Israelis need a reality check on the impending Iran deal and understanding the winners and losers.
It all depends on the question you ask.
If you ask: Why didn’t Israel and the US already succeed at regime change? Then everyone lost except Iran.
If you ask: Why is Israel not only not dominating the direction of negotiations, but being pushed to the side? Then Israel lost big time.
But if you speak to top IDF and Mossad officials, immediate regime change was never in play.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump made a mistake when, in the opening days of the war, they were excited to add that in as a goal and a real imminent possibility.
Top IDF and Mossad officials across-the-board will tell you that the most the war could achieve was to help improve conditions for regime change.
The real goals of the last two wars with Iran in June 2025 and early 2026 were to push back the two existential threats by a couple years: nuclear weapons and massive ballistic missile volumes which could overwhelm Israel’s air defense shield.
If you ask: Were those two primary goals achieved? The answer is unequivocally yes.
The first proof is that we are now a full year since the June 2025 war, and predictions by pessimists that the Islamic regime would have a nuclear weapon within a few months were not only proved wrong, but Iran is basically still around two years from nuclear weapons, and the impending deal will probably push it off even more.
If Iran never gets nuclear weapons, then looking backward in 25 years, historians will probably credit Netanyahu with pushing off the nuclear threat during this time period.
But, looking back, a win will not help him much in the present and upcoming election when much of the country is sour about the failure to secure immediate regime change.
There is a twist here that if Trump stops paying attention, the Iranians could end up keeping some 60% enriched uranium, but all signs are that that uranium will be removed or diluted.
In terms of leverage, once Iran opens up the Strait of Hormuz and the US keeps even some of its forces in the region, Trump will have more leverage, not less, to get the Iranians to give up the uranium.
The same is true with enforcing the 15-20 years uranium enrichment freeze. And Iran is a long-term planner. Many forget that while Iran broke aspects of the 2015 nuclear deal, for around the first four years it stayed within the uranium enrichment limits.
Many Israelis are rightly enraged that the upcoming deal means that Iran will have massive new funds to help its regime survive and try to help rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.
A reality check, though. This was always the deal Trump was going for: Remove the nuclear threat in exchange for money.
The thought of regime change, even with Trump, was brief and passing, and he did not even allow the Mossad’s plan with the Kurdish Iranians and Iraqis staging a ground advance against the regime in parts of Iran to go forward.
Yet once again, anyone who thought he would let that advance was not thinking about who Trump is and about his aversion to long and messy and wars, especially with ground troops.
Stunningly, top Israeli officials have told The Jerusalem Post exclusively that since former US president George Bush had supported this move in Iraq in 2003, they thought Trump would do so in 2026.
These officials should have been more aware of the difference in mentality of Americans and of the US president right after 9/11 as compared to in 2026, under the banner of “America First” and with no attacks on the US mainland.
Is this funding bad news for Israel on all fronts between Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas? Yes.
But are the apocalyptic warnings of how bad it will be over the top? Also, yes.
Israel has failed to completely defeat any of those enemies – that is a loss.
Yet, Israel has thoroughly bludgeoned and weakened all of those enemies in ways that cannot be restored within a year or two and may not be fully restorable.
It is looking more and more as though Hamas will make some kind of partial disarmament move to allow rebuilding in Gaza to commence.
If it does not, it is still utterly isolated from receiving weapons from outsiders, has zero rockets, essentially zero ability to threaten Israeli civilians (though it can threaten forward IDF troops in Gaza), and has been reduced from a powerful and sophisticated national military to the guerrilla warfare organization it was in the 1990s.
Hezbollah’s rocket stockpile has dropped from 150,000 to perhaps as little as 10,000. It can threaten Israel’s North, but not the rest of the country. And it cannot threaten the North at nearly the same level.
Israel may be able to utilize a withdrawal from most of southern Lebanon to normalize relations with the Lebanese government, completing a historic process which could isolate Hezbollah much more than at any time since its founding.
For over 18 months, Hezbollah has been largely cut off from Iran, smuggling weapons by land because the Syrian regime is now Sunni and as anti-Iran as Israel.
None of this means that Hamas and Hezbollah will fade away; they are still threats, especially Hezbollah.
But getting more money from Iran is not going to help Hezbollah restore its former powers and ability to threaten, especially since Israel will not stand by and allow it to rearm with long-range weapons, even after a ceasefire and even after a potential partial withdrawal.
In the upcoming stages of the expected deal, it is expected to receive unfrozen funds (its own money held overseas) of between $6 billion and $24 billion, some of which will be conditioned on nuclear progress.
Iran lost hundreds of billions of dollars in its defense sector and some other sectors during the recent wars.
The greatest problem is actually the ballistic missile program.
This threat of overwhelming volume has been pushed off by a couple of years. But nothing in the deal prohibits Iran from trying to restore its 500-1,000 missiles to its pre-war figure of 3,000, or worse, to jump to the 5,000-6,000 range, the prospect of which made Israel decide to go to war again in 2026.
Had Israel played its diplomatic cards better, including incorporating Europeans into some major decisions and strategy – since Europeans will be threatened by Iranian ballistic missiles much sooner than the US, as they are only somewhat out of Iran’s current range, whereas for Iran to strike the US, it would need years more to master intercontinental ballistic missiles – possibly an upper limit and range of missile limit could have been reached.
This is the largest and most undercovered loss for Israel in the deal.
The only – and relatively simple – solution for Israel is to send a direct message to the Iranians that Israel will respect the ceasefire until Iran crosses whatever missiles volume point the IDF deems. If Iran crosses that point, Israel must be clear that it will attack again.
All of this misses one of the largest threats to Israel today: the massive loss of support from its allies in the US, in Europe, and among some Arab countries in the Middle East. One positive of an end to the years of war, or even a pause for some years, is a chance to fix those issues.
This more complex analysis of wins and losses is not where the average Israeli is right now, having been sold the new “conceptzia” that after October 7, a two-plus year war, and air power alone against Iran, could end all threats to the Jewish state.
But at some point, it will be wiser for Israelis to focus on the enhanced security they have achieved, while awakening to the largest dangers confronting Israel in the future: a return of Iran’s ballistic missile threat and Israel’s cratering diplomatic status, which over time, will likely have severe military implications as well if the trajectory is not reversed.
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