Tel Aviv, April 09: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dropped plans to attend an international nuclear summit in Washington next week and will instead be represented by Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor, Israeli government officials said early Friday.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not comment further but Israeli media said Netanyahu was concerned that states attending the conference planned to press for Israel to open its own nuclear facilities to international inspection.
Foreign military experts believe Israel has an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons, but Israel has long refused to confirm or deny reports of its nuclear arsenal.
Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has said it will not sign up for a Middle East nuclear-free zone being promoted by the United States.
On Wednesday Netanyahu told a press conference at his office that he intended to attend the Washington conference, convened by US President Barack Obama, and to press there for stringent sanctions against Iran.
In his comments on Wednesday Netanyahu appeared unworried that his presence at the summit could turn the nuclear spotlight onto Israel.
“I’m not concerned that anyone will think that Israel is a terrorist regime,” he said. “Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me they see quite a few around Israel.”
Israel has never publicly acknowledged it has nuclear weapons and has maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity since it inaugurated its Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert in 1965.
Israeli governments have insisted Tel Aviv will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.
But in a slight departure from the usual wording, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, said in an interview with CNN last year that “to introduce” meant “to deploy.”
In December 2006 the then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sparked an uproar in Israel after an apparent slip of the tongue in which he for the first time listed Israel as a nuclear-armed power.
In 1969, Israeli leaders undertook not to make any statement on their country’s nuclear potential or carry out any nuclear test, while Washington agreed to refrain from exerting pressure on the issue.
Avner Cohen, author of the revelatory Israel and the Bomb, which has drawn upon thousands of documents and tens of interviews on the Israeli nuclear firepower, had said a recent US-Israeli accord amounted to “the United States passively accepting Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel does not unveil publicly its capability or test a weapon.”
The Israeli programme is under military censorship.
Israel’s nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was jailed in 1986 for disclosing the inner workings of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant to Britain’s The Sunday Times newspaper.
Since his release in 2004, he has been detained several times for violating the terms of his parole which ban him from travel or contact with foreigners.
The invitation to attend the 47-nation summit on nuclear security hosted by Obama posed a dilemma for Netanyahu.
“From the start, everyone said attending the conference would put him in a trap, but Netanyahu insisted,” the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper said on Friday.
But in the end this insistence was overshadowed by fears that the conference would focus on Israel’s nuclear programme.
However, some believe that Netanyahu backed out of the trip not over nuclear concerns but because of Israel’s recent rift with Washington.
“It is more connected to Israel’s relations with the US. It was a mistake to go to Washington last time and they learned the lesson,” said Efraim Inbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies.
Netanyahu returned from talks with Obama last month to a wave of derision in the Israeli press, with a showdown over Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem unresolved amid some of the most open hostility in US-Israeli relations in years.
Netanyahu has not yet come up with a response to US demands aimed at paving the way for fresh peace talks with the Palestinians.
Even before Netanyahu’s announcement, the White House had said Obama had no plans to hold talks with the Israeli leader during the nuclear meeting in light of their recent tete-a-tete behind closed doors.
“Because Israel has not answered Obama’s demands, why expose him to more pressure and have Obama treat him badly again?” said Inbar.
—Agencies