No one could claim Benjamin Netanyahu lacks chutzpah. Snubbing a Democratic US president by appealing to a Republican Congress to wreck the White House’s set piece initiative two weeks before facing his own election — well, that takes gumption.
But guts are not the same thing as wisdom. It is doubtful Mr Netanyahu’s gambit will have persuaded US lawmakers to change their minds. Most were already sympathetic to Israeli misgivings about the outlines of Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran. By making it a US partisan issue, Mr Netanyahu’s flouting of norms has opened cracks within pro-Israeli groups where none existed. He has also invited deeper scrutiny of his own objections to any kind of Iran agreement. Mr Obama still has much ground to cover before he can secure an acceptable deal. Even then, it may be unattainable. But he has an obligation to try. Ironically, Mr Netanyahu’s actions may have made his task a little easier.
Mr Netanyahu’s main objection is that Iran can never be trusted to honour any nuclear deal. Only a full dismembering of all of Iran’s civil nuclear capacity — every centrifuge it possesses and every ounce of enriched uranium it has produced — would be acceptable to Israel. Even then, US sanctions on Iran should still be kept in place. As the chief sponsor of Syria’s Assad regime, Hizbollah and other regional instruments of terror, Iran should continue to be treated as a pariah.