As Spoiler to US/Iran Talks, Israel's Netanyahu Doesn't Disappoint

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that recent overtures towards peace and reconciliation from Iran’s new president, Hossan Rouhani, are just “ruse” and a “ploy,” and rebuked the international community from looking on hopefully at a possible deal between the U.S and Iran over its civilian nuclear program.

“You know why Rouhani thinks he can get away with this?” said Netanyahu. “This is a ruse, a ploy. Because he’s gotten away with it before. He fooled the world once, now he thinks he can fool it again. He thinks he can have his yellow cake and eat it too.”

In his speech to the UNGA last week, Rouhani told world leaders that Iran and its people were “tired of war” and looked forward to a possible end of the standoff.

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Instead of offering support to a brokered agreement, however, Netanyahu “predictably” issued a new round of threats and repeated unfounded claims about Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite repeated statements by Iran that it has no desire for nuclear weapons and no verifiable evidence has been provided that that such a program exists, Netanyahu said: “It’s not hard to find evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it’s hard to find evidence that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.”

As The Guardian reported, the speech revealed “growing alarm” by the Israeli government and the sense of “danger” it feels by “being sidelined by the rapidly moving sense of detente between the new Iranian government, the US and other western countries.”

However, according to many experts, what Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing truly fear most is not that peace talks will falter or that Rouhani will betray his recent gestures, but that a deal between Iran, the U.S., and the international community might actually be struck.