For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the war he had hoped would secure his legacy – Israel and the US together attacking Iran – may be ending in a way that could sully it.
The framework agreement to end the war, announced on June 14, omits some of the most important things Israel wanted.
The full text of the deal has not yet been released, and Israel was not directly involved in the negotiations.
But initial details suggest that it does nothing to curb Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, or its funding of regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, who have attacked Israel with their own arsenals.
It could help Iran bolster those proxies by easing sanctions, which would allow billions of dollars to flow into its bank accounts.
When it comes to constraining Iran’s nuclear programme – a matter of greatest importance to Israel and the greatest priority of Netanyahu’s career – the terms of the deal remain undisclosed or still to be negotiated during the agreed 60-day ceasefire.
Questions remain over what will become of Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and whether the country will be able to keep enriching nuclear fuel.
And while Israeli officials disputed this, Iranian officials said on June 14 that the framework included a halt to “military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, effective immediately”. That could constrain Israel’s battle against Hezbollah.
In a news conference on the night of June 15, Netanyahu said Israel would seek to “preserve its freedom of action” to act against threats, including in Lebanon.
He said Israel had done just that earlier in the day, killing four people he said had posed a threat to Israeli soldiers.
People inspect their homes following Israeli strikes on the historic old market in the town of Nabatieh, southern Lebanon, on June 15.
PHOTO: EPA
Asked whether the same principle would apply to Iran, he said he was committed to ensuring the country never posed a nuclear threat to Israel, but did not elaborate.
Netanyahu alluded only obliquely to any differences of opinion with US President Donald Trump over the agreement, saying that while he and the president “often see eye to eye”, there were also “cases where we see less eye to eye”.
Others in his government were more blunt.
“The agreement with Iran is bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period,” Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, wrote on social media earlier on June 15.
Worse still for Netanyahu, who faces re-election in a few months and is behind in the polls, Trump, the Israeli leader’s most valuable political asset, has publicly rebuked him multiple times in recent weeks.
While Trump has praised Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatic, he has called Netanyahu “crazy”, ungrateful and lacking in judgment.
“The strategic mistake that Netanyahu made was failing to understand that just as Trump is with you, he could also flip on you,” said Yaakov Katz, an analyst and co-founder of the Middle East-America Dialogue.
On June 14, Trump added “difficult” to that litany of insults hurled at Netanyahu.
That came after Israel’s military – precisely as the United States was trying to close its deal with Iran – struck what it described as a Hezbollah target on the outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, in retaliation for a Hezbollah attack that wounded two Israeli soldiers.
In effect, Netanyahu appeared to have fallen into a trap.
Had he refrained from hitting back at Hezbollah at that moment, his growing number of critics, including on the Israeli right, surely would have accused him of allowing a new “equation” to take hold.
Striking Beirut could have been seen as off-limits to Israel because of Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah and Trump’s determination to close a deal with Iran.
But going ahead with the strike was equally perilous for Netanyahu.
Two Israeli defence officials said senior military commanders raised concerns that a strike would prompt Iran to fire missiles at Israel in retaliation, setting off a new escalation of violence.
Israel would then be accused of trying to derail the US-Iran agreement just as it was being clinched, they feared.
The strike put Netanyahu at odds with Trump for the third straight week over Israel’s freedom to retaliate in Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks.
Notably, Israel did not consult or coordinate the strike with the United States; it notified the US military moments only before it began, according to the two officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.
If Netanyahu’s goal indeed was to blow up the pending US-Iran deal, he failed to anticipate how forcefully Trump would push to save it.
Three hours after Israel picked up information that Iran was preparing to attack it with missiles sometime on the night of June 15, the two defence officials said, Israel learnt that Iran had halted those preparations to give Trump a chance to calm the situation and close the agreement.
Israel now finds itself counting the ways that Netanyahu’s grand strategy against Iran has failed.
And Israelis are increasingly convinced that it will make the 2015 Iran nuclear deal look “perfect in comparison”, as Netanyahu biographer Ben Caspit wrote in the Israeli daily Maariv on June 15.
For more than a decade, Netanyahu has steadily raised his bets in pursuing his strategy against Iran.
His 2015 address to Congress denouncing then President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran broke with decades of Israeli bipartisanship and left Netanyahu frozen out of the talks.
His alliance with Trump alienated Democrats, a growing number of whom turned against Israel during its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The war with Iran, and the perception that Israel had dragged the United States into it, added many Republicans to that column.
With its lofty goal of toppling the Iranian regime, the war was the culmination of Netanyahu’s long-term strategy.
But it ended up showing Iran that the thing it feared most – the might of the US military – was something that it could withstand, said Shira Efron, an analyst at RAND Corp, a think-tank.
“Israel has lost all its leverage, and this has real costs,” she said. “The US can just sort of walk away. But Israel is here in the region with an Iran that is only more threatening.”
Katz, the analyst and a former editor of The Jerusalem Post, said the upshot of the US-Iran agreement was a return to Israel’s strategic position in the region before the Hamas-led Oct 7, 2023, attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza.
“If there is intelligence one day in the future that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and enriching the military-grade uranium, Israel will have to go it alone,” he said. “We can’t rely on anyone else now.”
Katz said Israel’s three main current adversaries – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran – could persuasively argue that they had prevailed in their conflicts with Israel.
“Because victory for them was always about survival,” he said. “Because all three of them still have military capabilities. And because of the legitimacy granted to them.”
Netanyahu’s difficulty managing his relationship with Trump could be glimpsed in his failure to come out and say publicly what some members of his own right-wing coalition were already saying on June 15 – that the US-Iran deal was terrible for Israel.
In his news conference on the night of June 15, the Israeli leader made only the slightest nod to the shortcomings of the agreement.
He defended Israel’s wars with Iran, and said they had “saved the state of Israel from annihilation”. But, he added, Israel’s “struggle has not ended”.
Additional reporting by Johnatan Reiss
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
