Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks before a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 3, 2015.
Israeli officials have loudly and repeatedly condemned the Iran deal as insufficient, but those familiar with the situation have revealed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s great fear is not Iran violating the deal, but rather them abiding by it.
“Netanyahu said at the meeting it will be impossible to catch the Iranians cheating simply because they will not,” noted one of the officials. This is in direct contrast to his repeated claims Iran could not be trusted on the deal.
The big problem from the Israeli perspective is that this changes the status quo over the last 35 years, where new sanctions were easy and Israel could threaten to attack Iran all it wanted.
A 10-15 year deal means 10-15 years during which those Israeli threats will ring ever more hollow, where new sanctions will be all but impossible, and after Iran abides by the deal for this long, the civilian program will be all the harder to scare-monger over.
In recent years Netanyahu has tried to center his entire political career around hostility toward Iran, and his foreign policy is pretty much exclusively trying to convince the US of the need for a war against Iran. The rapprochement would effectively ruin all his hard work.