Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, will not be attending next week's nuclear summit in Washington. According to Israeli officials, he pulled out of the meeting after "learning that Egypt and Turkey may have been planning to use his appearance at the conference to call on Israel to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and to open its nuclear facilities to international inspection".
Upon closer examination, though, this justification seems very hollow and is probably not the real reason why Israel cancelled. First and foremost, nobody was going to force Israel to sign the NPT. All that was going to happen was that two countries, with whom Israel has full diplomatic relations, were going to address this issue.
In any case, it would have been a minor part of the summit and the other countries still outside the treaty – India, Pakistan and North Korea – would almost certainly have been mentioned too.
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