Israel’s War

A two-week cease-fire between the United States and Iran isn’t off to a great start. Marathon talks in Pakistan over the weekend resulted in no breakthrough. They prompted yet another frustrated Trump post announcing that the U.S. would now blockade the Strait of Hormuz. And Israel, whose war in Lebanon almost derailed the talks, continued bombing.

President Trump’s main leverage in the talks is the threat of resuming the war, which he edged toward yesterday with his blockade announcement. But that’s also not a particularly viable political choice — and the Iranians know it.

The Israelis know it, too. Today I write about how Israel, which was instrumental in taking the U.S. to war with Iran, is still trying to prolong the fighting.

Israel’s war

On Feb. 11, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, gave Donald Trump the hard sell on going to war in Iran.

According to reporting by my colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Netanyahu told the president that Iran was ripe for regime change, that a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign could destroy the missile program, that the Israeli intelligence service would help foment a popular rebellion — that victory was a near-certainty.

The next day, the director of the C.I.A. called the regime change scenario “farcical.” The secretary of state called it “bullshit.”

But Trump was sold. Sounds good, he’d told Netanyahu. It was the first time Israel had convinced a U.S. administration to go to war alongside it.

And Israel often seemed to be pursuing the fight on its own terms — hitting Iran’s energy infrastructure when the U.S. urged it not to and fighting its own war-within-a-war in Lebanon after Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group, fired rockets at Israel early on in the conflict.

Six weeks later, the picture is more complicated. Trump wants a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has asked Netanyahu to scale back his campaign in Lebanon. And Israel was not in the room for the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, this weekend.

But the Israeli prime minister who helped persuade the U.S. to go to war in Iran seems determined to keep fighting.

‘The war he always wanted’

Convincing Trump to attack Iran was a major win for Netanyahu. As my colleague David Halbfinger wrote at the time, “more than 30 years after he first publicly identified Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a singular menace to his country, Netanyahu finally got the war he always wanted.”

And the prime minister has little interest in ending that war now.

That’s partly because, unlike in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, in Israel it has actually been popular. But it’s also because the goals he laid out at the start have not been achieved.

I spoke to my colleague Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem. She told me that Netanyahu had promised Israelis a version of what he had promised Trump: That the war would remove Iran’s nuclear threat, destroy its ballistic missile program and “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple their government.

The war did degrade Iran’s capabilities. But Iran’s stockpile of 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium remains in the country. And there are no signs that the government is about to fall. On the contrary: It seems emboldened.

Netanyahu faces elections before the end of October and needs to persuade the public that the war has been a success. That’s a tall order.

“There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in all of our history,” Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s opposition, said in a statement.

“Israel was not even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security,” he went on, adding that Netanyahu had “failed diplomatically, failed strategically, and did not meet a single one of the goals that he himself set.”

A deadly campaign in Lebanon

When the cease-fire was first announced last week, Netanyahu issued a terse statement in English, saying that “Israel supports” Trump’s decision.

But since then, he has escalated Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon, continuing the attacks yesterday.

Netanyahu says the cease-fire doesn’t include Lebanon, contradicting both Pakistan, which helped negotiate the agreement, and Iran. Iran said it would retaliate if Israel’s attacks continued. Trump backed Netanyahu, but others criticized him.

Lebanon should not be the “scapegoat” for an Israeli government that is “frustrated because a cease-fire has been reached between the United States and Iran,” France’s foreign minister said, pointedly.

So far, Trump has only asked Israel to scale back its campaign, but seems to have gone no further. Israel has responded by no longer striking Beirut, the Lebanese capital, but its attacks on southern Lebanon are ongoing, and Hezbollah is still firing rockets into northern Israel.

By now the death toll in Lebanon has climbed above 2,000, according to the country’s health ministry — higher than that in Iran. Israel has occupied a strip of southern Lebanon and around a million people have been displaced.

Christina Goldbaum, our Beirut bureau chief, recorded this video from the city of Tyre in Lebanon, which is under an evacuation warning from Israel.

“Israel is trying to get in what it can, while it still can,” Isabel told me. “They’re just carrying on as long as they can.”

Like everyone else in Israel, Netanyahu is aware that at the end of the day “Trump calls the shots,” Isabel said, and Israel’s war will end when Trump wants it to.

The Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the U.S. have agreed to meet in Washington tomorrow for rare direct talks.

But Netanyahu might well get a chance to keep going. Saturday’s talks between the U.S. and Iran underscored the gap between the two sides, notably over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program.

That same day, the prime minister gave a 13-minute address to the Israeli public, where he said “the battle is not yet over.”

For more:

What now? The lack of a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran leaves the Trump administration facing several unpalatable options.

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