It’s been a difficult 10 days in Israel. A war against Iran that began in February with close coordination between the United States and Israel ended with Washington and Tehran signing a memorandum of understanding — a framework that opens a 60-day window toward a final deal and calls for the immediate end of military operations on all fronts, Lebanon included.
In Israel, the agreement landed poorly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was kept out of the negotiations and shown the text only once it was final. The week closed with four Israeli soldiers killed by a Hezbollah strike, followed by fighting that briefly imperiled the deal.
Open daylight between Jerusalem and Washington makes Israelis nervous. President Donald Trump is going out of his way to air his frustrations with Netanyahu, and Vice President JD Vance is openly criticizing members of the Israeli cabinet. The one relationship Israel’s prime minister has spent his career promising he alone could manage is showing bad strains. The paradox is that a conflict that in narrow military terms should belong in the win column has left Israelis feeling more exposed.
To make sense of that contradiction, I spoke with the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a columnist for Yediot Ahronot. We discussed the mood in the country months ahead of elections, and what Netanyahu’s chances are of holding on. We also touched on strategy. Can Israel repair its relationship with the U.S., and in doing so rediscover the wisdom the country’s founders taught it about living in one of the world’s most dangerous regions?
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Damir Marusic: How has the drama surrounding the agreement between the United States and Iran this week been playing with the Israeli public?
Nadav Eyal: It was a very depressing week. The Israeli public is disappointed by the MOU, and there is a sense of insecurity. There is this feeling that the confrontation between Israel and the U.S. signifies something deeper than just the Iran war.
We see this in polls. The Israeli public thinks the state’s security is worse now than it was before this year’s war with Iran began. There is a sense that this was not a success. You also hear and feel this from decision-makers and defense officials speaking off the record. Nobody is happy with the result, and nobody is happy with the deal. People are also extremely worried about Israel’s relationship with the U.S. Most understand the U.S. as a cornerstone of the state’s security.
Has this feeling of distress boiled over into politics?
We are in the middle of an election campaign; we are a few months away. It’s all about politics. The majority of Israelis are unhappy with this government. That isn’t my anecdotal impression; it’s what polls are telling us. The prime minister’s bloc has been losing in almost every poll since March 2023.
Voters were unhappy with the government during the war in Gaza, too. There was a certain period, mainly after the 12-day war against the Iranians last year, that looked better for Netanyahu. But in the last few weeks, it’s looked very bad. Netanyahu has always marketed himself as a person who can deal with the world — and specifically with the U.S. He is an ally of the Trump administration, and a personal friend of the president. This open confrontation threatens one of the basic promises that he has been making to the Israeli public — that we have the U.S. on our side. The daylight between the U.S. and Israel as to Lebanon and Iran is very clear at the moment.
But it’s very clear that the prime minister, the president and the vice president are doing their best to ensure this is isolated. Trump might say things about Netanyahu, but Netanyahu isn’t attacking the president — or the vice president. And the vice president has said the prime minister hasn’t spoken against the MOU because he understands the positive notions of the MOU.
According to every source we speak with, Netanyahu doesn’t think good things about the agreement, to say the least. But he does think that an open confrontation with the administration wouldn’t be beneficial to him, politically and strategically for Israel. This is the reason he’s trying to hold back.
His allies are not holding back. There is an assumption that it’s Netanyahu who is letting his allies speak this way. That’s not the case, as far as I know. They’re doing this of their own accord. Because generally speaking, left, right and center in Israel, people don’t like this agreement because of the specifics. It’s not that they don’t like that it stops the war — Israelis don’t want this war to continue forever. They simply don’t like the conditions in which it has ended.
Netanyahu has managed to stay in power for so long because the opposition has been split. Is there a sense that a coherent opposition to Netanyahu might emerge in these elections? He seems to be a master at electoral politics.
You’re absolutely right; he is a master at this. There isn’t a person alive today any better at winning elections in any democracy. He understands the Israeli psyche probably better than any other politician, and he’s a master campaigner. So counting him out would definitely be a mistake.
And the bloc that stands behind Netanyahu is much more homogeneous, ideologically speaking, and also in its unity around and behind Netanyahu, than the bloc that stands against him — a bloc composed of mostly Jewish voters who define themselves as Zionist, as well as Arab-Israeli voters who definitely do not define themselves as such.
Having said that, people should remember that since 2019 — five election cycles ago — the prime minister has not won an outright majority. The reason Israel went to election after election is because he couldn’t form a coalition. So he stayed in power as the head of an interim government until another election happened. And then, after several elections, he lost. And Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid became the prime ministers, one after the other, for a year or so. And then he won again. And now, four years later, he has basically lost every poll. The bottom line: He absolutely can lose.
It’s also about the resolve of the opposition. They understand they can’t allow themselves not to form a coalition this time. If you speak with members of the Knesset from different parties, some of them feel ashamed, looking at what the Netanyahu government has been doing in Israel over the last few years.
It’s not just the security failure leading to Oct. 7. It’s the judicial overhaul, which is seen by most of that bloc as an attempted judicial coup. Or the Arab-Israeli parties, which were a very difficult partner to the Bennett and Lapid governments — they now see a rise in crime and how the Israeli police, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Jewish supremacist, is not handling it. They now say they will do everything in their power to support any other government. This kind of resolve might change things.
How are Israelis thinking about the next steps, whether it’s with a new Republican administration, or the next Democratic administration? Is there a vision for how to reimagine the relationship after everything that’s happened?
What I’m hearing from both American and Israeli sources — some in the right wing that supports Netanyahu — is that while the problems are deeper than Netanyahu, Netanyahu symbolizes them. He has so much baggage. He’s so toxic in some circles that, as one source put it to me, “Just having a prime minister whose name no one in the U.S. remembers will be much better than the current situation.”
I tend to agree. The fact is that Israel has been in the news since Oct. 7 — even if it was attacked by Hamas and was fighting for its own security and survival. After years of hearing and seeing the cost of that war to the civilian population of Gaza, which cannot be denied — getting out of the news cycle is, I think, going to improve Israel’s standing.
Netanyahu is completely unacceptable to the majority of Democrats, and he’s now not acceptable to many Republicans who support Israel but see his leadership as flawed. Now we are also seeing a direct confrontation with parts of MAGA and Netanyahu.
The Netanyahu people will answer that by saying, “Look, Netanyahu is only a symbol for Israel. He’s a fantastic communicator, and he draws respect for what he’s doing as a leader, even if people don’t agree with him, or even if they hate him. But they understand what he’s doing. You’re going to pay a price for replacing him with a lightweight.”
I don’t think that is very convincing at this point. There are many things Israel could do to reform the relationship — say, by letting go of U.S. aid or changing the structure of that aid in a way that would be more beneficial for American taxpayers. I think there is a wide understanding in Israel that this needs to be done, including by Netanyahu himself.
Israel also needs to be more of the initiating side of peace and security in the region, not just seen as a combatant. It needs to be seen as a country that wants to end this cycle of conflict that was forced on it. You need to start having agreements, even if they are not the best agreements. Because of that, many people in Israel behind closed doors say, “Look what the president is doing, trying to restore some sort of security in the region. Even if it’s not in the best of terms, at the end of the day, we need to live, think and then maybe fight another day.”
You’ve described the politics and the strategy. What worries you most about where Israel’s head is at?
Part of the problem is that Israelis are self-absorbed by this war. They are traumatized by the memories of Oct. 7. For people outside the region, Oct. 7 seems like another cycle of violence. It isn’t. It’s very different because it was an attack on civilians, because of the mass murder, the mass rape. This is something Israelis never experienced before.
They are trying to restore deterrence. And they have to some extent lost track of time trying to do that. But the world has moved on and the region has not. So it’s healthy that the Trump administration, just like the Biden administration before it, is saying, “You know what? There’s a certain point beyond which one needs to pause. Even if the battle isn’t done, let’s wrap it up for now.”
And actually, that is classic Israeli policy. The region was always hostile to Israel, always tried to destroy it. For decades, Arab leaders said out loud that they wanted the destruction of Israel — until they signed peace treaties. Israeli policy was, “We will build, we will farm, we will have a better economy. We are buying time until they understand we are here to stay. And they will negotiate.” It was never about having a total victory.
Netanyahu has been promising total victory. Israel’s founding fathers — they never promised total victory. What they promised is a state. A state, if you can keep it, to paraphrase a famous quote. The notion that after the devastation of Oct. 7, Israel must now seek total victory — this has failed.
After Oct. 7, Israelis wanted once and for all to make sure nothing like that would happen again. But that conviction strayed away from classic Israeli security doctrine — that we cannot beat all our enemies, because there are so many of them. What we can do is we can have relative security in which we can build this place to be stronger and better.
I think there is now an understanding across the political field in Israel, but also within the defense apparatus, that this ambition after Oct. 7 to really change the equation of the region completely and utterly hasn’t succeeded. You need to go back to the classic Israeli realist perception. That means keeping up your alliances and being prepared to fight only when you must.
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