Kerry still pushes story Israel doesn't want new Sanctions on Iran.

Kerry still pushes story Israel doesn't want new Sanctions on Iran.

With respect to the prime minister and his visit here, look, we welcome the prime minister of Israel to come and speak in America anytime. And obviously, it’s a little unusual to learn of an invitation from the speaker’s office. That said, everybody knows that the subject of Iran is much on people’s minds. We have no difference in our goal with respect to our position. We may have – we do have some difference in tactics of how you achieve that goal. But we are determined that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon, and the key to our negotiations is to make certain that whatever is agreed upon will show people with clarity that that is, in fact, the case that the path to a nuclear weapon is not achievable and/or has been given up or both together, and that it can be verified. And that is obviously critical.

So I’m not going to say more about the negotiations at this time. With respect to more sanctions, our friends in Europe have made it very clear. Look, we have partners in this. We’re trying to convince our fellow – my former colleagues in Congress that the United States acting unilaterally is not always the best step to take. And in this case, we have a number of other serious partners – China, Russia, France, Germany, Great Britain – and we are all at this table negotiating together in an effort facilitated by the EU in an effort to be able to come to some agreement.

Now, the sanctions don’t exist simply because of the United States. And if all of our partners were to say, “Well, we don’t think you’re going the right way, we’re going to go do our own thing,” this can all fall apart, including the sanctions regime. You could lose the sanctions altogether. So deciding to act unilaterally is not exactly a strategy for success. We’ve been successful because we’ve kept everybody together, and everybody together has helped enforce these sanctions over a long period of time. And it’s very important to allow the Executive Branch of government, which in our Constitution has the right to be able to do this negotiation, to do it, and then there’s plenty of time for people to make judgments about how they feel about it.

So I think in Israel, one of the top intelligence – one of the top intelligence personnel within the Israeli intelligence field – I won’t name names, but this person was asked directly by a congressional delegation that visited there over the weekend what the effect of sanctions would be. And this person answered that it would be like throwing a grenade into the process. So we’re asking people to be responsible here, and then let’s have a good, responsible debate about what the best way to proceed is. Source.