Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his saber-rattling Iran hawks are experiencing panic.
What’s set them off are reports surrounding the firing of Mike Waltz, Trump’s outgoing national security advisor. As reported in The Washington Post, the former Green Beret officer “was considered far more eager to use military force than his boss in the Oval Office,” and according to one source, “wanted to take US policy in a direction Trump wasn’t comfortable with because the US hadn’t attempted a diplomatic solution.”
His close contact with Netanyahu was particularly annoying, as the national security adviser seemed to share the Israeli leader’s belief that it was the right time to strike Iran.
In March 2015, Netanyahu addressed the American Congress as then-President Barack Obama was working to lock in a deal that blocked Iran’s path to a bomb. Netanyahu had a warning: “The deal with Iran is dangerous and will ultimately lead to war.” It was the peak of a stubborn and sometimes ugly struggle led by Netanyahu, with the support of most of the political spectrum in Israel, against the nuclear deal with Iran – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – which was eventually signed a few months later.
Netanyahu, with his impressive rhetorical abilities (and opposing parties eager to appear tough), managed to turn opposition to the agreement into a nearly mandatory standard for every Israeli politician. Both opposition and coalition leaders alike did not hesitate to use derogatory terms for the agreement and to issue warnings about the dangers it contained.
Most of them also praised US President Donald Trump when he decided in 2018 to withdraw from the agreement and allow Iran to make giant strides toward nuclear weapons.
What they didn’t understand then – and still do not understand today – is that Bibi views the Iranian threat as a tool to boost his standing, and obscure the Palestinian issue and the government’s other failures. Rather than an agreement with Iran being an existential threat to Israel, it’s a political threat to him and his legacy.
Iran reached the amount of uranium needed for a bomb
Seven years have passed, and Trump has returned to the White House, but this time with an opposite policy. No more withdrawal from the agreement, but a return to it, and intensive talks with the Iranian regime toward a new agreement, which, as days go by, seems not to differ much from the one signed during Obama’s term (with the necessary changes resulting from Iran’s advancements since America’s blunderous withdrawal from the agreement).
Of course, it is very difficult to predict Trump, but it seems he does not want to get dragged into a war with Iran and is moving aside the hawks who challenge the attempt to reach an agreement.
THERE IS still a possibility that Netanyahu, Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, and the neoconservatives in Washington will manage to sell their wares to Trump, like the spin that the only deal with Iran that should be accepted is one achieved with Libya. But that, too, is a fantasy, just like the fantasy of total victory in Gaza, which Trump has supported so far.
Netanyahu continues to try to sell the Israeli public on the idea that it is possible to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program through an Israeli operation backed by the Americans or through a surgical American strike, even though such an option does not exist in reality.
The Iranian program has already reached the amount of highly enriched uranium needed for a bomb, and it is dispersed across many sites deep within the mountains. The Iranian program is not like Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs, which could have been wiped out in one go.
Trump and the American people are not interested in a return to the fiasco of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and only a war on that scale might allow for the elimination of the Iranian nuclear project (after many losses and a heavy price for the global economy). Even Iran’s Sunni neighbors prefer an agreement over an unpredictable regional war that would severely harm them.
Trump’s withdrawal from the previous agreement harmed Israel’s security and dramatically brought Iran closer to military nuclear capabilities. Trump then dismantled the international coalition that Obama had formed and caused Russia and China to abandon the effort to stop Iran. The main lesson from the Israeli handling of the nuclear deal, from the Obama administration to today, is that it has not delivered security – it’s actually made us far less safe.
WHO SAW that coming? The security officials at that time had the ability to see a broader and more complex picture. Then, the IDF chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, gave a speech in January 2016 at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), saying, “The nuclear agreement with Iran is a strategic turning point. There are many risks in it, but also opportunities. We are reassessing this turn of events.”
Eisenkot, unlike the politicians of that time, did not look at polls or politics but acted out of professional and security responsibility. This was also the position of other senior security officials, whose opinion of the agreement was almost entirely opposite to that of most of the political echelon.
Now, a decade after the original agreement and seven years after withdrawing from it, it turns out that when things are said out of political considerations, it’s easy to say the opposite when the political direction changes.The silence of the Israeli political system today in the face of a Trump-led agreement very similar to Obama’s – one that was previously presented as a strategic threat – raises pointed questions about the true motives behind that earlier opposition: Was it concern for the country’s security, or perhaps concern for the political security of the politicians themselves?
Factually, Israel and the world are today moving toward a new agreement – important, but much weakerw – ith a country that took full advantage of the years of the American withdrawal from the JCPOA to become a nuclear threshold state and strengthen its negotiating hand in terms of uranium enrichment (though, according to American intelligence, not in terms of its weaponization into a bomb).
The politicians from the liberal camp would do well to accept the agreement now as the best default option for preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons. Sanctions without the full support of Russia and China will never have the same effect.
Netanyahu will have to accept the new approach because this time it is a Trump agreement, admired by the Israeli Right.
One can only hope that Bibi will at least ensure Israel’s involvement in the details of the negotiations. Still, for that, he needs the trust of the American administration, which it seems he is gradually losing, similar to the reality during the Obama administration.
Once again, it’s Netanyahu first, Israel second.
The writer is J Street-Israel’s executive director. He has served as an Israeli diplomat in Washington and Boston and as a political adviser to the president of Israel.