Trump’s Iran Ceasefire Leaves Netanyahu Isolated, Israeli Analysts Warn
A US-Iran ceasefire skips Israel's demands on uranium and missiles, and polls show most Israeli Jews view the terms as a security setback for Netanyahu.
A ceasefire deal between the United States and Iran has produced an unusual reaction inside Israel: alarm rather than relief.
After Israel struck a Hezbollah position in Beirut on Sunday, many Israelis expected Iranian missiles to follow. Instead, they woke to news of a halt in hostilities. The response across the political spectrum has been sharply negative.
The core complaint is what the agreement leaves out. According to The New Yorker, the memorandum of understanding does not address Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium or its arsenal of ballistic missiles, the two issues Israel treats as existential.
The numbers behind the discontent
An Israel Democracy Institute poll, released days before the deal was announced, found that fewer than a third of Israeli Jews across right, left, and center believed ending the war under the current terms served the country's security interests. Among Arab citizens of Israel, 60 percent saw the war's end as compatible with security.
The same poll recorded another signal for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only 41 percent of Israeli Jews said Israel's security was a central consideration for President Donald Trump. That is the lowest share since the institute began tracking the question in November 2024.
The gap puts Netanyahu in a difficult position. Staying aligned with Trump now appears to cost him support among the base he relies on.
What the deal contains
Trump signed the fourteen-point document on Wednesday night at the Palace of Versailles. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian co-signed it.
The agreement also unfreezes tens of billions of dollars in Iranian funds held in international banks. That lifting of sanctions, critics argue, strengthens a regime that faced mass protests over the winter.
Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called the agreement "a bad deal for Israel and the entire free world" on Monday.
Former Israeli intelligence officials were blunter. Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch in Israeli military intelligence and now a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, told The New Yorker: "This agreement is a catastrophe for Israel."
Citrinowicz had opposed the war from the start, arguing that economic pressure, not missiles, was the better lever against Tehran. He said Israel is worse off now than when the war began on February 28th.
A shift in regime, not of regime
The war did not topple Iran's leadership. Iran's new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is widely seen as more hard-line than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was killed in Israeli air strikes. Citrinowicz described the outcome as "a change in regime," not a change of regime.
Amos Harel, a military analyst at Haaretz, ranked the ceasefire among Netanyahu's largest failures, behind only the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. He argued the outcome shows the damage Netanyahu has done to Israel's standing since 2023.
Israel's isolation
When the US signed the 2015 nuclear deal under Barack Obama, Israel could still draw on a broad set of allies. That base has narrowed sharply after the Gaza war, which involved tens of thousands of deaths and widespread destruction in the territory.
Most other countries welcomed the new ceasefire and raised no objection on Israel's behalf. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert summarized Netanyahu's position to The New Yorker: "Netanyahu is alone."
Vice-President J. D. Vance added a warning, suggesting Israel should avoid attacking its remaining powerful ally.
The friction is now public. At the G-7 summit in France, Trump said Netanyahu "has to be more responsible" about the conflict with Hezbollah, in which more than 3,800 people in Lebanon and 30 in Israel have died since March. He also disputed Israel's tactics, saying forces did not need to level a building every time a Hezbollah member entered it.
Netanyahu, at a rare press conference, vowed that Iran would not obtain nuclear weapons, with or without an agreement. But he announced Israeli troops would stay in Lebanon "as long as required," a stance that sets up a further clash with Washington.
For a leader who once called Trump the greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House, the gap between the two governments now defines the moment.
