After a five-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the United States and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formerly known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook is not good.

Less than a week after the start of negotiations, Britain, France and Germany accused Iran of “going back on almost all of the difficult compromises” made in the first round of negotiations before the new one. Iranian President, Ebrahim Raisi, does not take an oath. While such actions by Iran certainly do not help the negotiations succeed, there is another country – a country that is not even a party to the deal that was torn apart in 2018 by the president of the Donald Trump era – whose hard stance creates obstacles to successful negotiations: Israel.

On Sunday, when the talks could fail, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on countries meeting in Vienna to “take a firm line” against Iran. According to Channel 12 News in Israel, Israeli officials are urging the United States to take military action against Iran, either by hitting Iran directly or by hitting an Iranian base in Yemen. Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, Israel says it reserves the right to take military action against Iran.

Israeli threats are not just bluster. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, caused significant damage to the Iranian nuclear site of Natanz. In November 2020, shortly after Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, Israeli agents used remote machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. If Iran had responded proportionately, the United States could have supported Israel, with the conflict turning into a full-blown war between the United States and the Middle East.

In April 2021, with diplomatic efforts underway between the Biden administration and Iran, sabotage attributed to Israel caused a blackout in Natanz. Iran called the action “nuclear terrorism”.

Ironically described as the Iranian Build Back Better plan, after each of Israel’s nuclear facility sabotage actions, the Iranians quickly brought their facilities back online and even installed new machines to enrich uranium faster. As a result, US officials recently warned their Israeli counterparts that attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities were counterproductive. But Israel replied that it had no intention of letting go.

As time is running out to shut down the JCPOA, Israel sends its senior officials to plead its case. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid was in London and Paris last week asking them not to support US intentions to return to the deal. This week, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Israeli Mossad Chief David Barnea are in Washington for meetings with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA officials. According to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Barnea provided “up-to-date information on Tehran’s efforts” to become a nuclear country.

Along with verbal appeals, Israel is preparing militarily. They have allocated $ 1.5 billion for a possible strike against Iran. In October and November, they held large-scale military exercises in preparation for strikes against Iran, and this spring they plan to hold one of their largest simulated strike exercises ever, using dozens of planes, including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter.

The United States is also bracing for the possibility of violence. A week before negotiations resumed in Vienna, the United States’ Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, General Kenneth McKenzie, announced that his forces were ready to participate in possible military actions should the negotiations fail. . It was reported on Wednesday that Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s meeting with Lloyd Austin will include discussion of possible joint US-Israeli military exercises simulating the destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities.

The stakes are high for the talks to be successful. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed this month that Iran is now enriching uranium up to 20% purity at its underground facility in Fordo, a site where the JCPOA bans the enrichment. According to the IAEA, since Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, Iran has increased its uranium enrichment to 60% purity (from 3.67% under the deal), gradually approaching of the 90% needed for a nuclear weapon. In September, the Institute for Science and International Security released a report stating that as part of the “worst-case estimate”, in one month Iran could produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. .

The United States’ exit from the JCPOA has not only led to the nightmarish prospect of another Middle Eastern country becoming a nuclear state (Israel is said to have between eighty and four hundred nuclear weapons), but it has already inflicted massive amounts of nuclear weapons. enormous damage to the Iranian people. The “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign – originally Trump’s but now owned by Joe Biden – has plagued the Iranians with soaring inflation; soaring prices for food, rents and medicine; and a crippled health care sector.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, US sanctions prevented Iran from importing drugs needed to treat diseases such as leukemia and epilepsy. In January 2021, the United Nations released a report indicating that US sanctions against Iran were contributing to an “inadequate and opaque” response to COVID-19. With over 130,000 officially recorded deaths to date, Iran has the highest number of coronavirus deaths on record in the Middle East. Officials say the real numbers are likely even higher.

If the United States and Iran fail to come to an agreement, the worst-case scenario will be another war between the United States and the Middle East. Thinking of the abject failures and destruction caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a war with Iran would be catastrophic. You would think that Israel, which receives $ 3.8 billion a year from the United States, would feel obligated not to drag the United States and its own people into such a disaster. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Despite being on the verge of collapse, talks resumed this week. Iran, now under an intransigent government that US sanctions have helped bring to power, has shown it will not be a willing negotiator, and Israel is determined to sabotage the talks. That means it will take bold diplomacy and a willingness to compromise on the part of the Biden administration for the deal to be resealed. Hopefully Biden and his negotiators will have the will and the courage to do so.