Last week\u2019s brief shootout between Iran and Israel was aptly described by the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth as taking Israelis on a roller-coaster ride. On June 7, Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at a wide swathe of northern Israel.<\/p>\n
The missile fire remained confined to the north of Israel that evening, but the following morning, we were rousted out of bed in our Tel Aviv-area apartment by our civil defense phone app warning of an incoming missile \u2013 not from Iran but from an Iranian proxy, the Houthi regime in Yemen. That was followed later in the morning by missiles fired directly from Iran at the Tel Aviv area. Israel was retaliating by bombing targets in Iran. And then, as if he was flipping a switch, President Donald Trump declared a ceasefire, and Israel scrapped its plans for additional attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n
The flare-up wasn\u2019t entirely out of the blue. An Iranian official had announced that Iran would retaliate against Israel for an Israeli attack on Beirut\u2019s Dahiyeh suburb, the traditional stronghold of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will give a decisive and painful response to the Zionist regime\u2019s attack on the suburbs,\u201d Iranian parliamentary spokesman Ebrahim Rezaei, wrote on social media on June 7. \u201cThis rabid dog must be disciplined and put in its place. Watch the sky of the occupied territories tonight,\u201d The occupied territories refer to Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza.<\/p>\n
Israel can\u2019t reconcile itself to a situation in which every time it attacks Hezbollah targets in Beirut, that results in Iranian missiles being fired at Israel. Hezbollah has been weakened by its own rounds of fighting with Israel, but it remains a powerful military force that threatens not only Israel, but the government in Lebanon, which wants to see Hezbollah disarmed.<\/p>\n
More problematic is the fact that Israel isn\u2019t really in control of its own fate in the battle against its most formidable foe \u2013 Iran. Those decisions are being made \u2013 and sometimes On June 11, he wrote that the United States would hit Iran \u201cVERY HARD TONIGHT.\u201d Later he withdrew the threat amid claims of progress in the talks with Iran. As I wrote this, Trump suggested that a breakthrough in the talks with Iran may be imminent. An agreement has been negotiated between the U.S. and Iran and is expected to be signed on June 19.<\/p>\n
When Israel embarked on its major military operation against Iran in June of last year, the declared aims were to destroy Iran\u2019s nuclear program, to eliminate the threat from Iran\u2019s ballistic missile arsenal and to decouple Iran from its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies. None of those goals has been achieved.<\/p>\n
The past two years of fighting make it apparent that military force will have to be coupled by diplomatic agreements with Iran \u2013 and regarding Hezbollah. My concern is that the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran will get the United States out of the morass of a war that President Donald Trump never expected to last this long, but will fail to address the missile threat or Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
Iran may agree to concessions on its nuclear program, but it probably won\u2019t be more wide-reaching than the 2015 nuclear agreement that President Barack Obama reached and that Trump had called a bad deal. On the other issues, Israel may be left to fend for itself or may even have its hands tied, constrained by a ceasefire that doesn\u2019t allow it to defend itself against Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
Cliff Savren is a former Clevelander who covers the Middle East from Ra\u2019anana, Israel. He is an editor at the English edition of Haaretz.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week\u2019s brief shootout between Iran and Israel was aptly described by the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[5859,28567,2492,1660,41,16159,16153,28566,996,16152,461,28573,38,16158,28570,51806,1655,2254,5656,1665,1741,1658,35074,16147,1411,16145,16149,100,28574,16150,1743,34,218,1656,1651,13089,37,1653,10796,51807,16146,1659,1189,28569,28568,28572,502,16151,499,28571,1650,15960,30339,16156,16157,16155,49,1652,2928,498,13087,2253,10258,28565,81,1740,1654,9572,10801,1671,15984,13146,1657,501,51808,15959,10804,11080,16154,16148,36,3909,6393],"class_list":["post-165685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-aliyah","tag-anti-judaism","tag-antisemitism","tag-arab-israeli-conflict","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-book-of-esther","tag-branches-of-linguistics","tag-bundism","tag-conflicts","tag-cultural-assimilation","tag-culture","tag-doikayt","tag-donald-trump","tag-eliezer-ben-yehuda","tag-ethnoreligious-groups","tag-flag-of-palestine","tag-foreign-relations-of-israel","tag-gaza-strip","tag-gaza-war","tag-gaza-israel-conflict","tag-government-of-iran","tag-government-of-israel","tag-haaretz","tag-hadassah-medical-center","tag-hamas","tag-haredi-judaism","tag-hebrew-language","tag-hezbollah","tag-history-of-israel-1948-present","tag-human-communication","tag-international-relations","tag-iran","tag-iran-israel-war","tag-iran-israel-military-relations","tag-iran-israel-proxy-conflict","tag-islam-and-judaism","tag-israel","tag-israel-related-controversies","tag-israel-palestine-relations","tag-israeli-citizenship-law","tag-israeli-system-of-government","tag-israeli-palestinian-conflict","tag-jerusalem","tag-jewish-groups","tag-jewish-movements","tag-jewish-nationalism","tag-jews","tag-jews-and-judaism","tag-judaism","tag-judaism-and-politics","tag-judaism-and-warfare","tag-judaism-related-controversies","tag-kippah","tag-language","tag-languages","tag-linguistics","tag-middle-east","tag-military-of-israel","tag-missile","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-region","tag-palestinians","tag-passover","tag-passover-seder","tag-politics","tag-politics-of-iran","tag-politics-of-israel","tag-politics-of-palestine","tag-politics-of-palestine-region","tag-politics-of-the-arab-world","tag-politics-of-the-arab-israeli-conflict","tag-politics-of-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict","tag-politics-of-the-middle-east","tag-purim","tag-refusenik","tag-society-of-israel","tag-society-of-palestine","tag-society-of-west-asia","tag-sociolinguistics","tag-supreme-court-of-israel","tag-war","tag-west-asia","tag-zionism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}