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Old 07-22-2015, 12:06 PM   #5
PaulS
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Seems like there are a lot of Israelis who are in favor if it including former heads of Shin Bet and the Mossad:

In an interview this week with the Daily Beast, Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, or Israel’s top domestic security agency, suggested Israel’s politicians were playing “with fears in a fearful society.”

He praised the Vienna agreement as a useful measure to curb the Iranian threat.

“When negotiations began, Iran was two months away from acquiring enough material for a [nuclear] bomb. Now it will be 12 months,” Ayalon said, adding that many of his compatriots were not seeing the strategic advantage of the deal. “Israelis are failing to distinguish between reducing Iran’s nuclear capability and Iran being the biggest devil in the Middle East.”

When a framework agreement was reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, in April, Efraim Halevy, former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, hailed Obama’s victory. In an op-ed in the Yedioth Ahronot, Halevy listed some of the key provisions of the deal, which included a strict regime of inspections and the neutralizing of Iran’s key nuclear facilities.

“Anyone who has followed events in Iran in recent decades or has studied the matter has to admit truthfully that he never believed Iran would ever agree to discuss these issues,” he wrote, “let alone agree” to the measures imposed on Tehran by the world powers.

The alternative would be military strikes, which would plunge the region in deeper insecurity and would likely not be successful, Halevy said in an interview with Israeli radio in April.

“If we think that the monitoring won’t be effective, the only other option is a military campaign that will only set back the Iranians for a limited number of years,” he said.

Instead, argued Amos Yadlin, a retired air force general and former head of Israeli military intelligence, “there is a chance to set Iran back by many years.”

The final agreement, Yadlin told Israeli radio in April, would not legitimize Iran’s misdeeds on the international state, which include actively supporting militant proxy organizations in the Middle East deemed terrorist organizations by the United States and its allies.

“Iran can’t go back to being a legitimate member of the family of nations if it doesn’t stop all its activities that are not included in the agreement — its subversive activities, its support of terror groups, weapons proliferation,” Yadlin said. “The Americans took a strategic decision ... to deal with the nuclear issue as a separate matter and to not tie it to the other issues.”
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