856 Peres: I stopped attack on Iran. Statement concealed ‘til death. Reported in Israel & Europe but not USA

Peres: I stopped attack on Iran. Statement concealed ‘til death.
Reported in Israel & Europe but not USA

Newsletter published on 1 Oktober 2016

(1) Peres: I stopped an Israeli strike on Iran - Jerusalem Post
(2) Murdock's The Australian: Peres 'I stopped Netanyahu from attacking
Iran, and you can talk about it when I'm dead'
(3) RT (Russia Today): ‘I stopped Netanyahu from catastrophic attack on
Iran’ – Peres' statement concealed ‘til death
(4) UK Telegraph: Peres claims from beyond the grave that he stopped
Netanyahu from attacking Iran
(5) Pakistan: Deceased Israeli statesman Shimon Peres stopped attack on Iran

(1) Peres: I stopped an Israeli strike on Iran - Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Peres-bombshell-I-stopped-an-Israeli-strike-on-Iran-469112

Peres bombshell: I stopped an Israeli strike on Iran

By STEVE LINDE

09/30/2016 00:06

If not for Shimon Peres’s intervention, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was planning to bomb Iran, the former president revealed
confidentially to The Jerusalem Post over two years ago.

In a meeting at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa on August 24, 2014,
Peres dropped the bombshell in a conversation with me and Jerusalem Post
Managing Editor David Brinn.

I have thought long and hard about whether to publish it, and reached
the conclusion that he wouldn’t have told us if he didn’t want us to.

I was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post at the time and had
established a close relationship with Peres, who had retired a month
earlier as president.

During the course of the conversation (in which just the three of us sat
and chatted over coffee), Brinn asked Peres what he considered the
greatest achievement of his presidency. He responded by saying that he
had personally intervened to stop Netanyahu from ordering a preemptive
strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The following is based on my notes:

Peres: I stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran.

Me: Can you tell us more?

Peres: I don’t want to go into details, but I can tell you that he was
ready to launch an attack and I stopped him. I told him the consequences
would be catastrophic.

"Can we report this?" I asked.

"When I’m dead," Peres replied, with a wry smile.

Almost a year later, on June 7, 2015, I moderated a security panel at
The Jerusalem Post Fourth Annual Conference in New York in which Senior
Contributing Editor Caroline B. Glick got into a heated argument with
former IDF chief Lt.-Gen. (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi and the late Mossad
director Meir Dagan, charging that they had refused an order from
Netanyahu to prepare for an attack against Iran.

In 2010, Glick said, citing a report from the investigative journalism
TV program Uvda, "we learned that two of the gentlemen on this panel
were given an order to prepare the military for an imminent strike
against Iran’s military installations and they refused."

While pointedly not denying that the order had been given, Dagan
insisted: "It was an illegal order. We were always willing to obey any
legal order by the prime minister. We never refused an order."

"You were ordered by the security cabinet," Glick retorted.

"You were not there. You don’t know what happened there," said an
indignant Dagan.

"There was never a decision about it," Ashkenazi added, although he
acknowledged that he had opposed a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran.

At the Herzliya Conference the following day, Maariv columnist Ben
Caspit raised the issue with Peres.

"That journalist [Glick] wasn’t there! How would she know?" Peres raged.
"These are issues that should be discussed in the cabinet, not in the
media and not in public."

"Peres had good reason to be angry," Caspit later wrote on the
Al-Monitor media site. "He was one of the key players in that drama,
which played out between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2011.
These were some of the tensest times for Israel’s defense establishment.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak were
pushing ahead with their plans to attack Iran, while the IDF, headed by
Ashkenazi, and the heads of the other defense establishments opposed the
move. Ashkenazi and Dagan had the support of none other than the
president at the time, Peres, who joined their efforts to thwart the
attack."

Was it in fact Peres, the architect of Israel’s nuclear program, who
ultimately foiled an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites? He thought
so, although he didn’t say how he did it.

(2) Murdock's The Australian: Peres 'I stopped Netanyahu from attacking
Iran, and you can talk about it when I'm dead'
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/shimon-peres-netanyahu-iran-2016-9?r=US&IR=T

Natasha Bertrand

Oct 1, 2016, 1:20 AM

Former Israeli president Shimon Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age
of 93, told the Jerusalem Post two years ago that current Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu " was ready to launch an attack" on Iran,
and "I stopped him."

Peres, speaking to the Post’s Steve Linde and David Brinn in a meeting
at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa on August 24, 2014, apparently
said he didn’t want to go into details about the conversation he had had
with Netanyahu.

He also stipulated that the Post could not report on the incident until
after he was dead.

In 2011, Netanyahu and his defence minister at the time, Ehud Barak,
were actively building their case to attack Iran by forcefully arguing
that the Islamic Republic was developing a nuclear bomb.

"By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates,
[Iran] will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final
stage," Netanyahu said at a UN General Assembly meeting in 2012. "From
there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get
enough enriched uranium for the first bomb."

The Israeli Defence Force and members of Israeli’s defence establishment
opposed Netanyahu’s plans to strike Iran first, however. So did Peres.

"It is now clear to us that we cannot go it alone," Peres said in an
interview with an Israeli news outlet in 2012, referring to Netanyahu’s
desire to attack Iran.

"We can forestall it; therefore it’s clear to us that we have to work
together with America. There are questions of coordination and timing,
but because of the nature of the danger, we are not alone," he added then.

A secret cable written by Israel’s intelligence leaked that year further
conveyed the dissent brewing within Netanyahu’s own establishment. Iran
was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons," the
cable read.

The Obama administration intervened shortly after Israel’s lieutenant
general, Gabi Ashkenazi visited, Washington and relayed Netanyahu’s
plans to attack Iran, which Ashkenazi opposed (with Peres’ agreement,
according to the Post).

Obama — who was in the beginning phases of negotiating his landmark
nuclear deal with Iran at the time — sent the vice chairman of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James Winnefeld, to Israel to pressure
officials not to follow through with an attack. The move infuriated
Netanyahu and contributed to the leaders’ still-tense relationship.

Netanyahu was ultimately overruled — but if what Peres said is true, he
apparently had more to do with deterring an attack on Iran than either
Israel’s defence establishment or the United States.

(3) RT (Russia Today): ‘I stopped Netanyahu from catastrophic attack on
Iran’ – Peres' statement concealed ‘til death

https://www.rt.com/news/361263-peres-stopped-netanyahu-iran-attack/

  ‘I stopped Netanyahu from catastrophic attack on Iran’ – Peres'
Statement concealed ‘til death

Published time: 1 Oct, 2016 00:47 Edited time: 1 Oct, 2016 02:15

In a statement that was not to be made public until his death, the
former Israeli President told Jerusalem Post he stopped PM Benjamin
Netanyahu from a "catastrophic" military strike against Iran, at the
time the world leaders were engaged in nuclear deal talks.

Iran tension, Israel vs Iran

Israel has been the most ardent critic of Iran’s nuclear program for
decades, viewing Tehran’s progress in this sphere as a direct threat to
Israel and regional security. For years the country has resisted the
P5+1 negotiations on Iran’s nuclear future.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s cartoon of a nuclear bomb which he presented to the
UN General Assembly in September 2012 certainly grabbed the world’s
attention. Having incessantly talked about "red lines" for Iran's
nuclear development, four years ago he literally drew one across the
bomb to illustrate the point at which the international community should
take decisive action. Netanyahu set his literal red line at the 90
percent threshold of uranium enrichment.

Up until P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United
States, plus Germany) announced the agreement with Iran in July 2015, to
limit the country’s nuclear development in exchange for sanction relief,
Israel was threatening to take unilateral action against Tehran.

A day after the funeral of Shimon Peres, Jerusalem Post published the
former president’s revelation which was shared with the publication two
years ago, revealing that he was solemnly responsible for stopping
Netanyahu’s plan. With this revelation, it seems that plans to attack
Iran at the time were not just empty threats.

The conversation between Peres and Jerusalem Post Managing Editor David
Brinn took place at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa on August 24,
2014. During the exchange, Brinn asked Peres what he would consider the
greatest achievement of his presidency (2007-2014), to which the elderly
president responded by saying that he had personally intervened to stop
Netanyahu from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites.

Brinn, in a JP article, published some notes from that conversation,
which quoted Peres as saying:"I stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran."

"I don’t want to go into details, but I can tell you that he was ready
to launch an attack and I stopped him. I told him the consequences would
be catastrophic," Peres was quoted as saying.

When asked by the publication if they have his permission to report on
the claim, Peres replied: "When I’m dead."

After suffering a stroke, Peres died on September 28, 2016, near Tel
Aviv, allowing his years-long claim to be made public.

While details of the possible strike were not shared by the former
president, the attack could potentially have followed the blueprint of
Operation Opera, which was a surprise Israeli air strike on June 7 1981,
that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction 17 kilometers
southeast of Baghdad.

(4) UK Telegraph: Peres claims from beyond the grave that he stopped
Netanyahu from attacking Iran

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/30/shimon-peres-claims-from-beyond-the-grave-that-he-stopped-netany/

Shimon Peres claims from beyond the grave that he stopped Netanyahu from
attacking Iran

30 September 2016 o 4:43pm

Shimon Peres claimed in a secret interview two years before his death
that he intervened to stop Benjamin Netanyahu from launching airstrikes
against Iran which could have triggered a wider Middle East war.

Mr Peres, who died this week and was buried Friday at a funeral attended
by dozens of world leaders, told the Jerusalem Post shortly after
leaving the presidency in 2014 that he had worked to thwart Mr
Netanyahu’s plans to target Iranian nuclear facilities.

"I stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran," he said, when asked what he
considered his greatest achievement as president.

"I don’t want to go into details, but I can tell you that he was ready
to launch an attack and I stopped him. I told him the consequences would
be catastrophic."

When the newspaper asked if it could make his comments public, the
nonagenarian smiled and replied: "When I’m dead."

The claim from beyond the grave was published hours before Mr Netanyahu
offered a fulsome tribute at Mr Peres’s funeral, praising a man who he
once defeated in a 1996 election and rowed with when Mr Peres was president.

"It is no secret that Shimon and I were political rivals, but over time
we became friends, close friends," Mr Netanyahu said. Addressing the
dead statesman directly, the prime minister said: "I loved you. We all
love you. Be at peace, Shimon, dear friend, great leader."

It is widely known that Mr Netanyahu favored striking Iran during
President Barack Obama’s first term in office but his reasons for not
going ahead with the attack are murkier.

Various former officials have claimed that the head of the Mossad,
Israel’s spy agency, and the head of the armed forces both refused to
prepare plans for an attack, believing it would end in disaster.

Other sources have said that Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet colleagues balked at
the idea and refused to support him or that pressure from the White
House forced him to change course. peres Barack Obama stands by Shimon
Peres's coffin Credit: ABIR SULTAN

But Ehud Barak, who was then defence minister, has hinted that Mr Peres
played a part in scuppering the plans. "There was resistance to taking
action in Iran within our defence establishment, within the government –
in the President’s Residence," he told an interviewer in 2015.

Mr Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the
claim.

President Barack Obama used his eulogy speech to challenge Israel to
continue Mr Peres’s work towards "the unfinished business of peace".

"This work is in the hands of Israel’s next generation - in the hands of
Israel’s next generation and its friends. Like Joshua, we feel the
weight of responsibility that Shimon seemed to wear so lightly. But we
draw strength from his example," Mr Obama said.

Attendees at the funeral including Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
president, who came under fire from many of his own people for going but
said he wanted to honour Mr Peres’s "brave" work on peace talks.

Prince Charles sat with Mr Peres’s family wearing a yarmulke, the
traditional Jewish skullcap, emblazoned with the three white feathers of
the heraldic badge of Wales. David Cameron and Bill Clinton among guests
at funeral of Shimon Peres Play! 00:45

Successive British governments have barred the royals from traveling to
Israel or the occupied West Bank because of the fraught politics, making
exceptions only for funerals and visits to family graves.

Prince Charles last stepped foot in Jerusalem in 1995 for the funeral of
the assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and high-profile British
Jews have called for the royals to begin making regular trips to Israel.

"The firmly held views of British Jews is that, having welcomed the
visit of Prince Charles to Israel for two funerals, we now greatly wish
that he would come for a happy occasion and a proper royal visit," said
Jonathan Arkush, the President of the Board of Deputies.

Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, attended the funeral along with
David Cameron and Tony Blair, who sat behind the row of current world
leaders. All wore black yarmulkes of mourning.

(5) Pakistan: Deceased Israeli statesman Shimon Peres stopped attack on Iran

http://tribune.com.pk/story/1191742/deceased-israeli-statesman-shimon-peres-stopped-attack-iran/

Deceased Israeli statesman Shimon Peres stopped attack on Iran

Published: October 1, 2016

Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president and prime minister who died
on Wednesday at 93, "stopped" Benjamin Netanyahu from launching an
attack on Iran.

"I stopped Netanyahu from attacking Iran," Peres was reported as telling
Steve Linde, then-editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, during an
August 24, 2014 conversation. Peres stipulated in his interview that the
exchange between the two not be reported until after his death.

Former Israeli president Shimon Peres dies at 93

In 2011, Netanyahu and his defence minister Ehud Barak were actively
building their case to attack Iran, saying the Islamic Republic was
developing a nuclear bomb. "By next spring, at most by next summer at
current enrichment rates, [Iran] will have finished the medium
enrichment and move on to the final stage," Netanyahu told the UN
General Assembly in 2012. "From there, it’s only a few months, possibly
a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb."

World leaders gather for funeral of Israeli ex-PM, Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres, Israeli Defence Force and members of Israel’s defence
establishment opposed Netanyahu’s plans to strike Iran first. A secret
cable written by Israel’s intelligence leaked that year further conveyed
the dissent brewing within Netanyahu’s own establishment. Iran was "not
performing the activity necessary to produce weapons," the cable read.

The Obama administration intervened shortly after a senior official of
Israel’s defence establishment visited Washington and disclosed
Netanyahu’s plans to attack Iran. President Obama — who was in the
initial phases of negotiating his landmark nuclear deal with Iran at the
time — sent the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff of the
time to Israel to pressure officials not to follow through with an attack.

Abbas, Netanyahu shake hands at Peres funeral

The move left Netanyahu infuriated and contributed to the tense
relationship the the two leaders continue to share to date. Netanyahu
was ultimately overruled. And if what Peres said is true, he apparently
did more to deter an attack on Iran than either Israel’s defence
establishment or the US.

This article originally appeared on The Jerusalem Post.