Trading Israel's Security for a Deal With Iran

The Obama administration's insistence that pressuring Israel into a peace deal will help bring Iran to the negotiating table will only jeopardize Israel's safety and do nothing to stop the mullahs' nuclear program.

Bret Stephens offers an idea in the online edition of Foreign Affairs: “The United States pledges that it will not permit Iran to go nuclear, period. And Israel pledges it will dismantle settlements, period. (Jerusalem would have to be dealt with separately, but the deal at least offers Palestinians the contiguity they have long claimed to seek).”

This idea of linking the presence of Jews on the West Bank to action on Iran’s nuclear arsenal has been gaining momentum over the past few weeks among those who write regularly about the Middle East.  About a month ago on his CNN television show, GPS, Fareed Zakaria suggested that if Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu were serious about stopping Iran, the Israeli government would not be angering the Obama Administration by announcing that it was planning to build houses in East Jerusalem.

A few days later, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote, “Nothing will happen in the Middle East, unless the United States is seen as an honest broker able to criticize both sides when needed. Obama’s anger [at the announcement that new houses would be built] sped a needed clarification and freed debate”.

Cohen’s colleague at the Times, Thomas Friedman, chimed in a few days later: “Jerusalem, peace, Iran – they are all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.”

The concept is flawed. The grand bargain accepts the logic of the hostage-taker: the lives of the civilian population of Israel --  the most likely targets of Iranian nukes – are put at risk in order to extract political concessions from the Israeli government on the Palestinian front.

In fairness, nobody in the Obama Administration has ever suggested that Iran and settlement issues be linked. But last weekend the New York Times published reports of a secret memo to the White House in which Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that the administration lacks a strategy to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat. On Monday, the White House tried to downplay the significance of the memo. But as the Wall Street Journal claimed in a Monday editorial, the memo “merely says what has been obvious to the world for months.”

As the Journal editorial points out, news of the memo emerged just as senior U.S. military officials have testified to Congress that Iran may be just one year away from producing enough fissile material for one bomb.

What can Netanyahu, or any other Israeli prime minister for that matter, expect in return for acquiescence to the Obama Administration? For any Israeli prime minister, and indeed for every other legitimate national leader, the physical protection of the country’s civilian population must always be the most important national security priority. Yet Obama is expecting Israel to subordinate that concern to other – and possibly unachievable – U.S. interests.