IranNorth America

Israel seeks to derail nuclear talks, pushing US into war with Iran: Analyst

obama-netanyahu

Israel has directed the influential Zionist lobby in the United States to thwart the Iran nuclear talks and push Washington to launch a military campaign against Tehran, a journalist and political commentator in Toronto says.

Israel is “trying to derail, to scuttle, to basically shut down any kind of negotiation between Iran and the West and the reason that they want to do this is because the Israelis have been committed to a policy of covert warfare against Iran since at least 9/11,” Brandon Martinez said.

“Because if there’s a [nuclear] deal, this takes the war option off the table and the war option has been the primary goal and agenda of Israelis for years,” Martinez told Press TV on Thursday.

“The Israelis have been covertly lobbying the US government through AIPAC and other Zionist lobbies in Washington to not only take a belligerent stance against Iran in the form of economic sanctions… but they’ve been also calling on some of the more hawkish members of the US Congress to take it a step further, to push for military intervention in Iran,” he added.

In an op-ed published on CNN, Michael Oren, the former ambassador to the United States said a potential nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries will be a “bad for Israel, bad for America and bad for the world.”

“For Israel, Iran’s nuclear program poses not one, but several existential threats,” he claimed.

In a separate interview with Press TV on Thursday, Andrew Taylor, an author and political commentator in Manitoba, Canada, also described Israel as a “powder monkey for the United States.”

Israel “serves as the power that oversees Persian and Arab doings and sort of keeps the Pax Americana, the imperial outlook for the region,” Taylor said.

The former Israeli envoy had earlier criticized President Barack Obama for the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

Oren said Obama supported Iran and the Palestinians instead of Israel since he took office six years ago, adding that Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both made mistakes, but only Obama did so “deliberately.”

Oren blasted Obama for insisting that Iran was a rational and potentially very successful regional power.

Representatives from Iran and the P5+1 group of countries – the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany – are working together in the Austrian capital city of Vienna to finalize a nuclear deal.

The two sides extended their self-imposed end-of-June deadline one more week. The deadline is extended to July 7.

Back to top button