Israel, stunned by Trump’s Iran deal, sees it as a ‘catastrophic capitulation’

JERUSALEM – Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on June 18 as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of US President Donald Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hardline and emboldened despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February.

The deal’s requirement that US forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the US military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon – indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country – the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding its militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear programme? The existential threat to Jerusalem that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of US-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times Of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation”, in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct 7” – a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

Netanyahu and top officials in his government offered no public comment on the agreement overnight, leaving minor ministers and backbench lawmakers to put the best possible face on it.

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, speculated in a radio interview that Netanyahu would know how to say no to Trump about pulling out of Lebanon just as he knew how “to bring the US into this war”.

But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Netanyahu’s triumphalist rhetoric from early in the war had proved fantastical. He had repeatedly and confidently assured Israelis that the country and its alliance with the US were “changing the face of the Middle East” to Israel’s advantage.

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on June 18.

“Iran came out stronger and, I believe, is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the US, the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the US and Israel.”

Even as they reeled from the terms of the agreement, Israelis across the political spectrum seemed also to be reckoning with Trump, the nature of his support for Israel, and the degree to which Netanyahu has tied Israel’s fortunes to the US leader’s goodwill.

On June 17, at the Group of 7 summit in France, the US President had again spoken of Netanyahu with disdain, suggesting that he was excitable and prone to overreacting to Hezbollah’s attacks.

He belittled him publicly as the “very small partner” in the relationship and said that Israel would have been annihilated if it had not been for him.

Trump suggested that Syria could do a better job than Israel of cracking down on Hezbollah in Lebanon without killing as many civilians. And he minimised the ballistic-missile threat from Iran – which forced millions of Israelis to run in and out of shelters throughout the war. He said it was only fair for Iran to have missiles because other countries in the region did as well.

The reactions in Israel evoked a bad divorce.

Hanoch Milwidsky, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted a video on social media of himself removing a red MAGA hat and replacing it with a blue one with the Hebrew words for “total victory”.

Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist at Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, wrote that Netanyahu had led Israel into “the most severe collapse in its history”.

“Trump reneged on every promise, turned Iran into a power, strengthened Hezbollah, and as a final flourish, gave Israel a kick and humiliation,” he wrote.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-born Israeli pollster, said it was “slowly sinking in” for Israelis that Netanyahu had staked the entire US-Israeli relationship on his personal bond with a president prone to “temper tantrums” over “simple slights”.

“I think he was hoping that he could employ the tools that he has always employed with American presidents,” she said.

“You know, tread carefully and strategically, but push the boundaries, and try to run circles around them if you can.

“I think that with a bit of a back-and-forth dance, it was largely working for him with Trump,” she said. “But he hit his limit.” NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.