It is rare for a US Secretary of Defence to rebuke Israel in any way at all, and even rarer to do so publicly. So it was very welcome to hear Leon Panetta criticise Benjamin Netanyahu's government for its increasing isolation in the Arab world, and its failure to do more to restart peace talks. We have to hope that this new tone from the Defence Department is also reflected in the thinking of the State Department, but that remains unlikely, since the White House rarely succeeds in getting these two behemoths to coordinate their ideas.
But it is true that Israel has been completely caught out by the events of the Arab Spring, and its relationships with the former presidents and their regimes that have collapsed in confusion. Netanyahu has been badly wrong-footed by the seismic changes in the Arab world. His sole reaction has been to encourage western fear of the rise of Islamist parties, and to grind on endlessly about the threat from Iranian nuclear weapons.
Despite his criticisms, Panetta still agrees with Netanyahu that the nuclear threat from Iran is a real and active danger. He shares Washington's impression that Iran's nuclear technology is a current threat, and Panetta is firm on the Obama administration's determination that Iran must be stopped from getting nuclear weapons.
Panetta is well aware that there are no votes in next year's US elections for making peace with Iran (even if it does not have the technology to build nuclear weapons).
So even if Netanyahu is irritated by the frank chiding of a friend over his failure to handle the Arab Spring with any success, and his failure to do anything about the peace talks, he need have no fear that Obama will offer him any real threat in a US election year.
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