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As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu left office following his 12-year hold on power, he took the opportunity to deliver a fiery blast at US president Joe Biden over his lenient policy toward Israel’s arch-enemy Iran.
Outgoing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a fiery rebuke of how US president Joe Biden is handling relations with Iran during a final address to Parliament, before stepping away from office after a dozen years in power, the New York Post reported.
In his last Knesset address as prime minister, a defiant Netanyahu let it be known that the gloves were coming off. He declared that he would no longer keep his foreign policy disagreements with the Biden administration “behind closed doors.”
“The new US administration requested that I save our disagreements on the Iran nuclear deal for behind closed doors, and not share them publicly,” Netanyahu said, according to the Times of Israel. “I told them I won’t act that way.”
Netanyahu compared the Biden administration’s willingness to return to the Iran nuclear deal – one the US walked away from during the Trump administration – to when former President Franklin Roosevelt declined to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz during World War II when he had the opportunity.
“In the face of the threat of extermination, we were helpless,” Netanyahu said. “Our voice was not heard among the nations. We had neither a state or an army.”
“But today we do have a voice,” Netanyahu declared. “We do have a state, and we do have defensive power.”
I’ve heard what Bennett [Israel’s new prime minister] said [about standing firm against Iran], and I’m concerned, because Bennett does the opposite of what he promises,” Netanyahu added. “An Israeli prime minister has to be able to say no to the president of the US on matters that endanger our existence. I’ll be happy if this doesn’t come true, but from the moment the US returns to the Iran deal, this government will not approve operations against Iran to stop their armament.”
Netanyahu’s comments reflect the threat Israel feels from its neighbors, such as the “wipe Israel off the map” statement made years ago by Iran’s president.
Recent attacks against Israel resulted in 11 days of fighting in May in which Israel said Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant groups fired around 4,350 rockets from Gaza during the conflict, Reuters reported.
Yesterday, Hamas broke the treaty and launched incendiary balloons from a Palestine enclave into Israel, which retaliated with attacks on Hamas sites in Gaza, Reuters reported.
Israel has long sought to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. One of the most controversial statements to ever come out of Iran was made by Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in2005 saying his nation wants to “wipe Israel off the map.”
Speaking before the UN General assembly on September 21, 2011, then-President Obama addressed the statement.
“Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map,” Obama told the UN.
However, the original New York Times article noted that Ahmadinejad said he was quoting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution,” the Washington Post reported. The 1980 speech by Khomeini, spoken in Persian, reportedly correctly translated comes out as: “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” Nonetheless, the post reported that the phrase of “must be wiped off the face of the map” is exactly how it was presented for years on Ahmadinejad’s English-language Web site, as the New York Times also noted in another article on the translation debate.
