Gary Younge in the Guardian.

That Israel would try to do so on the backs of black South Africans is a laughable indication of its desperation. For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid's crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa's principle and most dependable arms dealer. As we learn elsewhere in the Guardian today, it even offered to sell the South African regime nuclear weapons.

Juan Cole writes.

Obama mysteriously has ceased leading on the Iran issue and is instead showing himself willing to be led. Thus have the pragmatic hawks (with the war hawks waiting in the wings) defeated the Realists and the liberal internationalists. Obama stabbed Turkey and Brazil in the back after asking them to risk their face for him. Obama is giving Iran the impression that he is indecisive. All of this backtracking for the sake of a sanctions regime that is highly unlikely actually to change Iran's behavior, contrary to the express hopes of Secretary Gates. Obama's current Iran policy cannot be explained in the terms of US-Iranian relations. It must be driven by something else. The Israel lobbies and dealings with the Netanyahu government are the likeliest candidates in explaining the abandonment of a Realist approach.

Guardian report.

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

Roger Cohen writeing in the New York Times.

Obama could instead have said: "Pressure works! Iran blinked on the eve of new U.N. sanctions. It's come back to our offer. We need to be prudent, given past Iranian duplicity, but this is progress. Isolation serves Iranian hard-liners."

No wonder Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, is angry. I believe him when he says Obama and U.S. officials encouraged Turkey earlier this year to revive the deal: "What they wanted us to do was give the confidence to Iran to do the swap. We have done our duty."

The Leveretts comment.

Now that Tehran has accepted the main elements of the Baradei proposal--the transfer of 1,200 kilos of low-enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for new fuel for the TRR--the United States has unilaterally changed the game.

Gary Sick comments.

According to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he had been in "constant contact" with Clinton herself and with national security adviser James Jones, while his prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had face-to-face encouragement from President Obama in December and April.

[...]

The Turks and Brazilians, who felt they had "delivered" Iran on the terms demanded by the United States, were surprised and disappointed at the negative reactions from Washington. Little did they know that their success in Tehran, which had been given a 0-30 percent chance just days earlier, came just as the Americans were putting the final touches on a package of sanctions to be presented to the UN Security Council. The Tehran agreement was as welcome as a pothole in the fast lane, and the Americans were not reluctant to let their displeasure be known.

BBC report.

Plans for a fourth set of UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme are being circulated among all 15 members of the Security Council.

[...]

Brazil's UN envoy said his country was not "engaging in any discussion on a draft at this point because we feel that there is a new situation".

[...]

Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the world to support Monday's deal with Iran.

Craig Murray writes.

The failure to welcome this step by US and UK governments indicates that their actual agenda does not relate to Iran's nuclear programme at all. And I still wait for a British minister to say something about Israel's very real and very large stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Gary Sick writes.

Although angst is high among the sanctions-at-all-costs crowd, this path to a nuclear swap deal was fully endorsed by the United States and was the centerpiece of the justification for sanctions. One way to respond at this point may just be to declare that our threat of sanctions worked: Iran has capitulated and we accept yes as an answer.

Hmmm... are we that smart?

David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy on the new nuclear agreement.

[...] the effort is significant on another level. It represents the return of Plan B both to Middle Eastern and global relations. During the Cold War, international actors typically had a binary choice. They could seek the favor and advocacy of the East or the West, the Soviets or the Americans. Then, almost twenty years ago that all ended. And for a while it appeared, the choice was America or an international community that couldn't get its act together terribly effectively.

But Turkey and Brazil working closely with Russia, India, and China, have effectively sent a message that Plan B has returned to the global equation. They have essentially said they didn't want to go along with the American approach to solving the problem (sanctions) and were vehemently against the Israeli approach (bombs away).

Telegraph report.

Britain, America and France said they would continue to press for new sanctions until Iran addressed wider concerns about its intentions.

The White House said the United States and its allies continued to have "serious concerns", while stopping short of categorically rejecting the agreement.

Craig Murray writes.

[...] no amount of googling brings up any British mainstream media mention of the fact that whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has just been jailed again in Israel. This is for breaching the terms of a military edict - not a court order - restricting his movements and contacts.

IMEMC report.

Israeli sources reported that Nuclear whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu, was sentenced, Tuesday, to three months imprisonment after he refused to perform community service in West Jerusalem, fearing harassment from fundamentalist Jews.

AFP report.

Uzi Even, a Tel Aviv University chemistry professor and former worker at Israel's Dimona reactor, said US President Barack Obama's campaign for global nuclear arms reduction is a sign of changing times and Israel must get in step.

"We could open Dimona to international inspection," the former member of parliament with the left-wing Meretz party told Israeli army radio on Monday.

From Mondoweiss. The original graphic is here.

The infographic accompanying yesterday's New York Times article on the U.S.'s attempt to head off a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race is -- as one might have expected -- missing a little bit of ink. Guess where?

Ynetnews report.

The Iranian struggle against sanctions steps up a notch: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to arrive in New York Monday in order to participate in the convention of 189 countries signed on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).