Donald Trump’s Iran deal—or perhaps we should say “capitulation”—is a fiasco for the United States and Trump’s presidency, but it is widely viewed as a catastrophe for Israel. The more Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu tries to undermine the deal by mounting attacks on southern Lebanon, the more he enrages Trump, who keeps pointing out that the U.S. is Israel’s only ally in the world. Israel is now more isolated than ever.
Israel was deliberately excluded from negotiations with Iran, because Israel was known to oppose any deal that would shorten the war. Nonetheless, in the deal the U.S. bound Israel to cease attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Recent polls conducted in Israel show that some 92 percent of Israelis believe that Iran won the war. Comparable majorities say Netanyahu’s launching of the war was a calamitous mistake and achieved none of its objectives. Another poll, by Israel’s Channel 12, shows that just 13 percent of Israelis now trust the once-popular Trump to safeguard Israeli interests.
Netanyahu contended that the war would topple the Iranian regime, end its support for Hezbollah, wipe out Iran’s long-range missiles, eliminate its nuclear threat, and leave Israel more influential in the region and more secure. Instead, the war left the Iranian regime stronger than ever, and the settlement allowed Iran to keep its ballistic missiles, plus $300 billion in reconstruction funding. Iran gets to keep financing Hezbollah, while Israel is not supposed to attack them.
The Financial Times quotes Dan Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, referring to Trump and Netanyahu: “Both of them were high on their own supply, misjudged what they could achieve … and squandered the most favourable strategic position.”
The deal also creates something that all Israeli leaders have hitherto worked assiduously to avoid: serious “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem. While Netanyahu’s freelancing has enraged Trump and JD Vance, collateral damage from Netanyahu’s brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank has increasingly alienated U.S. public opinion. AIPAC and affiliated political action committees have gone from the interest group that elected officials dare not cross to being so unpopular that, as my colleague David Dayen recently reported, they have been systematically hiding much of their political spending.
What’s not clear is how all this will affect Netanyahu’s chances to stay in office in this fall’s elections, and hence delay yet further a looming corruption trial that has been hanging over his head for years, or the long-term U.S.-Israel relationship once Trump and Netanyahu are gone. Israelis of all political stripes, including supporters and opponents of Netanyahu, as well as supporters and opponents of a two-state solution to Palestine, view the war and the terms of its settlement as a disaster.
Polls have consistently shown that Netanyahu is likely to lose this fall’s election, but his opposition is divided. Virtually all Israeli politicians, like the broad Israeli public, are uneasy about the turn of events in Iran and mistrusting of Trump. The joint Trump-Netanyahu misadventure and miscalculation in Iran leaves Israel further away from regional security.
As for the U.S.-Israel relationship, something fundamental seems to have shifted in both public and elite opinion. The relationship is unlikely to return to what it was before the Gaza invasion, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and Netanyahu’s manipulation of Trump to launch the war on Iran.
Before Trump, U.S. presidents and diplomats were often privately critical of Israel, but the power of the Israel lobby, the historical sense of a special relationship, and sympathy for Israel’s vulnerability in the region led U.S. leaders to refrain from using the potential leverage that came from massive U.S. military aid to constrain Israel’s behavior. Both nations are now paying the price for that passivity—and it is hard to imagine relations returning to the old normal, particularly when public opinion has also flipped.
Even for critics of the long-standing willingness of U.S. leaders to be played for fools by Netanyahu, that shift has to be small comfort. We are further away than ever from a fair settlement with the Palestinians; Israel is less of a democracy and more of a garrison state, less secure in the region and more of an international pariah. And Netanyahu’s insistence that anyone who criticizes Israeli behavior must be an antisemite has energized real antisemitism. None of this is good for the Jews.
