Zionists want US to attack Iran, not to reach nuclear deal: Writer

Zionists want the United States to stop negotiating with Iran over its nuclear energy program and launch a deadly war against Iran, an American political activist and writer says.

Ralph Schoenman, former personal secretary of British philosopher Bertrand Russell, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on Israel’s request to the US to extend the June 30 deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, a former intelligence minister and a high-ranking Likud Party member, is in Washington for meetings with top Obama administration officials regarding the Iran nuclear talks.  

He is urging the Obama administration to soften the deadline, arguing it is inadvertently giving Tehran leverage in the negotiations.

“The demand by a senior Israeli official that the United States extend the deadline for the Iran nuclear talks is a ploy,” Schoenman said.

“And it’s quite clear what the intension is. It’s to delay, and to stall and to continue to prevent an agreement being reached in the expectation that the forthcoming elections may bring a Republican to office and allow for the Congress to reject the agreement and with the expectation that the newly elected president will not veto that rejection,” he added.

“So what we are looking here is another of the attempts on the part of the Zionist state to prevent any kind of agreement from being reached that would stand in the way of a confrontation, and in fact what the Zionists really want is an attack on Iran,” he stated.

“And that’s basically what we are witnessing here, and they are not even opaque about their design,” the political activist continued.

“They’re exclusively speculating that they can use [Sheldon] Adelson and many [others like him] to spend huge sums of money to attempt to elect the Congress and a president that will go along with the rejection, and will prevent any kind of understanding from being reached, intensify the sanctions, and to take further steps to provoke a war. That’s the intent,” he pointed out.

The United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany are engaged in intense negotiations with Iran to work out a final deal aimed at ending the longstanding Western dispute over the Islamic Republic’s civilian nuclear work.

The United States, Israel, and some of their allies accuse Iran of pursuing military objectives in its nuclear energy program. Iran strongly rejects the allegation.

Israel, which has rejected global calls to join the NPT and does not allow international inspectors to observe its nuclear program, is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East with more than 200 undeclared nuclear warheads.

“Israel possesses the region’s only nuclear weapons stockpiles and doesn’t intend that to change,” Schoenman said.

“That’s the central issue here that the Zionist state has a vast and expanded nuclear capacity, missile system, constantly deploying it and has the intention and vengeance and often stated explicitly that they have a mind to use it,” he added.

“The defense [sic] minister of Israel himself said that he looks back to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the understanding that it was a MORAL DECISION, because the alternative to doing that to incinerating the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been millions of deaths to a protracted war,” he noted.

“That statement by the minister of defense [sic] of Israel made only last week underlines what is the issue here,” said the author of the Hidden History of Zionism.

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