The State Department confirmed Tuesday that Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke after US diplomats objected to a multilateral deal that would have called for imminent discussions on working toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.
Department press office director Jeff Rathke said that the conversation took place after Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked him to verify that Netanyahu called Kerry “to express Israel’s thanks for sticking to the US commitment” on the stalled Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review deal.
“They spoke and that was one of the things they talked about,” Rathke said.
He declined to divulge other details about the call itself, but described the proposal as “unbalanced” and written “on terms that would not allow for consensus-based discussions among all regional states.”
When pressed by Al-Quds reporter Said Arikat what an even-handed draft might look like, in the department’s opinion, Rathke would not elaborate.
“I’m not gonna get into further deconstruction of that document, but it has to be balanced and have consensus-based discussions,” he commented.
On Saturday, Reuters reported that Netanyahu called Kerry to express his gratitude after the month-long discussions ended in failure on Friday. The US said Egypt was responsible for the impasse. Egypt countered that the US, Canada, and the UK were to blame.
Egypt had proposed to hold a regional conference in no later than six months on a nuclear weapons ban. The symposium, according to the proposal, could have taken place with or without Israel and without any discussion of regional security issues—Israeli prerequisites for participation.
Despite characterizations of agreement’s language as putting an outsized focus on Israel and Netanyahu’s constant warnings about a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program threatening global security, Israel’s capabilities are believed to be unique, regionally speaking. Many observers also describe it as the world’s most secretive nuclear power.
“Israel neither confirms nor denies the widespread assumption that it controls the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal,” Ha’aretz noted on Saturday. “Israel, which has never joined the NPT, agreed to take part in the review meeting as an observer, ending a 20-year absence.”
An anonymous Israeli official told Reuters that Netanyahu specifically called Kerry to say that the US “kept its commitment to Israel by preventing a Middle East resolution that would single out Israel and ignore its security interests and the threats posed to it by an increasingly turbulent Middle East.”
On Thursday, State Department’s acting spokesperson Marie Harf claimed that “the United States and Israel support the creation of a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.”
“We’re closely working with our Israeli partners to advance our mutual interests, including preserving the NPT. Given there’s no final text, this is something we’re working behind the scenes and don’t have much more to share than that,” she said.
