Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refrained from publicly expressing his opposition to the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States. But if you look beyond politics and look at the Israelis’ position and the military’s actions in Lebanon, the situation is clear. Israel is angry, Israel is concerned.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has always been cautious about U.S. President Donald Trump, aware that his occasional criticism of Israeli policy allows Israel to pursue many of its military and political goals even as the rest of the world isolates it. The war with Iran was a case in point. After years of US refusal, Netanyahu finally persuaded the US president to launch a joint attack on Iran.
Recommended stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
But that war took a turn for the worse for the United States, and President Trump’s decision to accept the deal without overt cooperation from Israel upended many of the premises of what many in Israel considered a “special relationship” with the United States and revealed the dynamic between the two countries’ allies.
Under the terms of the U.S.-Iran deal, along with developing a $300 billion plan to rebuild Iran, the U.S. has committed itself and “its allies” to “an immediate and permanent cessation of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon.”
Israel responded immediately to the deal by attacking Lebanon, killing at least 47 people on Friday, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Four Israeli soldiers were also killed overnight by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, prompting Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir to say, “All of Lebanon must be burned down.”
Nevertheless, by Friday evening a ceasefire had reportedly been agreed between Israel and Hezbollah, but this was likely after pressure from the US, putting the US-Iran deal at risk of collapsing.
rocks and difficult places
It is unclear how far Netanyahu will go in defiance of the United States, whose diplomatic and financial support is vital to Israel, and how far he will go in appeasing the Israeli public and political forces that are widely understood to reject the deal.
Only a minority of Israelis believe their country has won the war with Iran, according to a television poll released Thursday. Iran is an opponent we have been told for generations is determined to destroy.
“The depth of the disappointment with the US-Iran memorandum is very real and deep,” said Daria Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster and political analyst. “Israelis are well aware that none of the goals that Prime Minister Netanyahu so clearly and confidently promised have been achieved. They believe that the war ended prematurely and that something went wrong in the grand scheme of things. They don’t like to criticize Trump, but they see him making decisions based on American interests, and many blame Netanyahu for the miscalculations that created dependence on Trump.”
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance intervened in the fray Thursday, directly addressing Israel and its ministers’ critics of the deal.
“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the state of Israel at this time,” Vance said, referring to the international condemnation that followed Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip and multiple attacks on neighboring countries.
Vance continued, apparently turning to Ben Gvir and his fellow far-right figure, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “If I had been in the cabinet of the Israeli government, we might not have attacked our only remaining strong ally in the entire world,” Vance said.
“I can’t think of a time when a vice president or president of the United States has so publicly criticized Israel and used such language,” Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg said, referring to President Trump’s direct criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s attack on Lebanon during Wednesday’s G7 meeting.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu understands that he cannot afford to create a real rift with the United States, but at least one is necessary to sustain his position,” he added. “It is difficult for Prime Minister Netanyahu to see any other way out than to buy time before the election and leave it until after the vote. Even if he were to suspend action against Hezbollah tomorrow, can he trust that they will not attack northern Israel, knowing how vulnerable he is?”
So it’s unclear to what extent Smotrich and Ben Gvir have broken with the prime minister over their criticism of the US-Iran deal, and to what extent they reflect his policies, said Ofer Kashif, an Israeli lawmaker from the left-wing Hadash party.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made political capital out of the Iranian threat since the 1990s, when he first claimed his country was on the brink of building nuclear weapons. Hezbollah’s firing of rockets into northern Israel in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, did much to distract from its own failures before the invasion of Iran.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu and his thugs, all the people that the so-called government is interested in, are sabotaging, sabotaging and destroying the deal, by selling the security and defense narrative, making it look as if there is no deal. That’s the real problem here,” Kashif said. “Destruction is the goal.”
