JERUSALEM – The architect of Israel’s war on Iran stood in front of the cameras on Monday and refused to mourn it. Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in the Prime Minister’s Office that the largest military operation in his country’s history crushed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, that Israel is safer, and that he will continue fighting whether Washington has just signed an agreement with Tehran or not. The rest of the country had already decided it had heard enough.
By the time he stepped away from the podium, opposition leaders, former generals, ruling coalition hardliners and centrist commentators were unanimous in their judgment, even when they agreed on nothing else. The interim memorandum between the US and Iran, announced in Washington over the weekend, has been treated in real time as a defeat for Israel, and the man asked to explain it is Netanyahu himself.
The shape of the deal explains why the reaction inside Israel was so severe. The agreement extends the ceasefire between the United States and Iran, lifts naval pressure on Iranian ports, and, according to the account given to French and Pakistani interlocutors by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, formalizes what Tehran has already begun to do: the Strait of Hormuz will not return to its pre-war status. Iran has retained its ballistic missile program, much of its enrichment infrastructure, and the regional proxy network that Israel began dismantling four months ago. The expected phased lifting of sanctions and release of frozen assets will give the Iranian government a financial runway that was not available to it on February 28.
None of this fits the story Netanyahu told his government when the operation began. The Prime Minister had promised that a short surgical campaign would end the nuclear threat and reset Israel’s deterrent posture throughout the region. Four months later, the campaign was over, but he did not end it.
The harshest assessment came from Ehud Barak, former prime minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Barak said in a written statement on Monday that Israel is paying the price for what he described as Netanyahu’s arrogance and blindness, and the price of the manipulations that the prime minister attempted against Donald Trump. Barak said that Iran has become stronger and Israel has become weaker, and this is Netanyahu’s strategic responsibility. He failed.
The line has arrived because it traces the regional reality that the analyst class has been describing for weeks. Tehran has withstood the largest air campaign ever launched by Israel. Its proxy network is intact enough to continue firing rockets into northern Israel. It has tightened its grip on Hormuz, the strait through which nearly a fifth of seaborne oil passes, rather than loosening it. The deal doesn’t cancel any of that. Believe it.
Yair Lapid, the opposition leader expected to face Netanyahu in elections scheduled for this fall, framed the agreement in broader terms. Lapid wrote that the deal was shaping up to be one of the most shocking failures in the history of Israeli foreign and security policy, and that it was registered entirely in Netanyahu’s name. This line was political, but it also embodied a generational shift in the way the Israeli establishment talks about its deterrent power: the assumption that Washington would guarantee Israel’s strategic options without limits was removed.
The cracks were already appearing in the final stages of the war. Trump became publicly angry over the Israeli strike in Beirut that nearly derailed the signing ceremony, telling his colleagues, in the language reported by the American press, that Netanyahu no longer had any control. By the time the memo reached his desk, the president had concluded that he wanted out of the conflict more than he wanted Netanyahu to agree to exit.
Within Netanyahu’s own coalition, the response was to stick to the mark. Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister of National Security, posted on social media that Israel should not concede to anything less than dismantling Hezbollah, a position he has been promoting throughout the day in interviews. Defense Minister Yisrael Katz pledged that Israeli forces would remain in the security buffer zone in southern Lebanon as long as necessary, despite Iran’s insistence throughout the negotiations that any agreement would include a halt to Israeli operations in Lebanon. The hardliners are betting that the war can continue on its peripheries even if the central front is closed.
This bet is fragile. Daniel Shapiro, who served as the US ambassador to Israel and now works at the Atlantic Council, said in a public interview on Monday that all it would take is one Hezbollah missile landing on a northern Israeli town for the pressure on Netanyahu to increase again. The agreement does not prevent the coming escalation. It only changes who is expected to absorb the cost of it.
Criticisms intersect with factions in a way that Israeli politics has rarely produced in recent years. Yair Golan, the leader of a center-left party and former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, said in a public post that Trump signed an agreement that transferred billions to the ayatollahs’ regime, left the nuclear infrastructure intact, kept the ballistic threat intact, and threw a lifeline to the regime in Tehran. Anna Barsky, a commentator for the daily Maariv, summed up the establishment’s mood more soberly: She wrote that Israel believes the war delayed Iran’s nuclear program, but did not change its goals.
What is striking is that none of these voices – Barak, Lapid, Golan, Ben Gvir, Katz, and Parsky – agreed on what Israel should do next. The hawks want to keep the Lebanese front open. The centrists want to replace Netanyahu. Barak wants to hold the prime minister accountable for his strategic miscalculation. Lapid wants to speed up the election date. What unites them is the ruling of the past four months, and the ruling is the same: Iran emerged from the war it started in a stronger position than it began.
Work is still underway to formulate the exact terms of the deal. Israeli officials, who had no role in drafting the memo, were told that the scope of sanctions relief, the timeline for releasing frozen assets, and the mechanism for verifying enrichment were still being negotiated. This uncertainty is now being weaponized on both sides of Israeli politics, with hawks claiming the deal is worse than reported, and centrists arguing that the uncertainty itself is what makes it dangerous. Both could be true. The only fact that neither party disputes is that Netanyahu was not in the room where the letter was written.
Some context has already been recorded elsewhere on this page. Trump arrived at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains carrying the Hormuz Agreement as his opening credentials, while Gulf leaders were preoccupied with his bilateral agenda and the conspicuous absence of Volodymyr Zelensky. The memorandum of understanding is on track to be signed in Geneva on June 19, with J.D. Vance confirmed and the president himself deliberately keeping his presence mysterious. The signing window is filled by Iranian, American and European negotiators, and an Israeli prime minister whose name is no longer on the list of invitees.
Netanyahu’s closing argument on Monday was that the battle is not over and that Israel retains freedom of action. The argument was intended to highlight continuity. Instead, it came as the Prime Minister told his country that the deal he had spent four months trying to prevent had been signed without him, that his coalition partners were already running to his right flank, that his opposition was running to his left flank, and that he would continue regardless. The country has not yet decided whether it agrees to this.
