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It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than seven hours to formulate a response on Monday to US President Donald Trump’s bombshell announcement that his emissaries were negotiating indirectly with the “top man” in Iran on a deal to end the war, and that the sides had reached agreement on some 15 key points.

And no wonder the prime minister struggled to find the words. He needed to somewhat dissociate himself and Israel from the US president’s gambit, without sounding like he was doing so.

The 37-second video he eventually produced managed to do that. Looking determinedly upbeat, Netanyahu appeared on a cursory listen to be warmly endorsing Trump’s outreach to the Iranian regime, but in fact he did no such thing. “Our friend President Trump,” he declared, “believes that there is an opportunity to leverage the massive achievements of the IDF and the US military in order to achieve the goals of the war through an agreement — an agreement that will safeguard our vital interests.”

Note the wording: Trump believes there is an opportunity. Trump believes he can reach an agreement that safeguards Israel’s interests.

And note, too, the final sentence of the prime minister’s very brief, very protractedly crafted message. “We will safeguard our vital interests under all circumstances.” As in, ultimately, Israel can and must only rely on its own capacity to protect itself.

Answering reporters’ questions on his dealings with the ostensible new “most respected” figure in the Islamic Republic — “the leader,” no less — the US president on Monday noted, as he often does, “My life is a deal. That’s all I do is deals, my whole life.”

But if he indeed strikes a deal with the regime — and especially if it turns out that the “top man” with whom he is interacting is, in fact, Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf — a “Death to America”-shouting former commander in the terror-exporting Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and murderous suppressor of anti-regime protests at home — Trump risks subverting the very goals of the war he and Netanyahu launched against the Islamic Republic less than four weeks ago.

Denouncing the regime on February 28 as “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” Trump accurately accused it of menacing the US and its allies worldwide for 47 years, promised to “raze their missile industry,” vowed to ensure Iran would never attain a nuclear weapon, and told Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” When the bombs stop, he urged, “Take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Instead, he is negotiating with that vicious, cynical and completely untrustworthy regime, whether or not he claims its latest representatives are somehow distinct from their recently eliminated predecessors. And thus, by definition, he is legitimizing its retention of power and narrowing the promised path for the Iranian public to oust it.

Echoes of Gaza, but Iran could be different

Trump’s assertion that the US has obtained broad agreement from its Iranian interlocutors to a 15-point plan for ending the war carries shades of the way he put forward his 20-point peace plan for Gaza last September.

Ignoring the fact that Gaza’s terrorist rulers had submitted a caveat-filled semi-rejection of his proposal, he declared that Hamas was ready for peace, and brokered a deal that, near-miraculously, enabled the release of the last 20 living hostages from more than two years of horrific captivity in Gaza.

But six months later, Hamas is still governing most Gazans, has not disarmed, is currently regrouping and rearming, and remains determined to destroy Israel.

Gaza is a nightmarish military and diplomatic challenge, because so many of its people loathe Israel more than they loathe the terrorist rulers who place them in the line of fire, and because there is no dependable alternative Palestinian leadership.

Iran could have been — and still could be — very different. Most of its people revile the regime that has been oppressing them for almost half a century. They have been crying out for international assistance in ridding themselves of the ayatollahs, have repeatedly resorted to mass protests, and been gunned down by the tens of thousands.

Trump’s reported 15 conditions for ending the war — including permanently stripping the Islamic Republic of its nuclear weapons program, constraining its missile capabilities, and severing it from Hamas, Hezbollah and its other terrorist proxies — would indeed deprive it of the capacity to menace Israel, the region, and the rest of the world, and could indeed spell its merciful demise… if those conditions are implemented.

But for precisely that reason, there is no way on earth that the regime will agree to them.

If the deal cannot be done, Trump promised on Monday, committing only to a five-day pause that ends on Saturday, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out.”

Well, we shall see. With Ghalibaf as of this writing denying the existence of any talks, and the regime reportedly demanding control of the Strait of Hormuz, the closure of US bases in the region and other outrageous conditions for an end to the conflict, that would appear to be the inevitable scenario.

And Trump continues to move forces into the region.

Strategic imperatives

The Islamic Republic is being battered hard by Israel and the United States, its nuclear sites and experts targeted, its missile launchers and stockpiles bombed, its paramilitary forces relentlessly weakened. The Israel Air Force says it has carried out hundreds of waves of strikes, dropping over 13,000 bombs on regime and military sites. But as Netanyahu acknowledged last week, “You can’t do revolutions [only] from the air… You can do a lot of things from the air, and we’re doing [them], but there has to be a ground component as well.”

If the regime is not ousted, it will do everything in its admittedly reduced power to revive and rebuild.

Just look at Hamas, resurrecting under Israel’s nose.

Just look at Hezbollah — now devastating northern Israel less than a year and a half after it was massively degraded and leaderless, despite operating in a country whose government opposes it and with neighboring Israel enjoying air superiority and carrying out constant operations against it.

The post-Ali Khamenei Islamic Republic, if it survives, moreover, will be a military dictatorship, with no compunction and a heightened incentive to rush to the bomb. And as Trump repeated on Tuesday, “If they had had a nuclear weapon, they would have used it as soon as they got it. They wouldn’t have waited. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

The US president’s dealings with the regime fuel concerns that have only grown over the past four weeks regarding strategic planning. The intimately allied US and Israeli military had clearly developed their war tactics, but what about the desired strategic outcome?

Was there no internalization of Iran’s potential to play havoc with global energy supplies? Surely Trump must have recognized that Tehran could have him over a barrel, crude pun intended, with direct financial consequences for the American people and for his own domestic support. And was there no concerted interaction with, and planning for, a potential alternate, life-affirming Iranian leadership?

Given that the regime is predictably extorting much of the international community via the Strait of Hormuz, effectively advancing the war would now require the US committing forces, and risking many more American soldiers’ lives, to ensure safe passage through that waterway — a policy that the former Obama-era CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta, of all people, reluctantly recommended over the weekend.

But then, as the then-still genuinely upbeat Netanyahu remarked on Thursday, “The death cult in Iran is trying to blackmail the world by closing… the Strait of Hormuz… Imagine how the ayatollah regime would be able to blackmail the entire world if they had ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.”

In a TV report on Monday night, an Israeli security source was quoted saying, “We do not know if there will be a deal in the near future or if this is a characteristic ‘Trump maneuver.’ But if there is a deal, and it does not involve the removal from Iran of its [450-kilograms of 60%] enriched uranium, any big words about ‘devastation’ and ‘degraded capability’ will not be true. The truth will be that it is an epic failure.”

And again, Trump told Iranians on February 28, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Well, it won’t be, will it, if he cuts a deal with people who are merely different faces of the same regime?

And finally, as for Trump’s vision of this agreement, if it happens, bringing “peace for Israel, long-term peace, guaranteed peace” — that carries historical echoes that I’d prefer not even to express and dearly hope will never have to.

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