Israel DM slams army chief s public threats to Iran
Defence Minister Benny Gantz in Jerusalem on December 2, 2020 [ALEX KOLOMIENSKY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images] January 29, 2021 at 10:23 am
Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz on Wednesday slammed Army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Aviv Kochavi, for publicly criticising the United States and threatening to attack Iran. A nuclear Iran is a danger to the world, to the region, and is a challenge to the security of Israel. Of course, Israel must be prepared to defend itself in any way, but red lines are drawn in closed rooms, Gantz told reporters.
Earlier on Tuesday, Kochavi said a return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, or a slightly improved one, would be an operational and strategic mistake for the world.
Jan 27, 2021
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi told the Biden administration that renegotiating the Iran nuclear deal “it is not the right thing to do.”
By JNS
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi said he has ordered the preparation of plans to attack Iran’s nuclear sites in order to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“Iran can decide that it wants to advance to a bomb, either covertly or in a provocative way. In light of this basic analysis, I have ordered the IDF to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to the existing ones. We are studying these plans, and we will develop them over the next year,” he said in a speech to the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
A return to the nuclear agreement with Iran would be bad, IDF Chief of Staff
Aviv Kochavi (pictured) warned while saying that the Israeli army was preparing various plans for a strike on the Islamic Republic.
Speaking on Tuesday at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Kochavi said in his opening remarks that “all our enemies are in a deep depression, both economically and because of the Coronavirus, and there is a deep distrust among everyone in the way their regimes deal with the issues.”
“Israel and the IDF have strengthened their alliances over the years. We have the strongest cooperation with the United States strategically and operationally, reaching a very high level of intimacy,” he noted.
Early attention to the region’s latent crises
The foreign policy team of the Biden administration has signaled a scaled-down approach when it comes to the Middle East. Grand ambitions of reshaping the regional order through regime change, military intervention, and settling the region’s myriad conflicts have given way to a more modest but still challenging agenda of containing Iran’s nuclear program, ensuring a modicum of stability to enable the downsizing of the U.S. military presence in the region, and extricating the U.S. from indirect involvement in Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the Yemen war.
This aligns with a trend toward recalibrating American interests in the region, focusing primarily on containing the twin threats of weapons of mass destruction and counter-terrorism.
Last Updated On: Jan 14 2021 11:03 Gmt+3
Turkey has made it clear that it is interested in mending its relationship with Israel, but that sentiment might not be shared in Tel Aviv.
Following weeks of hints from Ankara that it was serious about improving ties, Israeli officials remained mum in public about the prospects.
This changed when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced he would like to see the relationship fixed, prompting Israel’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi to convene a cabinet meeting on whether to follow up on this, according to anonymous Israeli officials speaking to Axios.
This was, in some ways, the closest glimpse into whether or not Israel would take Erdoğan up on fixing what was once a close partnership. However, an assessment on its own does not provide a clear enough signal that Israel is ready to take further steps on the normalisation tract.