ISRAEL can deal with the Iranian threat on its own if the international community fails to do so, tough-talking Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman claimed yesterday. Mr Lieberman warned that if Iran were permitted to acquire non-conventional weapons, "the entire Middle East will enter into a mad race to achieve similar capabilities".
Appearing before the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee, Mr Lieberman said: "Israel has the capability to deal with the Iranian threat even in the worst-case scenario in which our friends throughout the world stop dealing with the threat and we are left on our own." It was his first appearance before the committee since taking the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party into the governing coalition in November.
Mr Lieberman said Iran was more vulnerable than the image it attempted to project. "Sixty per cent of the population lives in shocking poverty, there are a million and a half students with no prospect of jobs, 900,000 women working in prostitution and three million drug addicts," he said. It would be easier for the international community to pressure Iran on the nuclear question, he said, than it was with North Korea since Tehran's economy was in the hands of a small number of businessmen - "50 to 60 families" - who were vulnerable to travel restrictions and limitations on bank transactions. "Sanctions should be directed mainly against them," he said.
The 49-year-old minister, who has just returned from an official visit to his native Russia, said Moscow's attitude towards Iran was changing. "Russia and Israel are on the same side of the barricades," he said. He noted that Moscow recently held up shipments of nuclear fuel to the nuclear power plant it was building at Bushehr in Iran. |