How Iran turned the tables on Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not famous for being shy. He ruled the Jewish state for 18 out of the 26 years of this century, largely through his ability to talk his way out of any tight corner.

Yet when the latest US-Iran ceasefire deal was made public, it took him more than 24 hours to say anything meaningful about the agreement with Iran’s clerical rulers, a regime he had spent decades trying to overthrow. He was silent on June 17 as US President Donald Trump signed the interim agreement to end the war with Iran in Versailles. Among other things, the memorandum of understanding states that the ceasefire includes the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, and that Israel would have to withdraw from Lebanon under any final agreement.

The key reason for Netanyahu’s sudden and highly unusual reluctance to speak on developments – other than to observe that sometimes both the US and Israel don’t see eye to eye – is that the US-Iran deal is a stunning defeat for the Israelis, of a kind that cannot be explained away.

Indeed, this may be the worst strategic setback for Israel since Oct 7, 2023, when Netanyahu’s government failed to anticipate and repel an attack by Hamas, the militant Palestinian organisation, in what became the bloodiest single incident in the Jewish state’s modern history.

Unlike in 2023, not many Israeli lives were lost in the latest confrontation with Iran. But Netanyahu gambled almost everything on this military adventure with the US and lost that bet. The setback is severe, and Netanyahu’s chances of winning the upcoming Israeli general election, which must take place by October, are rapidly crumbling.

A unique tunnel vision

Netanyahu always had an apocalyptic view of Israel’s security interests: there is no point in negotiating with Israel’s enemies, and the only question is how they are best fought and destroyed. With this vision, he has always been singularly obsessed with Iran. At one level, his obsession made perfect sense. While most of the Middle East’s Arab nations are relatively new creations harking back to the end of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I or the end of the British and French empires after World War II, Iran enjoys an uninterrupted historic existence of millennia and has a unique sense of purpose.

It is also far larger than its neighbours and endowed with plenty of resources, as well as an educated ruling elite and a large scientific base. No other regional state – apart, of course, from Israel – advanced as far as Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, despite all Israeli attempts to sabotage the project and assassinate Iranian scientists.

Iran’s unremitting hostility to Israel is also undeniable; nowhere in the region was the cry of “Death to Israel” as routine as it is in Iran at every public meeting.

Curiously, the leaders of Iran and Israel’s Prime Minister are locked into a relationship of mutual ideological dependency: just as Netanyahu needed Iran to justify his policies, so the mullahs in Tehran needed Israel as their bogeyman to cement their legitimacy.

The attacks which the US and Israel launched on Iran on Feb 28 were not just an ordinary military operation; Netanyahu saw them as the culmination of his entire political career.

And they emanated from another equally important claim Netanyahu made throughout his political life: that he was the only Israeli leader able to secure US military backing for the destruction of the Islamic Republic.

As such, the failure of the latest US-Israeli military campaign against Iran is not just a temporary setback for Netanyahu, it also represents the shattering of the Israeli leader’s entire vision.

Wrong assumptions, disastrous outcomes

Netanyahu has spent many years trying to persuade successive US presidents that Iran can only be dealt with by force. But those efforts bore fruit only with Trump. Like Netanyahu, Trump cares little for detail or for the historic setting of problems he needs to solve. And like Netanyahu, Trump has a limitless faith in the ability of his military to generate any outcome.

He was, therefore, easily persuaded by the Israeli Prime Minister that dropping a few bunker-busting bombs in 2025 would be sufficient to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, or that the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and his closest associates would topple the country’s regime.

We still do not know whether Netanyahu was aware of how complex the task of regime change in Iran would prove to be and merely decided to keep such facts away from Trump so as to secure US military cooperation, or whether Israeli intelligence really believed that toppling the regime in Tehran would be a piece of cake. What is clear, however, is that while Netanyahu was good at sweet-talking Trump into a war, the Israeli leader made no provisions for what would happen if the war did not go to plan.

What began on Feb 28 as a joint campaign mutated into an American-led process the moment Trump’s political calculus changed. Since the initial April ceasefire, Netanyahu repeatedly pressed Trump to resume full-scale operations, arguing that sustained pressure could still collapse the regime.

But the White House not only moved in the opposite direction, it also negotiated directly with the Iranians. The result is that the Iranian regime not only survived the war but also succeeded in creating for itself a new deterrence against future attacks, thereby upending Netanyahu’s strategies. And, in the process, the Islamic Republic has turned the tables on Israel.

For decades, Iran applied pressure on Israel by sponsoring various proxy militias, from Shi’ite armed groups in Iraq to allies in Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon – at one stage holding a larger arsenal than most of the national armies of Arab states – as well as Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. The Iranian strategy was to ensure that while Israel was constantly pinned down, Iran itself was kept out of harm’s way.

Since the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, 2023, Netanyahu has sought to dismantle every Iranian proxy. His constant wars, with their horrific impact on Palestinians and other Arab populations, alienated Israel’s friends and threaten to transform the Jewish state into an international pariah.

Still, and as Netanyahu saw matters, Israel’s approach served one strategic purpose: it placed Iran in the line of fire. No longer could the Iranians hide behind their proxies; they could no longer deter Israeli attacks on Iran itself.

But in the latest war, Iran has forged a new deterrence strategy against Israel. Instead of responding to Israeli attacks by firing missiles just at Israel, Iran has directed the bulk of its fire at its Arab neighbours and closed the Hormuz Strait, throttling all regional oil and gas exports.

The Iranian strategy was not merely to discredit the US as able to guarantee the security of its regional Arab allies but also to prevent any future Israeli attacks. Netanyahu now knows that if he plans to strike at Iran again, he will be setting fire to an entire region. Iran’s old proxies may no longer be sufficient to protect Iran, but Iran’s Arab governments will, from now on, indirectly do Iran’s bidding by preventing Israel from relaunching a war.

Worse still, the deal concluded between Iran and the US now contains an explicit US admission that Iran is the protector of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Netanyahu has insisted Israel is not bound by any US-Iran agreement in its fight against Hezbollah.

Trump, who has sharply criticised Netanyahu in recent weeks, acknowledged to reporters that “we have a little dispute over Lebanon’’ before advising the Israeli leader to use “a little softer touch’’. “You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah,” he added.

And, having dismissed Iranian leaders as “barbarians”, Trump now claims to be impressed by Iran’s new rulers. “The current Iranian leadership are very rational people. They are nice to deal with; they are strong and smart people. They are not radicalised, and they are looking to help their country,” he said this week.

Netanyahu’s rout is complete. The same simplistic Trumpian view of the world that allowed Israel to persuade the US to embark on a half-baked military adventure in the Middle East now works against Israel’s interests.

The bitter fruits of failure

Netanyahu intended to anchor a military victory against Iran as the centrepiece in his re-election bid. His main message would have been that, although his government failed to pre-empt the 2023 Hamas attacks, it has been successful since then in knocking down every Israeli adversary.

Now, such claims are impossible. The conflict in Gaza is frozen rather than resolved; Hamas is still in control, and the Palestinians are still there, living in rubble and squalor. Hezbollah is still fighting, and Israeli troops are sucked even deeper into Lebanon’s quagmire. And Iran is not only standing, it is also negotiating with the US above the heads of Israel deals that are far more generous than those Netanyahu and Trump criticised former President Barack Obama for concluding with Tehran.

More significantly, Netanyahu is now electorally vulnerable in the area always viewed as his chief electoral strength: his security policy. Yair Lapid, the top centre-left opposition leader in Israel, called Netanyahu’s latest military adventures one of the most shocking failures in Israel’s security history. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, was even harsher – “Iran emerged stronger; Israel emerged weaker. That is Netanyahu’s strategic responsibility,” he said.

The fury is not only from the opposition. The far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have both demanded a more aggressive line, with Ben Gvir urging Netanyahu to confront Trump and make clear Israel cannot tolerate this.

And some of Netanyahu’s closest media supporters are now openly attacking the US President. One called Trump “a loser” and US Vice-President J.D. Vance a “scumbag”. Another Netanyahu social media influencer claimed that Israel should no longer be “seeking salvation in Washington”, claiming that “relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from elsewhere”.

Yet the reality remains that Netanyahu has burned his bridges with the rest of the world and is now endangering his ties with Israel’s last remaining and most important ally.

The story of the botched Iran war seems set to mark a turning point for both Republicans and Democrats in Washington, and for anyone who hopes to take over from Trump in the 2028 presidential elections. Tying US policy to Israel’s singular – and often obsessive – security priorities was always misconceived, and has predictably resulted in a strategic disaster.

For, as the centre-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz aptly put it in an editorial this week, “the US should learn at least one lesson from this war about itself, and the allies it chooses to fight for”.