Israel's Five-Decade Push to Keep US and Iran at Odds
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- The author, a former Iranian negotiator in the 1991 Lebanon hostage diplomacy, argues that Israel has spent over fifty years working to keep the US and Iran in confrontation, drawing on declassified intelligence, memoirs, and investigative reporting to document a recurring pattern
- Israel's strategy during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War favored prolonging the conflict to weaken both regional rivals, with Israeli state broadcasting emphasizing each side's vulnerabilities to make political compromise more difficult
- UN mediator Giandomenico Picco contends that Israeli officials deliberately foiled the 1991 hostage release framework by impeding release of remaining American hostages pending resolution of missing Israeli servicemen in Lebanon
- Israeli officials including Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer briefed the Bush administration in 2002 that Iran was 'more dangerous than Iraq,' according to reporting in The Washington Post and confirmation by Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson
- Mossad allegedly arranged for intelligence about Iran's Natanz enrichment facility to reach the international community through indirect channels, passing classified information to the MEK/NCRI exile group while it was still on the US State Department's terrorist list, per Seymour Hersh, Scott Ritter, and IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei
- Benjamin Netanyahu mounted an unusually visible campaign against the 2015 JCPOA including an address to the US Congress without White House invitation; former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta and former President Obama all recalled Israeli pressure for unilateral military strikes
- In 2018, Netanyahu publicly presented what Israeli officials described as a cache of nuclear documents stolen from Iran, which became a key element in the Trump administration's case for withdrawing from the JCPOA
Why it matters: The piece lands just as Netanyahu prepares to meet Trump and could shape whether the current US-Iran escalation gets de-escalated or deepened. By framing Israel's role as a consistent fifty-year driver of US-Iran hostility—rather than a reactive ally—the article gives weight to the idea that diplomatic breakthroughs have historically been blocked by Jerusalem, not Washington or Tehran.
