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JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has withdrawn from President Barack Obama’s nuclear security summit in Washington next week, fearing Muslim powers would use it to demand Israel give up its presumed nuclear arsenal.
Netanyahu, who plans to send his deputy to the April 12-13 conference instead, decided to cancel “after learning that some countries including Egypt and Turkey plan to say Israel must sign the NPT”, an Israeli official said on Friday.
By staying outside the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel has avoided having to pledge not to seek nuclear weaponry and to admit international inspectors to its Dimona reactor, widely assumed to have fueled the region’s sole atomic arsenal.
Netanyahu’s attendance at the 47-country summit would have been unprecedented. Israeli premiers long shunned such forums, hoping to dampen scrutiny on their secret nuclear policies.
Aides said Netanyahu originally agreed to go after being reassured by the United States that the summit communique would focus on efforts to secure fissile materials and be devoid of language challenging Israel’s self-styled nuclear “ambiguity”.
Coordination between the allies has been clouded, however, by rifts over stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Obama, having held tense White House talks last month with Netanyahu, scheduled no work meetings with him on the summit’s sidelines.
A senior Egyptian diplomat said he had no knowledge of a plan to shift attention onto Israel at the summit and accused Netanyahu of trying to evade questions on the Palestinian issue.
“We believe that Netanyahu withdrew from the summit because he did not want to face President Obama and is using Egypt and Turkey as an excuse,” the diplomat said.
But the Foreign Ministry in Ankara said Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who has stepped up criticism of Israel since last year’s Gaza war, would demand while in Washington that it disarm as part of a nuclear-free Middle East.
NPT RSVP
“Israel is the principle threat to peace in the region today,” the French newspaper Le Monde quoted Erdogan as saying in Paris this week.
“Israel has nuclear weapons but doesn’t belong to the NPT. Does that mean that those who don’t sign the NPT are in a privileged position?”
Yet Egyptian and Turkish diplomats played down the prospect of the NPT coming up at the summit, saying the appropriate place would be next month’s U.N. review conference on the treaty.
A White House spokesman welcomed Netanyahu’s stand-in, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, to the summit, adding: “Israel is a close ally and we look forward to continuing to work closely on issues related to nuclear security.”
Aides said Netanyahu had planned to drum up support at the summit for sanctions against arch-foe Iran, which the West suspects of seeking nuclear weapons despite denials from Tehran. Neither Iran nor North Korea will be attending.
“This conference is about nuclear terrorism,” Netanyahu told reporters on Wednesday. “And I’m not concerned that anyone will think that Israel is a terrorist regime. Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me they see quite a few — around Israel.”
Israel says its nuclear secrecy helps ward off enemies while avoiding the kind of provocations that can trigger arms races.
The official reticence, and its tacit acceptance by the United States, has long aggrieved Arab and Muslim powers.
India and Pakistan — both scheduled to attend the nuclear security summit — are outside the NPT, like Israel. Unlike them, Israel has not openly tested or deployed atomic weapons.
(Additional reporting by Joseph Nasr in Jerusalem, Tulay Karadeniz in Konya, Turkey, Sherine El Madany in Cairo and Paul Taylor in Paris; editing by Janet Lawrence)
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