President Obama, right, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House on Oct. 1, 2014, in Washington.(Photo: Win McNamee, Getty Images)
A report that Israel spied on the Iran nuclear talks and shared the information with Congress is more evidence of a deteriorating relationship between Israel and the United States.
"What's new is what's political," Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator for Democratic and Republican administrations, said Tuesday. "This is an effort to show Congress, particularly the Democrats, that (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu has done wrong."
Israel denied that it spied on its most important ally. "There is no way," Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said about the prospect of spying on the U.S., according to The Jerusalem Post. He also said Israel received no complaints of such spying from the U.S., which the former military chief and head of military intelligence said would be expected in such a case.
The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday that Israel has been spying on the international talks to reach a nuclear accord with Iran. Israel, which considers Iran's nuclear program an existential threat, then shared the inside information with members of Congress to undermine the Obama administration's effort to secure a deal, the article said. The story was based on interviews with unnamed current and former Obama administration officials and corroborated by unnamed European and Israeli sources.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, said Tuesday, "We will continue our close military intelligence and security cooperation with Israel and that hasn't changed."
She said the U.S. briefs members of Congress on the Iran talks, adding that it's "an absurd notion that Congress would have to rely on any foreign government to gain insight on the administration's nuclear negotiations with Iran."
"We have spoken in the past of our concern about leaks of sensitive information, and our concern that sensitive information remain private," Psaki added.
Miller, who represented the United States in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the 1990s, said U.S. negotiators then knew their Jerusalem hotel rooms were bugged and that it's no surprise Israel would use electronic surveillance and human intelligence now to keep tabs on the Iran talks.
"We do this all the time," said Miller, who is now vice president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank. "I would be stunned if the Israelis weren't monitoring the hotels and the Europeans. And you may have sympathetic Europeans, like the French, willing to give the Israelis some information."
The report comes as Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party won last week's parliamentary election in Israel, assuring the prime minister a fourth term. Netanyahu and President Obama have had fractious relations over the Iran talks and about Netanyahu's March 3 speech before Congress without first consulting the White House.
He was invited to address Congress by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Boehner said Tuesday that the spy story was a surprise to him.
"I was shocked by the fact that there were reports in this press article that information was being passed on from the Israelis to members of Congress," Boehner said.
On Monday, Obama's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, told a liberal Jewish lobbying group, J Street, that the administration can't ignore how Netanyahu has tried to backtrack on his pre-election comments opposing the creation of a Palestinian state. saying it's time for Israel's "occupation" to end.
Miller said the latest accusations of spying points to Israeli concerns that the U.S. cares so much about brokering a nuclear deal that it's allowing Iranian influence in the region to increase. For example, Iran is supporting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in his civil war, Shiite militias in Iraq in its fight against the Islamic State and rebels in Yemen.
The Obama administration "created, willfully or not, an Iran-centric policy," Miller said.
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