Just four months ago Binyamin Netanyahu witnessed the fulfilment of his decades-old political dream: the start of a joint US-Israeli war on Iran.
But what was billed in Israel as the “final” battle against its arch-foe did not go to plan.
Donald Trump’s interim deal with Iran has been received with fury in Israel, as critics alleged a vast strategic failure overseen by a weak-willed US leader. Washington has fired back, with vice-president JD Vance warning Israel to “wake up and smell the reality” of its situation.
“They over-reached,” said Dan Shapiro, a former senior US official and ambassador to Israel, referring to Trump and Netanyahu. “Both of them were high on their own supply, misjudged what they could achieve ... and squandered the most favourable strategic position.”
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Netanyahu was repeatedly feted at meetings with Trump after the latter’s return to power: the pair met no less than seven times between the US president’s inauguration and the start of the war. But since a fateful February meeting in the run-up to the conflict, they have not appeared together.
As part of its agreement with Iran, Washington has also sought to impose a ceasefire on Israel’s fight with Hizbullah in Lebanon, drawing howls of protest from northern Israeli residents and far-right ministers angry at what both groups have called a “loss of sovereignty”.
[ Israel blindsided by US–Iran pact tying Gulf ceasefire to LebanonOpens in new window ]
Netanyahu has insisted his forces will not withdraw from a self-declared “security zone”, making Lebanon central to tense peace talks between the US and Iran.
The memorandum of understanding concluded last week between Washington and Tehran was the clearest indication yet that the interests of the US and Israel have radically diverged.
As well as including the Lebanon front, the text made no mention of Iran’s ballistic missile programme or its support for proxy militias in the region despite long-standing Israeli demands these should be part of the agreement.
A former senior Israeli official said “the nuclear issue is only dealt with in words”, not firm commitments from Iran to give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Depending on the progress of talks and its moves to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is set to gain US waivers to sell oil and access to its frozen assets. And the same regime still rules in Tehran.
“It’s hard to overstate what a strategic disaster this was,” said the former Israeli official. Compared with before the war, “the picture is certainly worse today,” especially since “we’re not in lockstep with the US as before”, they said.
It has been a steep decline in Netanyahu’s fortunes from the end of last year, when the US president called him a wartime “hero” at a Mar-a-Lago meeting and said “you might not have Israel” if anyone else were leading the country.
That moment may prove to have been the high-water mark for Netanyahu’s hyper-aggressive security doctrine, which had racked up a string of battlefield victories across the Middle East – at immense human cost – in response to Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack.
From Lebanon to Gaza and Syria, Israel’s enemies were badly damaged by the start of this year, with Israeli soldiers holding multiple “buffer zones” and striking at will, often under the cover of highly favourable US-brokered ceasefires. The Iranian regime was still recovering from the 2025 12-day war with Israel, and its economy was foundering.
Six months after that war ended, mass anti-regime protests began roiling Iran. Trump’s promise to come to the aid of the Iranian people quickly snowballed into a full-scale attack, spurred on by Netanyahu. Multiple previous US presidents had rebuffed the Israeli leader’s calls to launch an offensive against the Islamic republic.
“The protests popped up and the regime was seemingly on the rocks. [Netanyahu and Trump] believed it just needed a simple push and it would get them to topple,” said Shapiro, now at the Atlantic Council think-tank.
That bet failed. Despite devastating losses – from its top leaders and crucial infrastructure to thousands of civilian lives – Iran’s regime, deeply hostile to Israel, has emerged with a sense that the war strengthened its position.
But perhaps the biggest liability for Netanyahu is his growing distance from Trump, who in recent weeks has reportedly called the Israeli premier “f***ing crazy” and said: “I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”
[ US and Iran enter second day of negotiations as mediators hail progressOpens in new window ]
Support for the US president among Israelis – and especially among Netanyahu’s rightwing base – has plummeted. A poll by Israel’s Channel 12 last Thursday indicated a mere 13 per cent of Israelis trust the previously popular Trump to safeguard Israeli interests.
Pro-Netanyahu media figures have called Trump – who once declared himself “history’s most pro-Israel US president” – a “loser” and hurled slurs at Vance and envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Yinon Magal, a host on the far-right Channel 14 who is close to the premier, wrote on X last week that Trump had capitulated to pressure from the “low-life” Vance, alongside Witkoff and Kushner, who he claimed had “sold out their brothers in Israel”.
Vance on Thursday blasted far-right Israeli cabinet ministers for criticising the deal. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance said.
Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who previously worked with the Israeli premier, said: “This [agreement with Iran] is not a small blow to Netanyahu ... If the elections were held tomorrow he’d be in big trouble.”
Netanyahu’s Likud party and rightwing allies are trailing the opposition in the polls, with no clear path to securing another parliamentary majority.
With elections set for October at the latest, the veteran prime minister still had time to repair the damage, Shtrauchler said. But he stressed Netanyahu “can’t end the situation like this” in either Iran or Lebanon, given the gap between the current reality and the lofty promises made by Netanyahu at the start of the Iran campaign.
“The Israeli public didn’t expect for it to end this way,” he said. The Channel 12 poll showed that just 11 per cent of Israelis believed their country had won the war. Trump on Saturday posted on Truth Social an article entitled “Trump holds the cards in Netanyahu’s shaky re-election chances”.
Shira Efron, an Israel-based fellow of the Rand Corporation, said the recent Iran war was similar to Israel’s other post-October 7th campaigns, filled with “unrealistic expectations” and a singular focus on military solutions to every problem.
“The Israeli approach was ‘what won’t work with force will work with more force,’” she said. “There was never a diplomatic instrument on any of the fronts. That’s the over-reach.”
Netanyahu continues to reject any talk of failure, arguing in a rare press conference on June 15th that there was a “systematic campaign to diminish the achievements” of the war and expounding on ostensible successes in Iran: missiles destroyed, “innumerable” defence industrial targets struck, and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage.
The war had saved Israel from the threat of “nuclear annihilation” and “mass death”, he added, as he claimed Iran was rushing headlong towards a nuclear weapon – a position not supported by Israeli or western intelligence assessments.
Tellingly, many of the successes Netanyahu highlighted – Israeli hostages returned from Gaza, Hizbullah’s vast missile arsenal and senior leadership destroyed and even the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities – predate the most recent war. Hamas still controls about 40 per cent of Gaza, and Israel’s conduct in the strip has left it ever more internationally isolated.
At the press conference, Netanyahu barely mentioned Trump, downplaying disagreements as something that “happens in the best of families”.
“There are real achievements he can point to,” said Shtrauchler, but he added: “You’re either victorious or you’re explaining. Netanyahu a month ago wouldn’t have wanted this and would have preferred to walk hand-in-hand with Trump into the sunset.”
Netanyahu’s supporters have not yet given up hope. They suggest that with just a bit more time, and certainly one more offensive, a resounding victory will indeed arrive.
There is always the hope, for Netanyahu and his allies, that talks between the mercurial Trump and hardline Iranian regime collapse without a final deal.
“Trump and [Netanyahu] have a few more surprises on the way for us, even before the October elections, believe me,” Miki Zohar, a senior Likud minister close to Netanyahu, said in a radio interview last week. “Anyone who thinks the prime minister hasn’t secured achievements with Trump will be eating their hat very soon.”
Analysts in Israel and the US are much less certain.
Iran has made it clear it is prepared to hold up the larger negotiations with the US over the conflict in Lebanon, leaving Netanyahu with limited room for manoeuvre without risking even greater wrath from his most important ally.
Shapiro said Trump’s willingness to cut his losses and conclude a deal with Iran was a clear sign of his desire to “pull back and do less in the Middle East”.
Future US presidents will almost certainly vow never to undertake such a military adventure; Gulf Arab states, which bore the brunt of Iran’s retaliation, were seeking to ease tensions with Iran, while Tehran had secured newfound leverage and more money, he said.
“It was a huge strategic blunder, with one key lesson: in the post-October 7th world, there is no such thing as ‘finishing the job’.”
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
[ Trump and Netanyahu at odds as ceasefire pressure mountsOpens in new window ]
