Currently Online 
Israeli arms firms banned at Paris Air Show
Organisers at the Paris Air Show have blocked access to the stands of several Israeli arms manufacturers for exhibiting “offensive weapons”.
Large black walls were erected around the stands of five Israeli companies, including Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael and Elbit Systems.
Reporting from the event, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said the organisers took the decision after determining the weapons on display did not comply with the show’s rules. “Some of these companies do supply weapons to the Israeli military that are used in Gaza, things like very high-end drone systems,” she added.
According to Butler, one of Rafael’s executives was left “quite shocked” by his stand being “completely blacked out”. “He said they were given no notice at all. He was obviously outraged,” she added.
The Defence Ministry denounced the decision in a statement, calling it a form of “segregation” against the Israeli companies. “This outrageous and unprecedented decision reeks of policy-driven and commercial considerations,” it added.
Iran ‘never willing’ to accept ‘maximalist’ US nuclear proposal
Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, says the proposal put forward by the US during the nuclear negotiations with Iran was always going to be rejected by the Iranian side.
“The problem is that Trump has allowed himself to be so influenced by the Israelis that the demands the United States put forward for Iran, the proposal that was put forward, was maximalist: No enrichment of uranium whatsoever on Iranian soil,” she told Al Jazeera.
“And if there’s anything we’ve learned from more than a decade of watching nuclear negotiations with the United States is that the country insists on retaining an indigenous uranium enrichment programme,” said Slavin, who is also a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington University.
“So this was a proposal the Iranians were never willing to accept.”
Slavin added that Trump has seemingly accepted “Netanyahu’s logic that somehow these military strikes would convince Iran to come back to the table and accept what they had not accepted before”.
“That hasn’t happened so far. We will see.”
For Iranian leaders, ‘if there is no cost to attacking Iran, Tehran would look like Gaza’
Foad Izadi, a professor of international relations at University of Tehran, says Iran has not used all its military capacity in its retaliatory attacks on Israel so far.
“The message is that they are hoping for the Israelis to stop and they are gradually going to increase the pressure, if the Israelis don’t stop,” he told Al Jazeera.
“They haven’t used some of their most advanced weapons, they haven’t used other means of confronting the Israelis,” Izadi said.
He added the hope is that under international pressure, Israel will stop its attacks.
“If that doesn’t happen, the missiles are going to get bigger in terms of size and more in terms of quantity – until you have the other side stopping,” Izadi said, noting that the calculation of the Iranian leadership is that “if there is no cost to attacking Iran, Tehran would look like Gaza”.
