Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama

“Bibi” Netanyahu was disgusted.

“My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation.”

The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday’s meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran.

Subject: Iran’s nuclear program. After a “constructive” meeting of one day, all agreed to meet again in Baghdad, May 23, and departed.

For Bibi, it was a strategic defeat.

For Israel’s goal is a halt to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and the removal of enriched uranium from that country.

But Catherine Ashton, the foreign minister for the European Union who is leading the P5-plus-1, stated that the West accepts Iran’s position that, as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, she has a right to a peaceful nuclear program and nuclear power.

“Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear power” must be fully respected, Ashton said. No one dissented.

If the United States assents to Iran’s enrichment of uranium, and Iran gives assurances that the Ayatollah’s fatwa against the acquisition of nuclear weapons is being observed, a Washington-Tehran deal may be in the offing.

What would be the elements?

An end to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 20 percent, once Iran has a sufficient stock for its program of nuclear medicine.

Transfer of any excess 20 percent uranium outside the country to prevent further enrichment to weapons grade.

Regular intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities to ensure there is no diversion of uranium to bomb-making.

What would Iran demand?

Step-by-step lifting of sanctions, as it demonstrates it is telling the truth about not seeking nuclear weapons.

Such a deal would end the U.S.-Iran confrontation, yet allow Iran to continue to gain the knowledge, experience, and technical capacity to break out, should it ever decide to take the risk and build the weapons.

Netanyahu believes Israel’s security and survival mandate the nuclear castration of Iran. Sunday, in a detailed report cleared by military censors, Israeli TV showed how an attack would be mounted.

Yet reporter Alon Ben David conceded that the Israeli Air Force “does not have the capacity to destroy the entire Iranian program.”

Unlike the Iraqi nuclear reactor and the Syrian reactor Israel bombed in 1981 and 2007, Iran has many more nuclear facilities, spread over a far larger country, farther away and better defended.

And given the public threats by Israel and test runs by the IAF as far as Gibraltar, no attack on Iran will come as a total surprise. There would be losses of planes and pilots.