Let’s take Bibi Netanyahu at his word for a moment. Let’s assume that he genuinely believes Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons and that those weapons really do pose an imminent and existential threat to the survival of Israel.
This week, that threat was removed – or, at the very least, put out of the reach of the Iranians for a very long time. The four most powerful military-economic blocs on earth – the United States, the European Union, Russia and China – reached an agreement with Iran which, as Barak Ravid of Haaretz put it, will “put Iran’s nuclear program in deep freeze for the next 10 years, force parts of it into regression, and leave restrictions on it for a generation.”
The negotiators spent close to two years on the minute details of denuclearizing Iran and concomitantly lifting sanctions. But, important as those details are, they are not the clincher.