Amos Ben-Gershom, GPO)

Israeli concerns primarily stem from past differences with the US on the Iranian nuclear issue. For years Israel asserted that Tehran was working on a military nuclear program while Washington refused to accept the Israeli intelligence analysis. It took the Americans two years to become persuaded.

“The Iranians are charging at nuclear capabilities at full force and even the IAEA is falling in line with the Israeli intelligence evaluations,” a senior state official said. “That is why the US stance is problematic.”

Nevertheless, Israeli officials were pleased with the US assertion that Israel has the right to act. “They won’t tell us what to do. They have no interest in giving a red light or a green light because then they take responsibility for the situation. That is why we’re in the grey zone now.”

Israel’s political-security forums are slated to discuss the talks with the US and reach a new status evaluation on Israel’s position.

“As of yet, there is no decision to attack but we’ll see what tomorrow brings,” a senior official close to the talks with the Americans said. “Right now we are certain the Americans won’t do anything and we need to decide what to do.”

Referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Barack Obama, he added: “The meeting was important because now everything is out in the open: The Americans want oil prices not to go up because it’s bad for their economy.”

The issue of oil rates also drew criticism from some state officials. “Oil prices? Come on. You have to consider the fate of the Western world and history. It’s better to pay more for oil this year than to pay the cost for a nuclear Iran.

“While not making a direct comparison, psychologically the current atmosphere in the West is the same as the one in 1939. Westerners who sought peace and coexistence had options but at the moment of truth they chose to sacrifice Czechoslovakia. We’ve been there. While being very careful with this analysis, we have the same psychological phenomenon.”

Meanwhile, former Yesha Council Secretary-General Naftali Bennett took part in a rare CNN debate opposite an Iranian journalist who claimed Tehran has no military ambitions for its nuclear program.

EU’s Ashton accepts Iranian offe… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By Francois Lenoir / Reuters

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton wrote to Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator on Tuesday, accepting an offer to meet to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program.

Ashton represents six powers – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – in dealings with Iran, and her offer of talks came after weeks of consultations with them.

Iran proposed in February in a letter from Saeed Jalili that negotiations with global powers resume after more than a year of standstill, and said Tehran would have “new initiatives” to bring to the table.

“Today I have replied to Dr. Jalili’s letter of Feb. 14,” Ashton said in a statement. “I have offered to resume talks with Iran on the nuclear issue,” she said.

Ashton and her counterparts are concerned that Tehran’s nuclear work is aimed at producing weapons, and they want Iran to hold back on the program. Tehran says it is trying to develop nuclear power to meet rising electricity demand.

The time and venue for the talks will now have to be agreed, Ashton said.

Earlier Tuesday, Russia urged global powers to hold new talks with Iran on its nuclear program as soon as possible, saying Tehran had proved it was ready for serious negotiations.

“I would like to underscore Russia’s interest in the Iranian side and the ‘group of six’ reaching agreement on a date and site for the resumption of the negotiations process as quickly as possible,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.

Iran offered last month to restart the talks but has also continued to pursue activities that have stoked fears it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, leaving Western powers wary of starting negotiations.

Report: Syria forces bomb bridge used by refugees fleeing to Lebanon – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Bashar Assad’s forces cut off key escape route for wounded Syrians from the central city of Homs, AFP reports.

By Haaretz and Reuters

Syria government forces on Tuesday bombed a bridge used by refugees to flee to Lebanon from the central province of Homs, AFP reported.

The bombing of the bridge by Assad forces effectively blocked a key escape route used to evacuate wounded Syrians from the embattled city of Homs.

	Syria security forces shell the Baba Amro district of Homs.
	Photo by: AFP

“Regime forces on Tuesday bombarded a bridge near Qusayr, in Homs province, which is used by refugees and the wounded fleeing to Lebanon,” Rami Abdel Rahman, of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP.

United Nations and local officials said that some 2,000 Syrians, mainly women and children, had crossed into Lebanon recently.

Meanwhile, residents of Baba Amr who fled to Lebanon said the smell of decomposed bodies, sewage and destruction filled the air in the Syrian city of Homs as troops seeking to crush a revolt against President Bashar Assad bombarded it into submission.

With aid workers still blocked from reaching the former rebel stronghold and most foreign journalists banned from Syria, witness accounts from residents who fled across the border portrayed a grim picture of conditions in Homs.

“The smell of death was everywhere. We could smell the bodies buried under the rubble all the time,” said Ahmad, who fled to Lebanon last week.

“Bodies are in the streets, many are decomposed but we could not bury them,” he said, speaking at a relative’s house in Lebanon, looking tired with dark circles around his eyes.

“We saw so much death that at the end the sight of a dismembered body of a relative or a friend stopped moving us.”

esidents knew the end was near when, after a month of shelling, the Syrian army blew up a 3-km (2-mile) tunnel they had used to smuggle in essentials keeping them alive.

After that fighters of the Free Syrian Army, citing lack of ammunition and many casualties, urged people to leave.

Men fled to Lebanon, women and children to villages in Homs province. But some did not make it. Activists said last week at least 62 people were killed when they tried to leave Baba Amr.

Those who left said heavy bombardment had razed most of the neighborhood. Many buildings and houses were flattened, water pipes were blown up and sewage and litter filled the streets.

“I stopped feeling anything when I see people I know dead… Many people started feeling like that – the atrocities we saw were beyond our imagination,” said another former resident, speaking from a secret location as his presence was illegal.

Syrian state television reported residents were returning to Baba Amr, airing footage on Tuesday of dozens of men, women and children walking through grubby streets, passing pock-marked and semi-destroyed buildings.

Cleansing

Syria says it is fighting armed militants funded and armed from abroad while residents say the crackdown is aimed at crushing pro-democracy protesters and those opposed to Assad.

A convoy sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Red Crescent to provide aid and evacuate the wounded was still awaiting approval to enter Baba Amr. Activists said the army may have stalled the convoy to remove traces of destruction and take bodies from the streets.

A man who fled a day after the army went in said soldiers raided houses, arresting men who remained in the district and executed some of them. Activists say at least 60 men were executed since Friday.

“They are cleansing the neighborhood, they are robbing houses, arresting people then executing some. Baba Amr is besieged from all sides. It is a disaster,” said Omar, speaking by phone from inside Homs the day he fled Baba Amr.

“They said they have a list of 1,500 men and they want them all… They are shooting everything that is moving, even animals. There are bodies in the streets, some are swollen and carry signs of torture,” he said with a trembling voice.

An activists who was speaking to Reuters from Homs province said on Tuesday that there were at least nine rape cases reported to the activists and that the army continued killing young men in the district.

For a month of continuous shelling, residents felt abandoned by a world which left them without food or water and at the mercy of an unexpectedly severe military onslaught.

“We were surprised to see how long it lasted. We were not ready for all of that. We thought: ‘Now Baba Amr will break the back of the regime,’ and we thought: ‘OK, let them come,'” said another resident called Omar who fled to Lebanon last week.

“After the third day of shelling we felt we were alone, the world has abandoned us, and that even if (Assad) uses his planes against us nobody will move,” he said with a faint broken smile.

Many of those in Lebanon have lost contact with their families. They said in one month they buried a thousand people but many were left under the rubble and the death toll was impossible to ascertain.

“In every house there is a martyr if not more. It is impossible to know the exact number of those killed, we have to go back to Baba Amr and gather in a square to count each other in order to know how many are missing,” said Omar.

Despite their losses, the men said they would return to take back their neighborhood and bring down Assad.

“This is just one round. The war is not over. We are going back and we will not stop then. The army will leave Baba Amr whether they like it or not,” Ahmad said.

West of Eden-Israel News – Haaretz Israeli News source..

In his self-styled Churchillian mode, the prime minister tells the world: time is running out.

This was pure, unadulterated, one hundred percent proof Benjamin Netanyahu: solidly in his element, before his kind of crowd, delivering the Churchillian speech he was meant for, in the role that fate has thrust upon him.

This was not Munich, because President Obama, even for Netanyahu, is no longer Neville Chamberlain. And it wasn’t the War Speech, because the guns are still silent. So this was “The Lights are Going Out” speech, broadcast from London to the United States on October 16, 1938, in which Churchill exhorted America to “banish from all our lives the fear which already darkens the sunlight to hundreds of millions of men.”

	Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves after addressing the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, Monday, March 5, 2012.
	Photo by: AP

Thus, there were no Palestinians, no peace process, no 1967 borders and no settlements to freeze in Netanyahu’s succinct and rousing speech at the AIPAC Annual Conference last night. There were no weights on his feet, no obstacles in his way, no lip service for the prime minister to pay to a naïve president who believes that Israeli concessions will make the slightest difference.

For once, at long last, there was only nuclear-crazed Iran, of which he has been warning, a juxtaposed Holocaust, to which he has been comparing, an admiring Jewish audience, to which he has been preaching, and a bottom line that couldn’t be clearer: “We’ve waited for diplomacy to work. We’ve waited for sanctions to work. None of us can afford to wait much longer.”

So this was Netanyahu’s response to President Obama’s request to give him more time: not much longer. Israel won’t attack now, but it won’t adhere to Obama’s timetable either. Israel will give the international community a few more months to achieve the kind of dramatic breakthrough that Netanyahu made crystal clear he does not believe in. Then “the Jewish state will not allow those seeking our destruction to possess the means to achieve that goal”, no ifs or buts about it.

So if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, as the prime minister said yesterday in another context – is it really a duck? Has Netanyahu crossed the Rubicon? Has he now resigned himself to war, as he surely sounded last night, or is he still raising the stakes and ratcheting up the pressure on Obama to act forcefully and swiftly in order to prevent the conflagration that Netanyahu is threatening to unleash?

One needs to know the exact details of the exchange between Obama and Netanyahu at the White House yesterday, especially in their one on one meeting, in order to know the answers to these questions, though this, of course, did not prevent the analysts and commentators from debating that very subject last night. For his part, Netanyahu disturbingly displayed his ever-growing antipathy to such “commentators” who don’t toe the party line and happen to disagree with his views by comparing them, in some convoluted way, to War Department officials who refused to bomb Auschwitz in 1944. In Netanyahu’s new war mode, perhaps, there is no more room for dissent or criticism, a position no doubt shared by many of the listeners in his audience and by most of his colleagues back home.

Netanyahu will find no such fault, obviously, with Republican presidential hopefuls Romney, Santorum and Gingrich who will address the conference today by videolink, no doubt to quarrel with Obama, signifying the unprecedented and potentially harmful position that both Israel, in general, and the standoff, with Iran, in particular, have taken in this election campaign. The White House will certainly be seeking and probably finding signs of what they will interpret as “collusion” between Netanyahu and his close Republican friends, further complicating the already complex relationship between the two leaders which overshadows, not for better but for worse, the dangerous predicament that both countries seem headed for.

Are Obama and Netanyahu playing “good cop, bad cop”, as some would suggest, or are their public differences a true reflection of their ongoing adversarial relationship? And even if Netanyahu is just posturing, is he not entrapping himself in his own words, allowing his rhetorical flourishes to establish facts on the ground that may ultimately cause unintended consequences? The answer to these questions will become apparent in the next few months which, if anything, now seem certain to make Obama’s forecast that they will be “difficult” seem like the understatement of the year.

Report: Iran to grant UN watchdog access to suspected nuclear site – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

IAEA report last year said Iran built large containment chamber at Parchin military complex to conduct explosives tests that are ‘strong indicators’ of efforts to develop an atom bomb.

By Reuters

Iran said it will give the UN nuclear watchdog access to its Parchin military complex, ISNA news agency reported on Tuesday, a site where the agency believes Tehran pursued high explosives research relevant to nuclear weapons.

An International Atomic Energy Agency report last year said that Iran had built a large containment chamber at Parchin, southeast of Tehran, to conduct explosives tests that are “strong indicators” of efforts to develop an atom bomb.

	The base in Parchin where Iran conducted nuclear tests
	Photo by: Google Earth, GeoEye

The IAEA requested access to Parchin during high-level talks in Tehran in February, but the Iranian side did not grant it.

“…Parchin is a military site and accessing it is a time-consuming process, therefore visits cannot be allowed frequently … We will allow the IAEA to visit it one more time,” Iran’s diplomatic mission in Vienna said in a statement, according to ISNA.

It did not give a date for such a visit. Iranian diplomats and IAEA officials were not immediately available for comment.

Western suspicions about activities at Parchin date back to at least 2004, when a prominent nuclear expert assessed that satellite images showed it might be a site for research and experiments applicable to nuclear weapons.

IAEA inspectors did in fact visit Parchin in 2005 but did not see the place where the UN watchdog now believes the explosives chamber was built.

The IAEA named Parchin in a detailed report in November that lent independent weight to Western fears that Iran is working to develop an atomic bomb, an allegation Iranian officials deny.

Agency chief Yukiya Amano said on Monday Iran has tripled its monthly production of higher-grade enriched uranium and the UN nuclear watchdog had “serious concerns” about possible military dimensions to Tehran’s atomic activities.

Russia: Iran has proved it is re… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By REUTERS

MOSCOW – Russia urged global powers on Tuesday to hold new talks with Iran on its nuclear program as soon as possible, saying Tehran had proved it was ready for serious negotiations.

The remarks suggest Russia is more eager than Western nations to agree to an Iranian offer to resume nuclear negotiations with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China which have been frozen for over a year.

“I would like to underscore Russia’s interest in the Iranian side and the ‘group of six’ reaching agreement on a date and site for the resumption of the negotiations process as quickly as possible,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.

Iran offered last month to restart the talks but has also continued to pursue activities that have stoked fears it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, leaving Western powers wary of starting negotiations.

A Russian Foreign Ministry official, however, said Iran had shown by its words and its actions that it was ready for a serious discussion and that the break in talks should not be allowed to drag on much longer.

Israeli PM Netanyahu Meets U.S. President Obama – YouTube.

(Have any doubts about Israel bowing to US policy on Iran?  Watch… – JW)

Will US rescue Israeli pilots? – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: Ron Ben-Yishai presents issues likely raised by Netanyahu in his meeting with Obama

Ron Ben-Yishai

Monday’s meeting between US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was prepared well. However, it was easy to notice, in the photo opportunity at the start of the meeting, that Obama is very tense, as is the guest from Israel. Some attributed it to the lack of affinity, and maybe even chronic hostility, between the two figures. However, it appears that this time the tension was related to substantive issues and stems from the great gaps regarding strategy and tactics on the Iranian nuke issue.

It was quite clear that Netanyahu has decided, on Defense Minister Ehud Barak‘s advice and with his assistance, to do everything in his power in order to reach understandings and agreements with Obama on concrete and practical steps and timetables. Netanyahu, as a former commando and Barak’s subordinate, knows that success and failure hinge on the details. Hence, he aspired to reach detailed coordination with the US president and his associates on the strategic aims, midway objectives, and the way Israel and the US would act in case the steps adopted on the Iranian issue fail to elicit the desired results.

Netanyahu knows that Obama needs him on a presidential election year and apparently attempted to leverage this fact to the maximum.

The US agrees with Israel that the sanctions gravely harm Iran but are not achieving their objective. Given the sanctions’ gravity and pace, by the time they elicit results Iran would already possess the ability to produce a first nuclear device if not more, Israeli officials claim. Hence, Israel wants the sanctions to be tightened immediately and implemented quickly, much before July of this year.

However, the Americans are saying: “Wait a little. Note that the Iranians have already told the Europeans they are willing to sit at the negotiating table in order to come up with a solution to the problem.” Netanyahu’s position is different, especially in terms of the pre-conditions he suggested for entering talks with the Iranians. He demands that world powers present three demands to Iran right away:

One demand is immediate suspension of uranium enrichment in Iran’s territory. The second demand is the transfer of some 5,600 kilograms (roughly 12,500 pounds) of low-grade enriched uranium out of Iran’s territory. The third demand is a halt to the installation of centrifuges and the dismantlement of existing ones at the Fordo facility, located deep underground near Qom. Running this site in full capacity of 3,000 centrifuges is considered by Israel as a situation where it would be unable to effectively hinder Iran’s nuclear program via an aerial strike.

Until now, the Americans claimed that this triple demand is impractical, and that the Iranians must not be pressed by being presented with the desired ultimate result of the talks as a precondition for starting negotiations. Obama believes the talks should be held while showing maximal consideration and goodwill in the aims of producing a positive atmosphere. This is apparently one of the first points of disagreement raised Monday in the talk between the two leaders at the Oval Office.

What’ the red line?

Another issue raised in the meeting was the American reaction in case talks with the Iranians fail. In such case, the Americans would impose another set of paralyzing sanctions they would try to pass at the Security Council. Israel demands a full embargo on oil and oil products to Iran and from Iran, paralysis of trade and money transfers vis-à-vis Iranian banks, and heavy penalties on those who violate these boycotts.

The most difficult issue to resolve is what the media refers to as America’s “red line.” That is, the point where Israel and the US would agree that Iran’s progress requires an Israeli or American military strike of any kind or a combination of the two. President Obama told AIPAC that the US won’t tolerate a situation where Iran possesses nuclear weapons. However, Israel says defining the red line this way would in fact enable the Iranians to become a nuclear power. While Tehran won’t possess a nuclear warhead or atomic bomb, it would be able to produce a nuclear device at any given moment.

Under such state of affairs, Iran’s leadership would merely have to make a decision and then produce within six months at most a nuclear weapon. As opposed to uranium enrichment, the development of the actual weapon can be hidden relatively easily, and hence the Americans would not even know about it, just like they didn’t know when Pakistan, India and North Korea turned into military powers in practice.

Hence, Israel demands that the American “red line” would be defined as “nuclear capability,” that is, Iran’s shift to producing 90% enriched uranium, or a large quantity of 20% enriched uranium. Netanyahu also made it clear to Obama that Israel’s red line is a situation whereby the new, underground enrichment facility at Fordo will approach full capacity.

A no less complex issue is what would happen should Israel realize its sovereign right – recognized by Obama – to defend its citizens, by launching a strike in Iran. Hence, we can assume that on this front Netanyahu asked Obama and Defense Secretary Panetta several blunt questions, such as: Will the Israeli Air Force be allowed to use US electronic codes, which identify friendly jets in an airspace where the US exercises control or maintains a presence? Will the US take part in search and rescue operations for Israeli pilots forced to bail out?

In this context, Israel may also have some requests: For example, that the US sell or loan aircraft used for refueling jets in the air, or offer financial assistance that would allow Israel to accelerate the deployment of more Iron Dome anti-rocket defense systems or new armaments.

The US has much to give Israel in the framework of strategic coordination and understandings. Netanyahu also did not arrive at the meeting with empty hands. The Iranian issue is significant and vital to world peace, to regional stability and to Israel’s ability to maintain normal life more or less. What remains now is to see what was achieved in the summit in practice. If the meeting failed, we shall know about it quite soon. Yet should it produce results acceptable to both sides, we’ll only know once things start taking shape on the ground.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report March 6, 2012, 8:28 AM (GMT+02:00)

A grim Binyamin Netanyahu on Iranian threat.

Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu brought 14,000 pro-Israel lobby cheering delegates to their feet repeatedly – especially when he pledged Monday night, March 5, “Never again will our people have to live in the shadow of annihilation.”

Earlier, he and US President Barack Obama took a break from rhetoric and used a brief private interlude during their three-hour long meeting attended by advisers to get down to brass tacks in their argument over how and when to arrest Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon.

debkafile’s Washington sources disclose a couple of their comments.

While publicly reiterating that there is still a window that allows for a diplomatic resolution of the issue, Obama admitted privately to Netanyahu that the Fordow underground uranium enrichment plant can no longer be destroyed by bombs and missiles; American commanders say all that can be done is to block the vents of this underground facility and slowly stifle the personnel inside. Time and several strikes would be needed to accomplish this.
Netanyahu: Iran is building not one Fordow but ten. We can’t wait much longer.
In other words, the talk of open windows and more time is moot.

Obama: There is no intelligence that Iran has made a final decision to pursue a nuclear weapon.

Netanyahu: Time is growing short.

debkafile’s Washington source denied media reports that the prime minister had assured the president that Israel has not yet decided to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, meaning he had offered the president the time he wanted for diplomacy and sanctions to work.
Our sources report, to the contrary, that he insisted Israel is operating on a shorter timeline than the United States.
Then, in his speech to AIPAC, he set the record straight by declaring Israel can’t afford to wait much longer” and lauded the president for affirming Israel was entitled to “defend itself, by itself.”
How much is “much longer” is the subject of debate, but one thing is clear:  Israel won’t wait beyond 2012 or until after the US presidential election in November.
“Israel has waited six years for sanctions to stop Iran,” he told the AIPAC audience, but they have failed.
He produced two documents dated 1944 in reply to the widely-reported view that Israel is short of the capacity to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and an attack would cause disastrous consequences for the region and the world.
One document was a World Jewish Congress plea to the US State Department for the Americans to bomb the Auschwitz death camp. The second was a rejection of the WJC’s appeal, explaining that diverting large-scale air power from America’s primary front would bring forth “even more vindictive action from the Germans.”
Netanyahu drew loud cheers when he declared, “As Israeli Prime Minister I will never let my people live in the shadow of annihilation!  Never again!”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Washington did not resolve Israel’s differences with the Obama administration on if, when and by whom military force should be applied to shutting down a nuclear Iran.
Therefore, no joint communiqué or statement followed their White House meeting, which was also attended by White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and the prime minister’s security adviser Yaakov Amidror.
But he made a powerful address to American Jews to rally them behind his conviction that a nuclear weapon in Iran’s hands imperils not just Israel’s survival but, if it is not preempted, would allow Tehran to use it in one form or another to as a weapon of terror against every nation in the world.  An Israeli attack on Iran is therefore to be expected at some time in the coming months.
Before winding up his five days in the US and Canada, Netanyahu is meeting House Speaker John Boehner and other Congressional leaders in a bid for support for his strategy for a nuclear Iran.

Will Iran Heed Netanyahu’s Warning? « Commentary Magazine.

Much of the attention devoted to U.S.-Israel diplomacy in recent months has been on whether the United States will seek to prevent the Jewish state from acting on its own to forestall an Iranian nuclear weapon.

The differences between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu over the utility of sanctions or diplomacy and how much more time these measures should be allowed before force can be used have not been resolved. Nevertheless it is more likely than not that the Israelis are going to give the president a bit more time before launching their own strike.

But despite the near obsessive focus on the fractious Obama-Netanyahu relationship, the most important messages being sent from the speeches at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington were not those exchanged between those two leaders. Instead, it was the clear warning to Iran by Netanyahu that the Jewish people will not live under the shadow of annihilation. For all of the justified concern about what Obama will or will not do to try to impede the Israelis as he hangs on to the forlorn hope of a diplomatic solution to the problem, the fate of the Middle East hangs on whether Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei comprehended Netanyahu’s clarion call to action during his Monday night speech to the conference. Tehran must either stand down on its nuclear ambition or face an Israeli attack at some point in the not too distant future.

By stating unequivocally that Israel will always be master of its own fate when it comes to its security, Netanyahu was making it crystal clear that Obama’s misgivings about force will not preclude an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the program is rendered invulnerable. However much time, Netanyahu may give Obama, it is also easily understood that this is not an open-ended commitment since he is rightly convinced that neither renewed diplomatic activity nor even the stepped-up sanctions Obama now contemplates will work to convince the Iranians that they must give in.

As Netanyahu said, Israel has waited patiently for years as Western diplomatic initiatives intended to cajole or buy off the Iranians have flopped. It has also looked on as the half-hearted sanctions against Iran were tried and has seen that they will not answer the problem. And the Israeli leader is well aware that even the oil embargo mooted by some Western European nations and reluctantly seconded by Obama will also certainly fail due to lack of cooperation from China and Russia.

All of this renders much of the speculation about Obama’s intentions moot. He may argue that Israel must to give diplomacy another chance to work but few even in the administration believe it any such initiative will succeed since it has already been amply demonstrated that the Iranians interpret any opening for talks as an invitation for delaying tactics that only serve to get them closer to their nuclear goal. Since it is unlikely that the president will let go of his illusions about diplomacy or engagement with Iran working until it is too late to do anything about their nuclear program, that puts the ball squarely in Israel’s court.

That is why the most important message delivered this week was not the exchange between Obama and Netanyahu so much as it was the one delivered to Iran. The Iranians may be laboring under their own set of delusions in which they cling to the notion that the United States can exercise a veto over Israeli self-defense. But Netanyahu’s speech which drew a direct parallel between the current impasse over Iran and the refusal by the Allies to attack the rail lines to Auschwitz in 1944 is a signal that Obama is ultimately powerless to prevent the Jewish state from acting to prevent another Holocaust.

Iran has conducted itself in the last several years as if it believed it had impunity from retribution should it acquire a genocidal weapon to be used against the Jewish state it has sworn to destroy. It has also acted as if it believed, not unreasonably, that President Obama wasn’t serious about stopping them. But if Iran wishes to avoid having its nuclear facilities attacked, it needs to understand that Netanyahu was speaking in deadly earnest when he warned them of the consequences of their actions.