Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s agreement to end the war with Iran.
It is a disastrous deal from Israel’s point of view, analysts said, because it accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.
“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 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.
David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a lengthy 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.
Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. Some pundits said Iran had effectively chased the U.S. military out of the region, given the deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days.
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, by constraining Israeli military action in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — it seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war began.
The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran could receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.
And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Mr. Netanyahu tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.
Mr. 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, the diaspora affairs minister, speculated in a radio interview that Mr. Netanyahu would know how to say no to Mr. Trump about pulling out of Lebanon just as he knew how “to bring the United States into this war.”
But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Mr. 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 United States 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 Thursday.
“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., 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 U.S. and Israel.”
