Israel will handle the Iranian threat the same way it dealt with similar threats
from Iraq and Syria, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said on
Wednesday.
Liberman was referencing the 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq’s
Osirak nuclear reactor and the 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear core at Deir
al-Zor. Israel has never officially acknowledged bombing the Syrian core
although it has been widely reported to have been behind the
attack.
Israel “knows how to act” to prevent Iran from obtaining a
nuclear bomb, he said.
The public should leave the decision on how and
when to act to decision-makers, the foreign minister said. “If you want to
shoot, shoot. Don’t talk,” he added.
Liberman was speaking to students at
the Ariel University Center, where he also asserted that the best defense
against Gazan rocket attacks against southern Israel was IDF attacks on the
Strip.
He slammed the international community, saying it could not be
trusted to help Israel if major violence broke out.
“Anyone who trusts
the international community should look at its failure to stop 22 months of
Syrian violence, with 40,000 dead,” he said.
Referring to the Palestinian
bid for UN recognition as a non-member state, Liberman said it was “not a
diplomatic alternative to [peace] talks,” and that it crossed a red
line.
He did not respond to reports of a Foreign Ministry position paper
that considers ousting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as one
possible response to the UN statehood bid, but he did take the opportunity to
criticize Abbas.
During the talk with Ariel students, the foreign
minister accused Abbas of trying to save himself politically with the bid, not
his people.
Abbas had failed as a leader and had lost control of the
Palestinian street, as the Palestinians were split between “Hamastan” in Gaza
and “Fatahland” in the West Bank, Liberman said.