Addressing the UN General Assembly on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu constructed a Trinity of Danger, linking Gaza’s leadership of Hamas, the Islamic State, and Iran.
Netanyahu said Hamas and the Islamic State were “branches of the same poisonous tree”:
When militant Islam succeeds anywhere, it is emboldened everywhere. When it suffers a blow in one place, it is set back in every place. That is why Israel’s fight against Hamas is not just our fight, it is your fight.
Israel is fighting a fanaticism today that your countries might be facing tomorrow.
He used the jihadists to push against any nuclear agreement with Iran, the “most dangerous country in the world”: just as the world would never allow the Islamic State to obtain centrifuges for enriching uranium or a heavy-water nuclear reactor, so it should not accept Iran’s right to do so.
“Iran’s nuclear weapons capability must be fully dismantled,” Netanyahu said. “To defeat ISIS [the Islamic State] and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is to win the battle and lose the war.”
The Israeli Prime Minister said little about the current nuclear negotiations between Iran and the 5+1 Powers (US, Britain, France, China, Gernany, and Russia).
Instead, he distanced himself from any renewal of peace talks with Palestinians, and renewed his claim — made during the recent 50-day war with Gaza — “When it comes to their ultimate goals Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas…..The fight against militant Islam is indivisible.”
Netanyahu indicated that, rather than sit at the table with the Palestinian Authority, Israel would appeal to Arab States:
To achieve…peace, we must not look only at Jerusalem and Ramallah, but also to Cairo, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and elsewhere. I believe peace can be realized with the active involvement of Arab countries, those who are willing to provide political, material and other indispensable support.