The Accounting

Here in the valley below Gilboa, where Saul fell and where rockets fall now with much less poetry, I have been watching this war long enough to know the distance between what was promised and what is arriving. The deal taking shape between the United States and Iran will express, if signed, a capitulation that Netanyahu cannot name in public and Trump will not acknowledge in private.
In 2015, when the Obama administration signed a nuclear accord with Iran that drew fierce criticism, Netanyahu delivered a speech before the United States Congress that violated every diplomatic convention between allied governments. He came to Washington to tell the American president he was wrong, and a large part of his political identity was built on that gesture. Three years later, he convinced Trump to abandon the accord. The maximum pressure policy that followed did not deter Tehran. Instead, the regime accumulated four hundred and forty kilograms of sixty-percent enriched uranium and advanced its program to a point where the original deal would have looked, in retrospect, like a reasonable settlement.
Then Netanyahu convinced Trump to launch a military campaign. The United States attacked the underground facility at Fordow last June, and in February the two countries launched a joint overall assault. Trump believed the campaign would last a few days, and when the Strait of Hormuz closed and the disruption of Gulf oil exports became total, the president found himself facing consequences he had chosen not to plan for. The closure of the strait appears in the first chapter of every war simulation conducted in the region over the past three decades. Trump knew the risk existed. What he had not prepared for was being wrong about how quickly Netanyahu told him it would be over. Over the past month and a half we have watched Iranian obstinacy, empty American threats, and what now appears to be a compromise that addresses the nuclear program in some form and addresses almost nothing else, not the ballistic missiles, not the proxy organizations, and not the regime change in Tehran that was part of the promise when the war began. The sanctions relief that is part of the agreement will unfreeze tens of billions of dollars and fill Iran’s coffers with money that will almost certainly reach Hezbollah and Hamas.
I do not know what Netanyahu told Trump in private. But I know what he told us in public, which was that this war would end in total victory, that Iran’s nuclear program would be dismantled, that the threat would be removed, and that the sacrifices would be worth what they bought. More than two thousand Israelis have died since this war began. The deal taking shape does not reflect those promises. It reflects the limits of what military force can accomplish when the political will to sustain it evaporates, and it reflects the specific failure of a prime minister who spent years convincing an American president to fight a war on terms that were never honest about the cost.
In Lebanon, the picture is no less honest. Israel’s leaders have spoken publicly for years about Hezbollah as if it were a problem that military pressure would eventually solve, and it has not been solved. The group continues to attack daily, with explosives-laden drones causing injuries to soldiers and fatalities every few days, and it is not considering surrender. Israel’s strategy in Lebanon, if there was one, has collapsed, and the gap between the public declarations and the reality on the ground is the gap that defines this government most accurately.
Netanyahu cannot publicly oppose Trump. He is making do with quiet briefings delivered through unnamed diplomatic sources, careful not to say anything that might cost him the American relationship his political survival depends on. He built his entire career on the claim that he alone understood the Iranian threat, that he alone had the judgment and the connections to manage it, and that the skeptics who doubted him were naive or weak or both. What is taking shape in the Gulf is the accounting for that claim. The valley below Gilboa is quiet tonight, which means the drones are somewhere else. The prime minister who led us here is standing at a careful distance from the results, as if the war were something that happened to Israel rather than something he chose for us.