The Israeli statements, ahead of another planned round of talks in Moscow in June, reflect concerns that the sense of urgency that pervaded earlier discussions on Iran has faded in recent months and that Washington and other nations are allowing the Iranian leadership to gain more time to pursue what Israel says is a drive toward nuclear weapons.
“We have no illusions about the talks,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday at the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, a research center with close links to Israel’s military and security establishment.
Calling for stronger international action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after the massacre of more than 100 people in the town of Houla last week, Barak warned that the obstacles to mobilizing intervention to stop the bloodshed in Syria were a lesson regarding Iran.
“The difficulty the international community is having in generating the ability to act even in such a clear-cut case . . . must tell us something about other areas as well,” Barak said.
It is far from certain that “if only conditions are created in which it is self-evident and clear that the world must act, it will indeed act,” Barak added. “It is not self-evident, and it is not clear.”
Israel and the United States have different timetables for assessing the Iranian nuclear effort, Barak said, asserting, “Our clock is ticking faster.” He repeated earlier warnings that Iran is approaching a “zone of immunity” in which its nuclear facilities would be dispersed and protected underground, beyond the reach of a military strike.
“The relevant moment diplomatically is the last moment you can do something about the issue,” Barak said, adding that “the Iranians are systematically moving to a point after which Israel will not be able to do anything about it.”
In an address Tuesday in the same forum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out what he said should be the international demands on Iran, and he criticized what he called a softening of the stance of Western nations in the discussions.
“Iran must stop all enrichment of nuclear material, it must remove from its territory all the material that has been enriched so far, and it must dismantle the underground nuclear facility at Qom,” Netanyahu said, referring to the city near the fortified plant at Fordow. “Only an explicit Iranian commitment to implement these three demands, and explicit verification of their implementation, can stop the Iranian nuclear program.”
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