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Netanyahu: Israel Doesn't Seek to Eradicate Iran; Iran Seeks to Eradicate Israel

(Prime Minister's Office) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed by CNN's Fareed Zakaria at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. Netanyahu: After the [Iran nuclear] deal we have, basically, three things that we have to do, and I think on this we see eye-to-eye with the United States and with President Obama. The first thing is keep their feet to the fire. You have obligations, keep them. We'll all make sure that we monitor any violation and of course that would require taking appropriate action, reinstituting sanctions and the like. Second thing is resist Iranian aggression in the region, which continues and might even accelerate, given the amount of funds that they're going to get with the lifting of sanctions. The strongest way to stop Iranian aggression is to bolster America's allies, first and foremost Israel. We're negotiating now with the United States a Memorandum of Understanding to support Israel's security for the next decade. The third thing is beyond the region to begin to dismantle the global terror network that Iran, and through its henchmen Hizbullah, is establishing in the Eastern Hemisphere and in the Western Hemisphere. In Iran still today, after the agreement, Iranian leaders are talking about their goal to eradicate Israel off the face of the earth, to annihilate the six million Jews of Israel while denying the Holocaust that murdered another six million. That's what they say. They give a billion dollars a year to Hizbullah for the purpose of creating a warfront and the ability to bomb Israel's cities with a hundred thousand missiles and thousands of precision-guided missiles. It's all Iran. You take away the scaffolding of Iran and Hizbullah collapses. They support Hamas to the tune of about a hundred million a year for the purpose of bombing us. Hizbullah and Hamas say, "Our goal, like Iran, our patron's goal, is to wipe out the Jewish state." So to have a country committed to our destruction and the conquest of the Middle East have nuclear weapons, well, that ought to raise some concern. There's no symmetry. Israel doesn't seek to eradicate Iran; Iran seeks to eradicate Israel. Many in the Arab world see Israel as an ally rather than as an enemy, because of the two principal threats that threaten them. The first is Iran, and the second is Daesh [ISIS]. When they look around and say, "Who can help us in this battle that threatens our very future?" obviously Israel and these Sunni Arab states are not on opposite sides. We used to think that if we solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict it would solve the larger Israeli-Arab conflict. The more I look at it, the more I think it may be the other way around - that by nurturing these relationships that are taking place now with the Arab world, that could actually help us resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And we're actually working towards that end.
2016-01-22 00:00:00
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