The Inevitable Confrontation

The agreement is tested in Lebanon and the U.S.'s loss of deterrence.

Donald Trump with Benjamin Netanyahu during a special plenum session in honor of President Trump at the Knesset, October 13, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

It’s Friday, June 19, and overnight Hezbollah has continued its campaign against IDF forces in southern Lebanon. A commander’s tank was struck by a drone or missile, killing four—among them the battalion commander, while in another sector of the front five Israeli soldiers were badly wounded by an explosive drone. In response, the Israeli Air Force has carried out an extensive bombing campaign across numerous villages.

The fallout was swift. Talks scheduled for today in Switzerland between the United States and Iran—meant to implement the peace deal—were canceled, with Iran citing the IDF’s actions in its fiefdom in southern Lebanon.

This confrontation was inevitable from the moment digital ink hit digital paper on the Memorandum of Understanding. Neither Hezbollah nor Israel is a signatory to the agreement, and the two have been touting entirely different versions of it. Iran has assured its proxy that an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon is written into the U.S.-Iran MoU, to unfold over a phased 60-day period. Israel, meanwhile, has declared that it will not evacuate its positions in southern Lebanon—and insists it has not been asked to—while U.S. officials have reportedly told it that its right to respond to threats will not be infringed.

The larger question—whether Israel may strike “emerging” threats—isn’t addressed here directly, since this was a response to an attack, not a buildup of Hezbollah forces. But if the Trump administration won’t tolerate an Israeli reprisal to a Hezbollah strike, it certainly won’t stomach Israel hitting a growing missile storage facility on its border.

Trump’s own comments have been ambiguous. Beyond an endorsement of the “precise and humanitarian” warfighting style of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa—the former ISIS leader—he has not told Israel to stop outright. Most of his remarks echo the sentiment he offered two days ago: “I want Israel to be able to protect themselves, but I do want them to use good judgment.” “Good judgment,” one suspects, means Trump’s judgment—a phrase I’ve lately found hard to pair with so flattering an adjective. When the president wakes up, I imagine Truth Social will feature a more profane word for Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making.

For all that, the recent conversation between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was surprisingly friendly. On the outside, they reported—and quite rightly so—a rift in relations, about throwing Israel under the bus, but between the driver and the one being run over, a calm and quiet conversation took place. For listeners, it brought to mind the story of King David, who fasted and prayed for his sick son. Precisely when the son died, he arose and shook off his mourning: “Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?”

Donald Trump signs a Memorandum of Understanding between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States at the Palace of Versailles, June 17, 2026. (White House)

Although the dimensions of the American surrender are breathtaking in their scope, the surrender itself did not surprise Jerusalem. The assessment voiced by Netanyahu himself in discussions was that the Americans want an agreement, at almost any cost. For many weeks, Israel has known that the agreement would not include stopping the funding of terrorism and shutting down the ballistic missile array. But the inconceivable ease with which the self-proclaimed negotiation genius gave up on the equation—the nuclear program in exchange for lifting the stranglehold—testifies to the intensity of the collapse. One can be insulted, but there is no need to be too impressed by the attacks on Israel and on Netanyahu that accompanied the move. This is just the rhetorical justification for the main move, which is wrapping up the affair while continuously bombing, rhetorically, anyone perceived as interfering. In their conversations this week, Trump remembered to tell Netanyahu again in a call how he congratulated Biden after the 2020 elections, which, in my personal opinion, is a much less severe injustice than attempting to obtain illegal atomic weapons and killing many Americans, but maybe I am missing something.

The child who did not die and is still being fought over is actually Lebanon. Eighty percent of the talks with Washington deal with the struggle over the war with Hezbollah, an Israeli official estimated the day before yesterday. Hezbollah is in a desperate situation, and it is on the verge of breaking. Linking the two fronts will not only save the organization but make it easier for it to resume harassing the residents of the north, or to strengthen, or both. There is a national consensus in Israel on the matter, a consensus that should have been expressed by the heads of the opposition, not just in silence.

Trump’s betrayal of the principles he himself set was so sudden and powerful that many are convinced this is again a deception that will end with Tehran going up in flames. They are in for a rude awakening. But the story, nevertheless, did not end this week. The Iranians will not miss the opportunity to present Trump as an empty vessel, as a joke. At some point, perhaps, he will abandon them again in favor of Israel and the Gulf states. You can count on the ayatollahs to give him the opportunity.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom

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IDF pilot approaches an F35 fighter jet. (IDF)

So where could things have been done differently against Iran? Should the protesters in Iran in January have been told to forget about help? Maybe to say to Trump in February, “Thank you, Mr. President, but attack alone; we pass?” Maybe to avoid destroying the ballistic missile industry, from the opportunity to deduct 300 billion dollars from Iranian assets?

Opponents of Netanyahu and Trump are aiming the time machine specifically at 2018, to the decision to exit the nuclear deal that Obama signed with Iran. The claim is that leaving the agreement is what sent Iran to enrich enough uranium for 10 bombs and to race forward with the program. Former President Barack Obama gloated over his successor this week and essentially said that any agreement with Iran would look the same.

This is a selective interpretation of the facts. First, according to the original agreement, the main restrictions on uranium enrichment were supposed to gradually expire within 10 to 15 years. Or, in other words: right about now. Not illegally, but with the permission and authority of the Security Council and without sanctions. Even within the agreement, Iran would have reached the same amount of fissile material. The dramatic difference is that right now it is doing so as a blatant violation, under a regime of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, whereas if we had stayed in the agreement, it would have done so with the backing of the U.N. Security Council, with its coffers swelling from hundreds of billions of dollars of free trade.

But mainly, a half-truth is worse than a lie: Iran did not leap to 60 percent enrichment immediately after the American withdrawal in May 2018. For many long months, and even beyond that, it feared the reaction of the Trump administration and stayed within the limits of the agreement. The dramatic rise in enrichment began only when the Iranians recognized that the American military threat was not credible.

Surprisingly, or not, this happened after Trump was replaced by Biden, and it was clear to everyone that there was no credible military threat and that the West was deterred from conflict. And this is exactly—but exactly—what might happen now, when the Iranians are wounded and bruised but hold the weapon of closing the Strait of Hormuz and the belief that Trump will never embark on another adventure. It might require another president and another daring operation to extract an archive to cancel this agreement as well.

Shabbat Shalom! We will be back on Sunday.

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English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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