Israel seeks similar pressure on Iran as US applies on Syria

Israel is pressing the US to use the deal to remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile as a model for making Iran renounce nuclear weapons, but insists that diplomatic pressure on Tehran should be backed with a tougher military threat.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s intelligence minister, said the US threat to use force against Iran, if diplomacy failed to deter it from building a bomb, was “not credible enough” and warned that Hassan Rouhani, the country’s new centrist president, was fooling the world with a “smiling campaign”.

“It should be like Syria: ‘We are going to attack you unless you give up your nuclear weapons programme,’” Mr Steinitz told the Financial Times in an interview. US pressure on Iran, he said, needed to be “more credible and more concrete, with some timetable, some time limits”. He said Israel was discussing its views with its “American friends”, but did not elaborate.

He said of Iran’s president: “He will smile his way all the way to the bomb.”

Mr Steinitz’s comments came a day after President Barack Obama said he had exchanged letters with Mr Rouhani, and that the US-Russian agreement on Syria showed that a diplomatic solution to the stand-off with Iran was possible. But Mr Obama added that Tehran should not conclude that “we won’t strike Iran”.

Israeli officials worry that international pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme has ebbed since Mr Rouhani’s election. Some in the country were also dismayed by Mr Obama’s decision not to use force in Syria, which they see as a test of US and international resolve to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is due to address the UN General Assembly next week in a speech focusing on Iran, a year after he laid out “red lines” in Iran’s nuclear programme that he said must not be crossed, and brandished cartoons of a sputtering bomb.

Israel estimates that economic sanctions have cost the Iranian economy $100bn so far, but says sanctions and diplomatic pressure must be backed up by pressure of a military threat.

“The greater the pressure, the greater the chances,” Mr Steinitz said. “We learnt something with what happened in Syria right now,” he added, referring to the US’s shifting of warships to the eastern Mediterranean, which he said had brought about the US-Russia deal.

“I praise Obama,” he added. “He made his point.”

Mr Steinitz, a former philosophy professor and leftwing peace activist turned rightwing Likud politician, is Mr Netanyahu’s main pointman on Iran. He is also one of Israel’s most prominent voices in foreign policy while Avigdor Lieberman, tapped to resume his former role as foreign minister, awaits the outcome of his trial on corruption charges.

Mr Steinitz said Syria’s chemical weapons sites numbered in the dozens, and that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime might play with this by moving some of its stocks or weaponry around, or allowing a small portion of it to fall into rebels’ hands, which would give him the excuse to abandon the disarmament regime.

“We know Assad is very tricky and he already cheated the world,” he said. “He built a nuclear reactor in the north of Syria and somebody bombed it – there are rumours that somebody destroyed it in 2007,” he said in reference to a bombing raid Israel is reported to have carried out but never acknowledged.

Israel itself, which never ratified the 1993 chemical weapons convention, is thought to possess its own chemical weapons stockpile.

When asked whether it would abandon these if pressed, Mr Stenitz would neither confirm nor deny their existence, nor renounce them. “Let me put it like this: we are a very responsible country,” he said. “Our policy is that we are a little tiny Jewish democracy that has to survive in the most difficult and hostile neighbourhood on the face of the earth.”