Three years late, Israelis finally hear the truth about Trump

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When Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, Israel’s then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, turned the decision into a political celebration. Israeli media outlets received detailed briefings on how a daring Mossad operation to steal Iran’s “nuclear archive” from a secure location in the Islamic Republic was the final straw that convinced Trump to break the international agreement.

That sense of pride was missing last week, when former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, the man who commanded that operation, spoke at the Haaretz-UCLA conference on Israeli national security. Cohen was asked about the fact that ever since Trump got out of the deal, Iran has significantly increased its uranium enrichment. “That’s true,” he replied.

Another speaker at the same conference was former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who strongly opposed the nuclear deal at the time of its signing, when he was still in office. Yet in an interview with Haaretz analyst Anshel Pfeffer, Ya’alon said that as bad as that deal was, Trump’s decision to withdraw from it – with Netanyahu’s encouragement – was even worse. He called it “the main mistake of the last decade” in Iran policy.

Two days later, former IDF Chief of Staff Lt. General (ret.) Gadi Eisenkot, brought a similar message to the Security and Policy conference in the Reichman University in Herzliya. The American withdrawal from the deal, said the man who commanded the Israeli military when it happened, was a net negative for Israel: It released Iran from all restrictions, and brought its nuclear program to a much more advanced position.

For many Israelis, these statements could come as a surprise. They contradict a years-long narrative crafted and promoted by a man who until recently was the most powerful politician in the country. Netanyahu presented Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as his own personal achievement, and a mostly shallow, compliant Israeli media adopted the story with very little questioning. Commentators and analysts described it in their studios as a geopolitical victory. The man who fought against Obama’s terrible Iran deal, the story went, finally got what he always wanted – to kill the bad agreement.

There were, of course, other voices – of journalists, experts and even some officials in the Israeli government – who warned in real time that Israel was going to pay a price for this decision. The security and intelligence establishment, after all, had a nuanced, ambivalent view of the Iran deal all along, free of Netanyahu’s apocalyptic, doomsday visions. They saw it as a problematic agreement full of holes, but still much better than anarchy, which is what Trump’s new policy had created.

Haaretz’s national security analyst Amos Harel wrote in 2019, based on conversations with senior officials in Israel, that Iran was showing no signs of giving up the nuclear program and that Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, meant to collapse the Iranian regime, was bound to fail. Back then, some Israeli officials were beginning to say the obvious – that Netanyahu’s celebration of Trump’s withdrawal from the deal was premature, an Israeli version of George W. Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” speech in the early stages of the Iraq war.

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It took two more years, however, for the men who worked closest to Netanyahu in those critical moments – his former Mossad chief, defense minister and top general – to publically acknowledge that it was all a big lie. Trump’s Iran policy included some tactical achievements, but the overall strategy, if there ever was such a thing, ended in failure. Iran was closer to nuclear military capability on the day he left office than it was when he first entered the White House.

It’s easy to ask the former senior officials who are now saying all of this out loud why they didn’t shout it from the rooftops when they were still in office. In reality, some of them (Cohen not included) were hesitant about Trump’s Iran moves at the time, and were even willing to say so in professional forums.

But their warnings were drowned out by Netanyahu’s boisterous victory campaign. Now that they are finally speaking out, the Israeli media has a moral obligation to bring their words of truth to the public, after years of irresponsibly carrying Netanyahu’s water.