Israel scuppers Iran nuke deal

[David Guyatt]

...and Israeli officials estimate that unless an unexpected crisis takes place, an interim agreement will be signed in this round or shortly afterwards.

Odd that.

[Magda Hassan]

This is new.

Iran releases video explaining position on nuclear energy

Published yesterday (updated) 19/11/2013 23:45

A screenshot from the video shows Zarif walking through the Iranian
Foreign Ministry building in Tehran. (MaanImages/Youtube)

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BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif released a video on Tuesday explaining Iran's position on the country's nuclear energy program ahead of negotiations on Wednesday.

The video was released in five languages on Zarif's personal Youtube page, and it comes as the foreign minister headed to Italy to meet with leaders there.

"Free will is in our being, in our DNA, and it has been the essence of the collective demand of us Iranians for the past century. We have repeatedly joined hands to stand up against tyranny, demanding respect for our free will," he said, stressing that "Iranians are no different from any other people on this planet we share."

His trip immediately precedes negotiations in Geneva on Wednesday, when an Iranian delegation will meet with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, China, France, Britain and US) as well as Germany in attempt to clinch a deal that would legitimize Iran's civilian nuclear energy program and end the confrontation that has resulted from its pursuit of nuclear power.

"For us Iranians, nuclear energy is not about joining a club or threatening others. Nuclear energy is about a leap, a jump toward deciding our own destiny, rather than allowing others to decide for us," he said.

"For us, nuclear energy is about securing the future of our children, about diversifying our economy, about stopping the burning of our oil, and about generating clean power," he added, stressing the economic and ecological benefits of nuclear power for Iran.




"It (nuclear energy) is about the Iranian nation moving forward forward as an equal in a new realm defined by peace, by prosperity, by progress," he added.

He also spoke at length about the potential for peace and dialogue for defusing the West's historic rejection of Iran's right to a nuclear program.

"The choice is not submission or confrontation. This past summer the Iranian people chose constructive engagement through the ballot box. And through this, they gave the world a historic opportunity to change course," referring to the election of President Rouhani in the Iranian elections, a choice many hailed as a sign that Iranians were interested in engaging in renewed negotiations with the West.

"To seize this historic opportunity we need to accept equal footing, and choose a path based on mutual respect and recognition of dignity of all peoples."

"And more so, on the recognition that no power, however strong, can determine the fate of others. This is no longer an option," he added.

"The Iranian people are determined to explore this path. Join us in ending an unnecessary crisis and opening new horizons," he said, addressing his audience in English with French, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian subtitles.

The video's release follows the failure of the last round of negotiations earlier in November to achieve a substantial result, despite indications that a deal was nearly clinched.

Israel has repeatedly warned world powers not to engage in negotiations with Iran, and is widely suspected of having reached out to the US, France, and other parties to the negotiations to urge them to refuse any potential deal. Israel suspects that Iran will use its civilian nuclear energy program to develop nuclear weapons, a prospect it strongly opposes.

Israel has the Middle East's only nuclear weapons arsenal, while Iran has stressed that it categorically opposes nuclear weapons and has repeatedly called for a nuclear weapons free zone across the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instead called for more sanctions to be imposed on Iran.

The United States and the European Union have imposed increasingly harsh rounds of sanctions on Iran in the last few years that have affected all sectors of the country's economy.

The sanctions have precipitated an economic and humanitarian crisis in Iran, with wide-ranging effects on the civilian population that include medicine shortages, a currency collapse, and the isolation of the country's banks from the global financial system.

Nearly two thirds of Israeli Jews oppose a deal being reached between world powers and Iran on Tehran's controversial nuclear program, a survey in Israel Hayom said on Friday.

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=649017

[Magda Hassan]

Lebanon army seizes car packed with 400kg explosives

Lebanese security forces establish a checkpoint in the southern suburb of the capital Beirut on September 23, 2013.
The Lebanese army has seized a bomb-laden car carrying 400 kilograms of explosives in the eastern Bekaa Valley, days after a deadly terrorist attack near Iranian embassy killed 25 people.
Security sources said on Fridaythat the car rigged with 400 kilograms (250 pounds) of explosives was found at dawn.
The army, on alert since Tuesday's attack outside the Iranian embassy, had spotted the suspect vehicle earlier, state media said.
Troops gave chase to the car and exchanged fire with the passengers but it got away, the official National News Agency said.
The army eventually found the vehicle abandoned on a road between the villages of Makneh and Yunin with its tires burst, the news agency said.
The identity of the passengers was not immediately known nor was it clear where they had planned to blow up the vehicle.
The incident came as Lebanon marked the 70th anniversary of its independence from French colonial rule.
The 32-month conflict in neighboring Syria has stirred tensions in Lebanon where many Takfiris back the militant groups.
In October, the army defused a car bomb in south Beirut, weeks after it was hit by two bombings.
http://en.alalam.ir/news/1536807

[David Guyatt]

It's good to see the neo-cons, military hawks and right-wing Israeli's tossed out of touch here. About time too.

I suppose it's too soon to say it is historic, but it does seem to have a feel about it. It reminds me of the Cuba missile crisis - because at one point the western players were within a minute or two of launching an all out war against Syria, and God knows what this would've precipitated?

Maybe a back channel brought this to fruition too?

But of course, there's still a long way to go. Israel and others will continue to try to bring ruination on this, I suspect.

Iran seals nuclear deal with west in return for sanctions relief

Barack Obama hails historic accord as first step towards resolution of decade-old impasse over Iran's nuclear programme

• Julian Borger in Geneva and Saeed Kamali Dehghan
  
• theguardian.com, Sunday 24 November 2013 04.36 EST
  
• Jump to comments (99)
  

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (left) next to Catherine Ashton (centre) as US secretary of state John Kerry embraces France's Laurent Fabius in Geneva. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Iran has struck a historic deal with the US and five other world powers, accepting strict constraints on its nuclear programme for the first time in a decade in exchange for partial relief from sanctions.
The deal, signed in the Geneva Palace of Nations at 4.30am on Sunday morning, also marked arguably the most significant foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama's presidency, particularly as it is intended to be the first step in a six-month process aimed at a permanent resolution to the volatile decade-old global impasse over Iran's nuclear programme, and fend off the threat of a new war in the Middle East.
"While today's announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal," President Obama said in an address to the nation from the White House. "For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme, and key parts of the programme will be rolled back."
The Geneva deal releases just over $4bn in Iranian oil sales revenue from frozen accounts, and suspends restrictions on the country's trade in gold, petrochemicals, car and plane parts.
In return, Iran undertakes to restrict its nuclear activities. Over the next six months it has agreed to:
stop enriching uranium above 5%, reactor-grade, purity-dilute its stock of 20%-enriched uranium or convert it to oxide, which makes it harder to enrich further. The medium-enriched uranium, in its hexafluoride gas form is relatively easy to turn into weapons-grade material used in a weapon, so it is a major proliferation concern.
not to increase its stockpile of low-enrichment uranium.
freeze its enrichment capacity by not installing any more centrifuges, leaving over half of its existing 16,000 centrifuges inoperable.
not to fuel or to commission the heavy water reactor it is building in Arak or build a reprocessing plant that could produce plutonium from the spent fuel.
The six-month life of the Geneva deal is intended to be used to negotiate a comprehensive and permanent settlement that would allow Iran to pursue a peaceful programme, almost certainly including enrichment, but under long-term limits and intrusive monitoring, sufficient to provide the rest of the international community confidence that any parallel covert programme would be spotted and stopped well before Iran could make a bomb.
That agreement would lead to the lifting of the main sanctions on oil and banking that have all but crippled the Iranian economy, and the eventual normalisation of relations between Iran and the US for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, spent much of the three rounds of negotiations since September , closeted together in intense discussions, a dramatic break from the previous 34 years when there was barely any official contact between the two countries.
"This is only a first step," the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told a news conference. "We need to start moving in the direction of restoring confidence, a direction in which we have managed to move against in the past."
Sunday morning's deal was agreed after a diplomatic marathon of three intensive rounds, culminating in a late-night session in the conference rooms of a five-star hotel in Geneva, chaired by the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, a former Labour peer and CND official, for whom the deal represents a personal triumph.
Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, and their German, Russian and Chinese counterparts, Guido Westerwelle, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, also took part in a six-nation group mandated by the UN security council to handle the nuclear negotiations since 2006. Some of the complications involved in coming to a deal stemmed from the need to keep the six powers together.
However, the key overnight sessions that clinched the deal involved Kerry, Zarif and Ashton alone..
"This deal actually rolls back the programme from where it is today," Kerry said. However, he added: "I will not stand here in some triumphal moment and claim that this is an end in itself."
The bigger task, he said, was to go forward and negotiate a comprehensive deal.
The difficulties facing the negotiators in the coming months were highlighted by the very different interpretations Kerry and Zarif took on the fiercely disputed issue of whether the deal represented a recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium in principle. Zarif was insistent that it did because it was based on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guarantees the right to a peaceful nuclear programme. Kerry said that neither the NPT nor today's deal specifies a right to enrichment. That, he said, was a matter for negoiation in the coming six months.
News of the deal united Iranians from across the political spectrum in celebration, reflecting widespread hope that it would reduce the threat of war and ease punishing sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of people stayed up through the night to follow the minute-by-minute coverage of negotiations on satellite televsion, Facebook and Twitter.
The first announcement that a deal had been reached, by Ashton's spokesman Michael Mann, and the confirmation by Zarif, were both made on Twitter a first for a major global accord.
"Day five, 3am, it's white smoke," tweeted the deputy Iranian foreign minister, Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, referring to the terminology used in Vatican for the announcement of a new pope.

[David Guyatt]

It seems there was, in fact, a back channel...

Secret US-Iran talks paved way for nuclear deal

Meetings that ran parallel to official negotiations help achieve most significant Washington-Tehran agreement since 1979

• Julian Borger and Saeed Kamali Dehghan in Geneva
  
• The Guardian, Sunday 24 November 2013 15.16 EST
  

Delegates at the Iran nuclear talks at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: /Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media

A historic agreement on Iran's nuclear programme was made possible by months of unprecedented secret meetings between US and Iranian officials, in further signs of the accelerating detente between two of the world's most adversarial powers, it emerged on Sunday.
The meetings ran parallel to official negotiations involving five other world powers, and helped pave the way for the interim deal signed in Geneva in the early hours of Sunday morning, in which Iran accepted strict constraints on its nuclear programme for the first time in a decade in exchange for partial relief from sanctions.
The Obama administration asked journalists not to publish details they had uncovered of the secret diplomacy until the Geneva talks were over for fear of derailing them. The Associated Press and a Washington-based news website, Al-Monitor, finally did so on Sunday.
The nuclear agreement, which arguably marks the most significant foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama's presidency, was struck at 4.30am at a Geneva hotel on day five of the third round of intensive talks. It amounts to the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The deal releases just over $4bn in Iranian oil sales revenue from frozen accounts, and suspends restrictions on the country's trade in gold, petrochemicals, car and plane parts. In return, Iran undertakes to restrict its nuclear activities. Over the next six months Iran has agreed to:
Stop enriching uranium above 5%, reactor-grade, and dilute its stock of 20%-enriched uranium, removing a major proliferation concern.
Not to increase its stockpile of low-enriched uranium.
Freeze its enrichment capacity by not installing any more centrifuges, leaving more than half of its existing 16,000 centrifuges inoperable.
Not to fuel or to commission the heavy-water reactor it is building in Arak or build a reprocessing plant that could produce plutonium from the spent fuel.
Accept more intrusive nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, including daily visits to some facilities.
"While today's announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal," Obama said in an address from the White House. "For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme, and key parts of the programme will be rolled back."
Iran welcomed back its negotiators as heroes at Tehran's Mehrabad airport. Its currency, the rial, which has been pulverised by a gruelling succession of economic sanctions, jumped more than 3%. "This is only a first step," Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign affairs minister, said. "We need to start moving in the direction of restoring confidence, a direction in which we have managed to move against in the past."
But there was silence from Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia and dismal warnings from Israel that the deal would merely embolden its fiercest adversary. "Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world," said Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. David Cameron said the deal "demonstrates how persistent diplomacy and tough sanctions can together help us to advance our national interest". In a tweet from Downing Street, he said: "Good progress on iran - nowhere near the end but a sign pressure works".
Sunday morning's deal was agreed after a diplomatic marathon of three intensive rounds, culminating in a late-night session in the conference rooms of a five-star hotel in Geneva, chaired by the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, a former Labour peer and CND official, for whom the deal represents a personal triumph.
Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, and their German, Russian and Chinese counterparts, Guido Westerwelle, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, also took part in a six-nation group mandated by the UN security council to handle the nuclear negotiations since 2006. Some of the complications involved in coming to a deal stemmed from the need to keep the six powers together.
However, the key overnight sessions that clinched the deal involved Kerry, Zarif and Ashton alone.
"This deal actually rolls back the programme from where it is today," Kerry said. However, he added: "I will not stand here in some triumphal moment and claim that this is an end in itself."
The bigger task, he said, was to go forward and negotiate a comprehensive deal.
The six-month life of the Geneva deal is intended to be used to negotiate a comprehensive and permanent settlement that would allow Iran to pursue a peaceful programme, almost certainly including enrichment, but under long-term limits and intrusive monitoring that would reassure the world any parallel covert programme would be spotted and stopped well before Iran could make a bomb.
That agreement would lead to the lifting of the main sanctions on oil and banking that have all but crippled the Iranian economy, and the eventual normalisation of relations between Iran and the US for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The difficulties facing the negotiators in the coming months were highlighted by the different interpretations that Zarif and his US counterpart, John Kerry, took on the fiercely disputed issue of whether the deal represented a recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium in principle. Zarif pointed to a line in the preamble in the text which said that an eventual comprehensive settlement "would involve a mutually defined enrichment programme with practical limits and transparency measures". American argued that the phrase "mutually defined" implied Iran would still require international consent to pursue enrichment.
The Associated Press said preliminary and secret talks were held in Oman and other locations. The US envoys for the meetings were the deputy secretary of state, William Burns, and Jake Sullivan, a foreign policy adviser to Joe Biden. Al-Monitor reported that a senior national security council official, Puneet Talwar, also took part. AP said there had been five meetings dating back to March, implying the first contacts came three months before the election of the reformist Hassan Rouhani as president. It is not clear which Iranian officials were involved in the talks.
The talks help explain why the US and Iran were able to strike a deal relatively quickly after Rouhani's election. But it also helps explain the irritation of the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, at the previous round of negotiations a fortnight ago when he was presented with an agreement that the US and Iran had worked out independently.

[Magda Hassan]

So far so good. Putin has avoided war in Syria. He has avoided war against Iran. Lets hope he does some thing for the Palestinians. But won't be holding my breath on that. Anyway, nice to see the Neo-cons and hawkes and Israel on the outer for a change. Lifting the sanctions will make life much better for the average Iranian too. Don't suppose the assassinations of nuclear scientists and engineers will be stopping any time soon though.

[David Guyatt]

If you shout Wolf! often enough, this is what happens.

It couldn't happen to a nicer man...

Where does the Iranian nuclear deal leave Binyamin Netanyahu?

The Israeli prime minister has made it his life's mission to protect the Jewish state from Iranian threats, but now looks sidelined

• 
  
• • Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
    
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 28 November 2013 14.50 GMT
    

Binyamin Netanyahu's warnings about the Iran deal have not been heeded, but his isolation may strengthen him at home. Photograph: Abir Sultan/AP

First it was bad. Then it became very bad; soon, exceedingly bad. Finally, it was condemned as a "historic mistake" which made the world a "much more dangerous place".
The blunt rhetoric and raw anger of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, over the deal struck between six western nations and Iran in Geneva last weekend reached its apotheosis in the hours following the pre-dawn signing of the accord.
This was not about the minutiae of corridor diplomacy in Geneva's Intercontinental hotel. For Netanyahu, the devil was not in the detail, as so many said in the aftermath; the devil was in the bigger picture the potential unravelling of his core vector, the defining issue of his premiership.
Netanyahu has made it his life's mission to protect the Jewish state from potential annihilation by Iran's Islamic regime. He has cast the threat from Tehran in terms of the rise of nazism in the 1930s, and warned against a similar failure to stop it in its tracks by whatever means necessary.
And, somewhat to his credit, the world took notice. The Iranian nuclear threat became of paramount importance on the global stage. For a while, it looked like Israeli military action with or without US involvement was simply a matter of time.
But, now, most of the world wants to find a diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem, compromising with Tehran in order to avoid another war. Where does this leave Bibi, as the Israeli prime minister is known, whose shouts of "no compromise" have been heard but not heeded?
"He was hurt politically by Geneva," said Gil Hoffman, political editor of the Jerusalem Post. "This was a man who was elected for being the great communicator, for his ability to convince the world about the most important issue it faces. And he failed. He's known as King Bibi, but he doesn't look much like a king now."
But Avraham Diskin, professor of political science at Hebrew University, said: "At the bottom line, Netanyahu is not fundamentally weakened. His basic stance still has widespread support in Israel."
The US and Europe are now striving to keep Netanyahu inside the tent. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, telephoned to urge him to play a "full and constructive part" in the next few months, and Simon Gass, the UK's chief negotiator at Geneva, was dispatched to reassure Israel over the deal. The French also sent a senior diplomat, Jacques Audibert.
And the US secretary of state, John Kerry, is to visit Jerusalem next week to discuss Iran and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
According to Daniel Levy of the European Council for Foreign Relations, Netanyahu has three options: embrace, strike or undermine. "He could say Iran has capitulated and claim victory. He could bomb, which I've never believed he was going to do on his own. Or he can try to ensure this deal gets tripped up in the coming months and I assume that's what we're going to see."
Having described the Geneva agreement as the "deal of the century" for Iran, Netanyahu could not now credibly claim it as a triumph for his position. And, despite his insistence that Israel is keeping the military option on the table, the chances of a unilateral strike while the major world powers are committed to pursuing a diplomatic resolution are negligible.
So engagement to try to shape or undermine the ongoing diplomatic process, while continuing to talk tough, is Netanyahu's only realistic option. That may not rule out continued covert operations against specific Iranian targets.
Public opinion in Israel appears to be solidly behind the prime minister. Polls in the aftermath of Geneva indicated around 58-60% believe the deal endangers their country, and 55-58% support Netanyahu's stance.
"Israelis are often at each other's throats, but when faced with an existential threat, they come together. The way Netanyahu has handled the Iran issue has pretty much across-the-board support," said Matt Rees, co-author of Psychobibi, an ebook about the prime minister.
Few alternative positions are articulated by Israeli politicians. "On the Iran question, it's not that Netanyahu is paramount. There simply is no other actor on the stage," said Amit Segal, chief political correspondent for Israel's Channel Two. The new leader of the opposition, elected to the helm of the Labour party this week, Isaac Herzog, accused Netanyahu of "creating unnecessary panic" over the Geneva deal, but few expect him to fundamentally challenge the prime minister's stance on Iran.
According to Levy, the lack of credible opposition on the issue gives Netanyahu "more space to 'act up' than if he was in a more competitive political environment".
Yet, despite popular support for Netanyahu over Iran, it is not the issue of greatest concern to most Israelis. The past few years have seen the economy emerge as the public's top priority, in a notable shift from security issues. Bibi has little to offer voters on their day-to-day concerns, but constant warnings of existential threats ensure his continued domestic hegemony.
However, doom-mongering is also likely to further test the patience of Israel's key ally, the US. Kerry is "increasingly disabusing himself of the notion that he has a political partner in Netanyahu", according to Levy.
"Netanyahu's repeated unreasonableness and repeated willingness to play US domestic politics has put him in a grey zone where there are voices in the US administration, which I imagine are gaining traction, who are saying we've simply got to work around this guy," he said. "It's a combination of substantive rigidity and the cavalier way in which he's willing to brazenly stick it to them in their own political backyard that is testing people's patience."
But, according to Hoffman, international isolation can have the effect of shoring up Netanyahu at home. "The people of Israel blame Obama, not Netanyahu. Obama is seen by Israelis as hostile, and therefore when Netanyahu stands up to him especially on an issue seen as an existential threat it goes down well," he said.
As well as trying to get Netanyahu onside over Iran, Kerry will also be trying to keep the peace talks with the Palestinians on track during his visit next week. Netanyahu, having failed to prevent a "bad deal" in Geneva, may be less willing than ever to compromise with the Palestinians.
"The Palestinian issue is the big casualty of this deal," Bruce Riedel, of the Brookings Institution in Washington, told the New York Times. "Now that they have an Iran deal, over the strong objections of Israel, it's going to be very hard to persuade Netanyahu to do something on the Palestinian front."
Others say there was no sign of the talks leading anywhere anyway. "To suggest that this could derail [the process] does an injustice to just how thoroughly stuck it is anyway," said Levy.
Netanyahu who "only sees threats, never opportunities" has had his core political project subverted by the Geneva process, he added. "What does his premiership become now? Does it really just become about outlasting [David] Ben-Gurion [Israel's first prime minister, who spent more than 12 years in office]? Does longevity make up for any ground-breaking substance?"
According to Rees, Netanyahu's faith in his historic role will not falter. "He sees himself as a great strategic thinker. He believes very firmly that not even the US can be the guardians of Israel's security. Isolation only confirms his deepest psychological traits it doesn't make a crisis for him but makes him stronger."

[Magda Hassan]

Beyond the propaganda
Israel sent Iran weapons and so did the George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign.

The US and Iran partnered together hand in glove in the attack on Afghanistan's Taliban. Iranian agents called in the air strikes and US air power delivered.

But somehow we're supposed to believe that Iran is a permanent enemy of Israel and the US.

There's more here than meets the eye.

[David Guyatt]

Beyond the propaganda
Israel sent Iran weapons and so did the George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign.

The US and Iran partnered together hand in glove in the attack on Afghanistan's Taliban. Iranian agents called in the air strikes and US air power delivered.

But somehow we're supposed to believe that Iran is a permanent enemy of Israel and the US.

There's more here than meets the eye.

It's always the same. One story for there public, but a different reality behind the scenes. It's all about manipulating public opinion. And it's all about war and money.

[Magda Hassan]

Be careful what you wish for.

Israel's Double Standard Illuminated by Opposition to Iran Deal

by: David Harris-Gershon on November 26th, 2013 | 14 Comments »

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in his vociferous opposition to U.S. negotiations with Iran, has argued with particular force against the easing of international sanctions against Iran. His logic? No sanctions should be lifted until Iran abides completely by those international agreements it has been violating in the pursuit of nuclear advancement.
Israel's problem is that this is a similar argument many Palestinians and peace proponents have been making for years: that Israel should be pressured by the international community to forgo its settlement enterprise, deemed illegal by international law.
As Jodi Rudoren reports in The New York Times:

In some ways, Israel's approach to Iran has echoed arguments long made by its Palestinian adversaries. Over the past few weeks, Israeli leaders frequently said Iran must be forced to comply with United Nations resolutions and International Atomic Energy Agreements that it has been violating for years. Similarly, the Palestinians insist that Israel must live up to prior promises to evacuate settlements considered illegal under international law.
"It shows a double standard," said one senior Palestinian official involved in the talks, speaking on the condition of anonymity under an American dictate not to discuss them publicly. "If they expect to reach a solution in Iran by pushing more and more sanctions, why shouldn't they expect from our side to push for sanctions against Israel?"

This strange alignment Israel's opposition to the Iran deal mirroring Palestinian opposition to Israel's geopolitical stances has even inspired some to conclude that the interim deal struck with Iran could serve as a model for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations going forward.
One such person is Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's lead negotiator:

On Monday, Saeb Erekat, the lead Palestinian negotiator, called it a "unique precedent" and "platform" that should be applied to the peace process.
"What happened in Geneva is a new prototype where everybody has shared in reaching an agreement to avoid war and achieve stability," Mr. Erekat said in a statement. "We call upon the international community to make use of the same efforts in order to end decades of occupation and exile for the people of Palestine in order to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine."

Netanyahu's berating of President Obama on the phone, and Israeli officials' public condemnation of the Iran deal, may be playing well in the short term at home.
However, internationally, such opposition is doing nothing but strengthen the hand of those Middle East peace proponents who agree with Israel's approach: that pressure should not be eased against violators of international law until the violations stop.
Ironically, by opposing the Iran deal, Israel is supporting the notion that the only way to compel it to abandon the settlements and occupation is via international pressure.
Including sanctions.

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2013/1...-iran-deal