Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Monday morning to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) a day before his big speech to the US congress. He hailed the strength of the U.S.-Israel alliance and said talk of its demise were “just wrong.”
Mr. Netanyahu downplayed the very open disagreement being had between the Obama administration and Israel over talks with Iran concerning the future of its nuclear program.
“My speech is not intended to show any disrespect to President Obama or the esteemed office he holds,” Mr. Netanyahu told AIPAC, the U.S.’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby. “My speech is also not intended to inject Israel into the partisan American debate.”
The prime minister did not shy away from criticizing the diplomatic process Mr. Obama is pursuing with Iran.
A defiant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Israel will continue to stand up for its right to exist against the growing threat posed by Iran, and defended his controversial Tuesday speech to Congress as a chance to warn America that this threat is growing.
“For 2,000 years, my people, the Jewish people, were stateless, defenseless, voiceless. We were utterly powerless against our enemies, who swore to destroy us,” Netanyahu said at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in Washington.
“No more!” he said to applause. “The days when the Jewish people are passive in the face of threats to annihilate us — those days are over.”
Netanyahu said his Tuesday speech before a joint session of Congress is a chance to warn America that Iran needs to be checked even today, and that Iran would become an even larger problem with nuclear weapons.
“We must not let that happen,” he said of the possibility of Iran obtaining those weapons.
“I plan to speak about an Iranian regime that is threatening to destroy Israel, that’s devouring country and after country in the Middle East, that’s exporting terror throughout the world, and that is developing, as we speak, the capacity to make nuclear weapons, lots of them,” he said.
