Asked whether Trump approved strike on Iran’s South Pars gas, Netanyahu says diplomatically: Israel ‘acted alone’

Asked at his press conference whether US President Donald Trump had approved yesterday’s Israeli strike on the Iranian gas fields, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a diplomatic answer: “Fact number one, Israel acted alone against the Asaluyeh [South Pars] gas compound. Fact number two, President Trump asked us to hold off on future attacks, and we’re holding off.”

He says there are many signs that the Iranian regime is cracking and “I wish I could divulge all of them… Will I commit right now that it’s going to happen? I can tell you that we’re working to create the conditions for it to collapse, but it may, it may survive, it may not. If it survives, it’ll be a lot weaker… shorn of industries that it built over decades, death industries, shorn of many other capabilities that they have, and equipped with the experience, with the knowledge, that if they try it again, they’ll be hit again even harder.”

Invoking lessons of history, the prime minister says that “you have to be blind not to see that the democracies led by the United States have to reassert their will to defend themselves, and to oppose their enemies in time, while there’s still time… The fact that people don’t see that,” and that a lot of the news media spreads fake news “and a lot of shortsightedness, and do not see the historic period and the historic struggle that we are engaged in now, doesn’t obviate these truths.”

He is asked again about the claim that Israel “misled” the US into starting this war, with its price also in lost American lives. “Well, I misled no one,” he retorts, “and I didn’t have to convince President Trump about the need to prevent Iran from developing its nuclear program, putting it underground, and being able to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the United States. He understood that. He explained it to me. I didn’t explain it to him. And I think that our partnership is the only way to avoid this catastrophic development.”

“The loss of servicemen is painful,” he acknowledges, recalling his brother Yoni, killed leading “the historic Entebbe rescue. The cost to bereaved families is enormous, and I sympathize and send the condolences of the people of Israel to these families and to the American people.”

“Freedom is precious. It has its costs. But if you’re not prepared to defend it, if you’re not prepared to resist the tyrannies that are trying to arm themselves with the weapons of mass death, you will have no future,” he says.

“You have to identify danger in time and act in time against it. You either fight or flight,” he says. “Where can you flee? Nowhere, because Iran can reach any part of the world. So you have to, at a certain point, fight… I didn’t have to convince President Trump of anything. He didn’t need any convincing.”