Trump's Iran deal sparks anger in Israel over Netanyahu's war aims

When Donald Trump launched a pre-emptive war on Iran with Israel in February, many in Israel hailed the campaign as the crowning triumph of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political and diplomatic career.

Three months later the regime remains in power in Tehran. Trump is now pursuing a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, and the reported terms have provoked alarm and anger in Israel.

“Israel is completely beholden to the decisions of a capricious, hollow and desperate American president,” Nahum Barnea wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth. Several other commentators condemned both the deal and the Israeli prime minister.

“The greater the fury, the greater the roar, the greater the defeat,” Barnea added in a scathing account of Netanyahu’s strategy before and during the campaign that the United States called Operation Epic Fury and Israel named Operation Roaring Lion.

“If the agreement currently being talked about is signed, the damage will be even worse. The billions that will flow into the regime’s pockets will go a long way.”

At the start of the war, Israel’s security elite warned that Netanyahu risked sacrificing the country’s most vital foreign policy asset, bipartisan support in the United States, in pursuit of regime change in Iran and possibly a boost in an election due by October.

Almost three months on, U.S. opinion polls indicate that a body blow to a decades-old legacy may be the conflict’s most enduring legacy for Israel.

Israel has been locked out of negotiations with Iran and has not been updated on their progress, according to the New York Times. Its government has been forced to draw on regional allies and their espionage networks to monitor Iran’s leadership.

The deal that Trump’s team is negotiating may place some constraints on Iran’s nuclear program, but there is broad consensus that they would be less restrictive than the agreement reached by Barack Obama’s administration in 2015.

Netanyahu criticized that deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in Washington at the time.

“The emerging agreement is far worse than the previous one,” Ben Caspit wrote in Ma’ariv. He highlighted the risk that fallout from the war and ceasefire could accelerate Iran’s nuclear program rather than destroy it as Netanyahu had promised. “If they do come to possess a nuclear bomb, it will be Bibi’s bomb.”

The assassination of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, removed the man who set up the nuclear program but also held off the final stage of creating a weapon, Caspit added.

Israel’s other concerns going into the war, including a regional proxy network and a ballistic missile arsenal that caused death and destruction across Israel, do not appear to be on the table at all.

Far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition are now pushing him to challenge the U.S. president on a partial ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon that was implemented under pressure from Washington.

“It is time for the prime minister to bang on Trump’s table and inform him that we are returning to war in Lebanon,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, wrote on social media on Monday.

Worry about threats from Iran and its allies probably lies behind polling that showed strong Israeli support for the decision to go to war with Iran, even after weeks of missile attacks.

Immediately after the ceasefire, more than a third of Jewish Israelis said they were very or somewhat unhappy about it, compared with just over a quarter who were very or somewhat happy the fighting stopped, according to the Israel Democracy Institute.

Support for the government declined as the conflict dragged on with no sign of the regime change Netanyahu had promised. Even in April, when there might have been more cause for optimism about continued U.S. pressure on Iran, just over a third of Israelis rated the government’s performance positively, the same survey found.

Not all criticism was aimed at Netanyahu, and not all those unhappy with the deal regretted the war. Still, the outline of Trump’s apparent plan found few champions in Israel.

“To Trump’s credit, it needs to be said that at least he tried,” Ariel Kahana wrote in the Hebrew-language daily Israel Hayom. “His bold willingness to unleash the United States’ tremendous firepower on Iran is tens of times preferable over the historic impotence that was shown by all of his predecessors.

The bottom line is that Iran can and is presenting to the world a victory picture by dint of the very fact that it is still standing. Trump, for the time being, does not have a similar counter-picture of his own to show. That isn’t very good news for the Israeli people.”