Israelis are more concerned about the economy than Iran

TEL AVIV, Israel — After six weeks of hype, the morning after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress feels a bit anticlimactic.

His 40-minute address on Iran’s nuclear program prompted a flurry of reactions in Washington. Republicans heaped praise on it; a Democratic congressman called it “fearmongering in the ultimate.” Senator Lindsey Graham cashed in with a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser co-chaired by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and Netanyahu supporter. The White House dismissed it as “nothing new.”

Here in Israel —well, how much is left to say? Every aspect of the speech has been discussed for weeks, except for its substance, and it was fairly light on that. With an early election looming on March 17, politicians have already staked out their positions. Hundreds of retired generals and security officials came out this week in sharp opposition to Netanyahu.

The key question in Israel now is not what Netanyahu said, but how long everyone keeps talking about it. Despite the controversy, the prime minister wants to keep the story in the headlines. Recent polls have not been encouraging for his Likud party. A Knesset Channel survey released hours before the speech showed him winning just 21 seats; his main center-left competitor, the Zionist Camp, was polling at 24.

It's the economy, stupid 

Two weeks before the election, voters are defecting for centrist parties focused on the economy, which remains their top priority: 56 percent of Israelis told the Knesset Channel they will vote on socioeconomic issues, compared with 30 percent on Iran’s nuclear program.

Likud is keen to avoid these issues; indeed, it hasn’t even bothered to release an economic platform. After six years in office, Netanyahu is widely seen as responsible for the skyrocketing cost of living. The party believes that it can win an extra seat, perhaps two, by keeping the focus on Iran. It sounds trivial—but in a 120-seat legislature divided amongst eleven parties, that small boost could give Netanyahu the margin he needs to form the next government.

Isaac Herzog, the main challenger for the premiership, delivered a brief rebuttal last night from a town near the Gaza border. “The painful truth is that, behind the applause, Netanyahu remains alone. And the negotiations with Iran will continue without any Israeli involvement,” he said.

Herzog has been making this point for weeks, and yesterday it was delivered before a small crowd in a badly lit room, a stark contrast to Netanyahu’s theatrical performance. (Many Israelis didn’t even see the full statement, because TV networks cut it off halfway through to avoid violating Israel’s tight rules on broadcasting election propaganda.)

While they oppose the speech, most of Herzog’s center-left allies agree with the crux of Netanyahu’s remarks. “The deal with Iran, if it will happen, is a bad one,” said Ya’akov Peri, a Knesset member from the centrist Yesh Atid party and former head of the Shin Bet security agency. “We think it’s going to be a bad deal,” said Omer Bar-Lev, from the Zionist Camp.

There is, in the words of another Knesset member, “wall-to-wall agreement” that the deal being discussed is a bad one. With little substantive disagreement, politicians will quickly try to steer the campaign back to the economy.

Breakout time 

Netanyahu outlined two fundamental objections to the deal being negotiated. It would leave Iran close to “breakout,” being able to produce a nuclear weapon— “about a year by US assessment, even shorter by Israel's,” he said. And the deal might include a “sunset clause,” with restrictions expiring in 10 or 15 years.

Iran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful. The International Atomic Energy Agency largely agrees, saying that Tehran’s declared nuclear facilities are all being used for civilian purposes, but it warns that undeclared sites may still exist.

The prime minister tried to reassure lawmakers that they could still walk away from the negotiating table. “Iran's nuclear program can be rolled back well beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal, and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse in the price of oil,” he said. “They need the deal a lot more than you do.”

In one sense, this statement was a concession. Netanyahu was a longtime skeptic of the administration’s Iran policy; he pushed for ever-more crippling sanctions, always with the threat of airstrikes looming in the background. His remarks yesterday were something of an about-face. “He’s now demanded that we just extend sanctions, something that in the first place he disagreed with,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul-general in New York.

The White House has charged before that Netanyahu never presents plausible alternatives to the current deal—that, in effect, the only other option is war. Some Israeli commentators saw his speech as an effort to offer a third way. “Iran’s regime was fragile, Netanyahu said, and would not rush to war if the talks failed. Its leaders, rather, would simply return to new talks under more favorable terms,” wrote Haviv Rettig Gur, the political columnist for the Times of Israel.

Unsurprisingly, the White House disagrees. The Obama administration spent years cobbling together aggressive sanctions against Iran, a regime that goes well beyond the US and Europe to include unlikely members like China — which, though it continues to purchase Iranian crude, has scaled back infrastructure projects and other investments in Tehran.

Sanctions, or no sanctions 

Obama believes the sanctions are unlikely to survive if talks collapse: major economic powers are eager to do business with Iran, and their fragile cooperation would crumble if the US was seen as walking away from a plausible agreement. Scrapping the talks, in the White House’s opinion, would give Iran both an economic boost and the freedom to advance its nuclear program.

“If we go with new sanctions, would the world support this? What’s liable to happen is that Iran will abandon the negotiations, begin installing thousands of new centrifuges, activate the reactor in Arak and quickly become a nuclear threshold state,” an administration official told Barak Ravid of Ha’aretz, the liberal newspaper that has largely been sympathetic to Obama’s diplomatic effort.

Netanyahu received a rapturous welcome from Congress, giving Israeli voters an impressive image of their prime minister shortly before the election. He achieved his domestic political goals. When it comes to Iran, though, the final decision ultimately rests with Obama; he is determined to sign a deal, and a reluctant Congress will have a difficult time stopping him. He may have helped secure a fourth term in office, but his speech brought him no closer to changing American policy.