In perhaps the most widely debated address ever given by a foreign leader to Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described a “fateful crossroads” on the Iranian nuclear threat and said that the emerging deal between Iran and world powers is paving the way for a Middle East “littered with nuclear bombs.”
“This deal has two major concessions: one, leaving Iran with a vast nuclear program, and two, lifting the restrictions on that program in about a decade,” Netanyahu said in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning.
“That’s why this deal is so bad,” he said. “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb, it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
Netanyahu’s two U.S. speeches—Tuesday’s Congressional address and Monday’s speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference—come against the backdrop of U.S.-Israel disagreements on both protocol and policy. The White House and some Democratic legislators have opposed Netanyahu’s Congress speech on the grounds that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not consult President Barack Obama about inviting the prime minister. At the same time, while the proposed Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2015 would impose new sanctions on Iran if the country does not reach a political framework agreement in its nuclear talks with the P5+1 powers by March 24, Obama has vowed to veto any new sanctions legislation that passes in Congress.
During his speech to AIPAC, Netanyahu declared that reports of the demise of the U.S.-Israel alliance are premature and wrong, and that the two countries “must always remember that we are family.” At the start of his remarks to Congress on Tuesday, the prime minister struck a similar tone, saying that the “remarkable alliance” between the U.S. and Israel “has always been above politics, and must always remain above politics.”