At Jerusalem’s bustling Mahane Yehuda market, a traditional bastion of support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, Israeli divisions played out among the fruit and vegetable stalls on Sunday as Mr. Netanyahu departed for Washington with plans to deliver a contentious speech on the Iranian nuclear threat before a joint meeting of Congress.
“This is the best step he could take,” Avraham Levy (63), a merchant, said of the speech in which Mr. Netanyahu is expected to deliver a strong warning against a possible deal being discussed to limit Iran’s nuclear activities. The address has set Mr. Netanyahu on a collision course with the Obama administration.
Rivka Alkalai (84), a retired civil servant who defined herself as a centrist on the Israeli political map, shook her head and tut-tutted in disapproval.
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“You don’t blatantly go and fly in the face of your good friends,” Ms. Alkalai said of Mr. Netanyahu and the Americans. “He will only do harm,” she said as she shopped for green beans and celery.
Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to the Republican-led Congress, set for Tuesday, is not only proving divisive in the United States, where he is being accused of interfering in American politics and damaging a decades-old alliance based on bipartisan support for Israel. It is also taking place in the highly charged period before Israel’s March 17 elections and has spawned an increasingly fraught debate in Israel about the potential benefits versus the risk of damaging the crucial Israeli-American relationship.
More broadly, Israelis are now questioning whether Mr. Netanyahu, who is running for a third consecutive term, is Israel’s saviour against the Iranian nuclear threat or whether his Iran policy has, instead, been an abject failure. Popular criticism has now been bolstered by prominent voices from Israel’s security establishment. A group of nearly 200 former military and intelligence officials called on Mr. Netanyahu to cancel the speech, an unusually public challenge.
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On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry, seeking to soothe the bruised relations between Washington and Tel Aviv, said on ABC’s “This Week” that Mr. Netanyahu was welcome to speak in the United States. The two men spoke by telephone on Saturday.
Israel says that a proposal under consideration that would strictly limit, for at least 10 years, Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material in exchange for an easing of sanctions, would allow thousands of Iranian centrifuges to continue spinning and enriching uranium — a far cry from Israel’s demand for zero enrichment and the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and capabilities.
— New York Times News Service