Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday, June 29, 2014.TEL AVIV, Israel – Seizing on the mayhem in Iraq, Israel’s prime minister on Sunday called for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as part of a broader alliance with moderate forces across the region, and asserted that Israel would have to maintain a long-term military presence in the West Bank to keep a jihadi juggernaut from powering its way to the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his positions in a policy speech that marked one of the most detailed responses by a world leader to the lightning territorial gains made in recent weeks by Sunni extremists fighting in Iraq, and it underscored how profoundly events can ripple across an increasingly interlocked Middle East.
Netanyahu suggested that the territorial gains made this month by the Al Qaida-inspired jihadi group called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant could endanger neighboring Jordan, with which Israel has a peace agreement it considers vital to its security. The group has recently captured wide swaths of Iraq including the important cities of Mosul and Tikrit and several border crossings with Syria, and on Sunday formally declared a caliphate, or an Islam-ruled state, on territory it controls in both countries.
The offensive by the Islamic State’s militants “can be aimed toward Jordan in the shortest time,” Netanyahu warned. Without stating outright that the Western-leaning Jordanian monarchy could fall, Netanyahu suggested as much by saying that the new developments meant a need for Israel to hold on to the West Bank border with the Hashemite kingdom, along the Jordan River.
“We must be able to stop the terrorism and fundamentalism that can reach us from the east at the Jordan line, and not in the suburbs of Tel Aviv,” he said, implying that from Jordan radicals could sweep through the West Bank, whose borders reach within 20 miles (30 kilometers) of Tel Aviv. The metropolis of some 2 million is the business and cultural center of the Jewish state, and the engine of its increasing prosperity.