the deal gives Israel the least<\/a>.<\/p>\nIran reaffirms it “shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” a pledge made and broken before. But the memorandum leaves the enriched stockpile on Iranian soil.<\/p>\n
The “minimum methodology” is down-blending on site under IAEA supervision, not removal or destruction, as Israel demanded.<\/p>\n
It binds both sides to “discuss the issue of enrichment” and Iran\u2019s “nuclear needs” in the final deal, an opening to the enrichment Netanyahu spent a decade calling intolerable.<\/p>\n
Until then the status quo holds: Iran keeps its program while Washington forgoes new sanctions and added forces.<\/p>\n
For a leader who vowed dismantlement, the operative verbs are discuss, down-blend and maintain.<\/p>\n
The economics point the same way. Treasury waivers let Iran export crude oil the moment it signs; Washington undertakes to free Iran’s frozen funds for any beneficiary its central bank names; a final deal dangles at least $300 billion to rebuild.<\/p>\n
To a government that calls sanctions relief fungible and a pipeline to Hezbollah, the order is backward: Iran is paid while the nuclear file stays open.<\/p>\n
Even the Strait of Hormuz needles: The same Iran that throttled it is now credited for its “best efforts” to keep it open.<\/p>\n
And then there are the missiles. The memorandum sets no limit on Iran\u2019s ballistic arsenal; Trump said in Paris it would be “a little bit unfair” for Iran not to have “some” when Saudi Arabia and Qatar do.<\/p>\n
Yet it was the developing Iranian missile program that posed the greatest immediate threat to Israel.<\/p>\n
It is a critical component of a nuclear weapons program, both to defend it from attack and to produce the very missiles that could deliver atomic payloads.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu’s case against the JCPOA was that it left Iran’s missiles untouched and handed enforcement to the U.N.<\/p>\n
Trump’s framework does both, closing with a binding Security Council resolution to lock it in.<\/p>\n
He is selling all of it as common sense. Netanyahu might read it as betrayal, while his critics will see proof that it’s time to say bye-bye to Bibi.<\/p>\n
The Break, in the Open<\/p>\n
The rupture is out in the open, and not for the first time.<\/p>\n
Trump said Netanyahu had “no f****** judgment” after an Israeli strike in Beirut, which came “an hour before we are supposed to sign the deal” and nearly scuttled it, according to Axios.<\/p>\n
It had echoes of Trump’s criticism last year, when he said that Israel and Iran “don\u2019t know what the f*** they\u2019re doing” when they violated a ceasefire.<\/p>\n
At the start of this month, Trump admitted telling Netanyahu he was “f****** crazy” for his strikes on Beirut while the fragile Iran talks were underway.<\/p>\n
“Without me, there would be no Israel because no other president was willing to do what I did,” Trump said at the G7 meeting in France on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“I have had a great relationship with Bibi. Now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon.”<\/p>\n
Trump told Netanyahu that he need not “knock down a building every time you want to go after someone.”<\/p>\n
Moreover, Trump belittled the alliance itself, calling Israel the “very small partner” to America\u2019s “big partner.”<\/p>\n
Netanyahu was reacting, not shaping.<\/p>\n
A senior U.S. official told Axios that Trump informed him: “This is the deal. It’s a great deal, and it’s time to end this war,” and that Netanyahu “seemed to recognize he couldn’t stop Trump from signing it.”<\/p>\n
Likud, meanwhile, scrapped a planned campaign push touting his Trump ties after deciding the relationship would not help him, according to reports in Israeli media.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu is still refusing to pull Israeli troops from the “security zone” in Lebanon, even after the MOU.<\/p>\n
Anonymous Israeli officials told Reuters that Tel Aviv and Washington are engaged in “stubborn” negotiations over Lebanon.<\/p>\n
The Puppetmaster Lie<\/p>\n
Beyond the fraught politics, the Trump-Netanyahu clash over the Iran agreement is putting the truth to an antisemitic lie that proliferates on social media.<\/p>\n
The trope of the all-powerful Israeli pulling Washington’s strings has shadowed both men for years.<\/p>\n
The American Jewish Committee calls “puppet master” imagery part of the myth that Jews secretly manipulate governments, economies and media.<\/p>\n
The Anti-Defamation League warns the label evokes “longstanding antisemitic tropes about Jewish power.”<\/p>\n
The Iran deal is the clear refutation.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu cultivated influence, pressure and spectacle around Trump, but he did not command U.S. policy.<\/p>\n
Criticizing his pressure tactics is legitimate; calling him a Jewish puppeteer controlling America is certainly not.<\/p>\n
What the deal exposes is more ordinary and more damaging: dependency.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu is, in fact, a client trying to shape a superpower whose president has his own ego, timetable, coalition and definition of victory.<\/p>\n
If anybody is the “puppet master” here, it’s Trump.<\/p>\n
Political Mastery<\/p>\n
Netanyahu’s defenders argue, with some force, that Israeli strikes did the hard work\u2014boxing Iran in, preserving its freedom of action and forcing terms tougher than Obama\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Without the bombing, no leverage; without leverage, no memorandum.<\/p>\n
And the U.S.-Israeli split over how to end the war has itself become a line of attack on him ahead of the election.<\/p>\n
Trump’s defenders have an equally serious case.<\/p>\n
A performance-based framework, backed by his standing threat to resume bombing if Tehran cheats\u2014which he repeated at the G7\u2014may beat an open-ended war that drains resources and risks wider conflict.<\/p>\n
Reasonable hawks can land on either side.<\/p>\n
But even a tolerable deal corrodes the mythology, because the myth was never about survival.<\/p>\n
It was about political mastery: the promise that Netanyahu could bend the great power to Israel\u2019s purposes.<\/p>\n
A deal he could not stop, signed without his sign-off and defended over pro-Israel conservatives’ objections, proves the opposite.<\/p>\n
The Reckoning at Home<\/p>\n
The timing could hardly be worse.<\/p>\n
Israeli elections are set for October, and pre-election polling shows Netanyahu’s coalition losing its majority, even if his Likud party takes the most votes.<\/p>\n
He remains burdened by the corruption scandal that preceded his 2021 defeat and by accusations over his handling of the wars after October 7.<\/p>\n
Opposition leader Yair Lapid has aimed at the weak point.<\/p>\n
He called the agreement a “disaster,” said Netanyahu had failed to defeat Iran and Hezbollah, and called it “absurd” that Israel was not at the table.<\/p>\n
Lapid warned it “would be one of the most shocking failures of Israeli foreign and security policy” if the reports held.<\/p>\n
That is the deeper damage to Netanyahu. The deal shows his power was always contingent on a president he could flatter, lobby and pressure\u2014but never command.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu built a career on the promise that he knew how to handle America. But the deal reveals the more dangerous truth his rivals will repeat until the polls open.<\/p>\n
America was always the power handling him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump’s Iran deal is wrecking the central myth of Benjamin Netanyahu. For three decades, Israel\u2019s longest-serving prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[41,38,12195,196,37,619],"class_list":["post-166628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-donald-trump","tag-for-members","tag-iran-war","tag-israel","tag-perspective"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116772188147209101","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166628","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=166628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}