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Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett lashed at the European leadership, saying they should be grateful that “someone is taking out the nuclear menace” coming from Iran in an interview with Euronews after EU leaders called for diplomatic engagement.
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Bennett said the US and Israel “are doing the hard work like we’re used to” combating what he described as a fundamentalist, radical Islamist nuclear threat.
“If we had not acted, Europe would be under a terrible ballistic missile, nuclear menace,” he told Euronews. “We are fighting your war, we expect your backing.”
When asked about specific countries, he refused to comment but suggested that Israel is protecting “Madrid and Barcelona” by going after Iran in a reference to Spain.
The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was the first European leader to condemn the US-Israeli war as violating international law and called the attack illegal.
Sánchez is also pushing an active political campaign under the banner of “no to war.”
Bennett described the Spanish government as “just abhorrent, incredibly disappointing.”
In a summit held in Brussels last week, European leaders called “for de-escalation, maximum restraint, the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure and full respect of international law by all parties” involved, including the UN Charter.
Bennett pushed back saying Israel is fighting the most “just of wars” and said the military campaign is justified because “you cannot allow an imminent threat to grow so big.”
The question around the immediacy of the threat has been challenged.
Last week, Joe Kent, a senior US intelligence official appointed by President Donald Trump, resigned from the job in protest to the war.
He argued that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and claimed that the Trump administration was swayed under pressure from Israel and what he called “its powerful American lobby” in a letter.
Bennett called Kent a “schmuck, irrelevant…he will go down in the dustbin of history” and doubled down on the threat emanating from Iran as requiring immediate action.
“If you allow a threat to grow and grow, at some point it becomes so big that you can’t manage a threat anymore. Like North Korea, where the world did not act and now no one can take care and eliminate those nuclear weapons. Like Hitler,” he said.
Asked about the timeline of the war and its objectives, Bennett said Israel needs time.
His comments come in contrast to President Trump who on Monday said would give Iran a five-day ultimatum, extending a previous deadline, to hold talks and explore a deal.
Without elaborating, Trump said the US is holding talks with a top individual in Iran understood to be the president of the Iranian parliament and said talks are underway.
Tehran denied talks are happening on state media.
Asked about whether Israel is working under Trump’s timeline and would accept a deal in the same terms as the US President, Bennett said “it depends.”
“Our objective is to totally dismantle the nuclear programme and ensure they never achieve a nuclear weapon. Same with the ballistic missiles and same with dismantling the terror proxies. We have to see what the deal is,” he told Euronews.
Watch the full interview on Europe Today on Euronews from Monday to Friday from 8am CET and catch the replay available across all platforms.
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