Future of Israeli Politics and Netanyahuism

These are the words we're using to describe whatever it is that the Trump administration and the Islamic Republic of Iran are expected to sign this Friday I've heard some people describe this latest agreement as a ceasefire as an accord But Greg Carlstrom, from over the Economist He says there are a couple of words he is begging you to use peace deal. That is very much not what I think this is. It's not how I would describe it. I mean the U S. government is calling it a memorandum of understanding. I think you could also call it a deal to keep talking about another deal, which is very much what the ceasefire was back in April and this is just the sort of warmed over updated version of that in some ways It feels a little bit to me like an extension on a term paper, more than anything. It gives us sixty more days to negotiate something firmer. It does. I mean, if you go back to that ceasefire in April, why did they not agree to a more comprehensive deal that would end the war for good? It's because there were certain substantive points of disagreement that they just couldn't resolve And at the top of that list was what do you do with Iran's nuclear program with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium? And that's unresolved here. It's completely unresolved in this memorandum of understanding The basic thing the U S. wants the world to know is that the Strait of Hormuz will be opening at some point soon. Even that seems squishy to me, like when Donald Trump first announced on social media there was some kind of agreement. The implication was that the straight would be open right away. And then within a few hours, that became, it'll be open after we sign this on Friday. And now the closer we look, it's like, okay, the straight will be reopening over the course of thirty days. Is that am I getting that right Well, and if you listen to JD Vance then the next morning, when he went on television, he said actually, there are still some details that we need to negotiate with the Iranians about reopening the Strait of Hormz. And so it's not clear how that's going to work. So if it hasn't even resolved the details of when and how the strait is going to be reopened, then that it makes you wonder just how bare bones of an agreement this really is Part of the trouble, Greg says is that the U. S and Iran are signing this agreement notot just for themselves, but for their allies. For Iran, that means Hezbollah in Lebanon for the U. S That means Israel But Israel and Hezbollah They're exchanging fire just hours before this latest agreement was announced Israel strikes reached Beirut suburbs And a whole lot of Israelis seem to want to keep fighting. It seems to me that the US and Israel. went to war together, very much with locked arms. If this deal is the beginning of the end of the conflict Are they ending We together No, I think what we're seeing here is that They have different interests. For Israel, it went into this war and it wanted to overthrow the regime in Iran, it wanted to If not that, at least force it to accept a very far reaching deal that would limit Not only its nuclear program, but its missile program, it itss support for regional proxies, for the United States, we're always going to be other interests at play and now those interests have diverged from Israels Today on the show Donald Trump is saying, let's make a deal Who else is on board I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to what next stick around It seems like in Israel there's been universal condemnation. O this deal, just even the news that a deal was possible. The news site Zateo published a listle of what they called like nine meltdowns from Israeli leaders over the deal. And it was everyone from Iamara Ben Gavir, the National Security Minister to Yayer Lapid, who is the leader of the opposition party. Why is this deal so universally reviled at this point in Israel I think you have a couple of things going on. One is Fom the Israeli perspective, because both this deal, the MOU, and whatever final deal might result from it in the future, Neither of those addresses Iran's missile program, its support for proxies. best this is going to be a very narrow nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran that will probably give Iran significant sanctions relief. in return, it might be a deal weaker than the one that Barack Obama signed back in twenty fifteen and the one that Donald Trump later abandoned. Fr Israel's perspective, from a strategic perspective, this is not a good deal, it's not a victory for them That's one part of it. The other part of it is, of course, we're heading towards an election in Israel later this year, which is probably going to happen in October. And so all of Netanyahu's political opponents have a real interest in kicking him over this. Netanyahu was someone who for many, many years ran on the platform of I am a uniquely capable prime minister when it comes to foreign policy I am the only one who knows how to deal with the Americans, how to deal with the Trump administration, how to deal with Iran. I mean, going to war with Iran has been his life's mission for many, many years now. And so if this war ends with a deal that is from Israel's perspective, not a good deal, That is something that his political opponents are absolutely going to make hay with Douds really think they're safer now I don't think so. I think Israelis, you know, who spent before this, the better part of two years at war in Gaza, at war in Lebanon, who fought their own much shorter war in Iran last summer So they feel like this has been a never ending period of conflict. They went into this war being told by Netanyahu that this would be sort of the war to end all wars, right? that this was going to be the moment when Israel decisively dealt with its main state adversary Instead, Israel is now watching as its main ally, the United States, makes a deal with that adversary. So I think for many Israelis, there's a feeling now of, I mean, what was the point of all of this? It feels as if they're coming out of it in a worse position. We are speaking on Tuesday, june sixteenth Can we just lay out what we know about the broad outlines of this U. S. Iran deal however you want to talk about it ' I feel like I'm learning more every day, but it's drips and it's drabs and it's contradictory We talked about how the Strait of Hormuz, the idea was it's open, but when is it open? We don't know. There's also this question of fees or tolls. This is so interesting to me because you know, Donald Trump is saying, there will be no tolls, but then I've heard other reporting say that there may be fees and those sound like the same thing to me So what we know or what we think we know, I mean again, we don't know anything for sure until we see the text, but having spoken to people earlier this week who were involved in the talks, what I think I know about the deal is this. Hormose is meant to reopen within thirty days there will not for the moment be any tolls or fees or any other charges on ships The Iranians are going to keep insisting that at some point they will charge them. I'm skeptical that that is actually going to happen. but for now That is not meant to happen at least for the first couple of months, It's supposed to be open for free passage There will be sixty days of negotiations between the U. S and Iran over this more far reaching deal that addresses the nuclear program, Iran's demands for long term sanctions, relief, things like that. And the U.S is saying those negotiations are starting like as soon as we sign this thing on Friday, like straight into negotiations. We don't know where they're going to take place. We don't know when they're going to take place. We don't know who's going to do the negotiating. Do we even know who's signing this agreement? We don't know for sure. I mean, I suspect it's going to be JD Vance on the American side and Mohammad Khalleibv, who is the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, who is one of the most important influential people in their political system. I think it's going to be the two of them. They've been heavily involved in the talks leading up to this. but We may not know for sure until it happens on Friday. and we may not even see you know images of the two of them together. I don't think there's going to be some photograph of them shaking hands. I'm not sure either one of them really wants it. So this signing ceremony might be something that happens behind closed doors What about? Money for Iran of things here I've heard about three hundred Billion, I believe, dollars for rebuilding Iran. heard about sanctions relief for Iran, which would be Iranian money being allowed to flow back to Iran Tell me about the money situation So my understanding is there are Three broad areas in the deal related to money. One is a temporary waiver on sanctions on Iranian oil sales. So the U. S would lift sanctions on oil exports for this period of negotiations whilst they're talking about the final deal The second thing is the U.S will, as you say, release some of this Iranian money that is frozen in banks overseas due to sanctions. Now, I've heard twenty four billion dollars as the amount that will be released That will take place, though, not all at once. It will take place supposedly in stages during this sixty day negotiation period. money for. good behavior, right? But do we know what the good behavior is? We don't. I mean, this is one of the issues with what know about the MOU. so far, the Americans are saying we will release this money in tranches if Iran meets certain milestones during the negotiations. But what are those milestones? I have absolutely no idea, and no one I've asked either knows or is willing to share There will be some release of Iranian funds, probably right away when the deal is signed when Hormlos is opened U And then the third thing is you mentioned this idea of a three hundred billion dollar reconstruction fund, which is something that We've heard JD Vance mention and other American officials mention Is this taxpayer money? Because I think I think JD Vance wants to make it very clear that it's not, but then I'm sort of like, where is the money coming from Well, so the idea here is If you listen to American officials, Gulf countries, Arab Gulf countries will make a pot of money available to Iran for reconstruction in Iran. as long as Iran makes this final deal, winds down its nuclear program, makes various other concessions. They keep talking about the Gulf Coast coalition the GCC, which is something I'd never heard of before. It's something no one has heard of because it doesn't exist. I mean, there is a GCC, but it stands for Gulf Cooperation Council. It's a very different Gulf cooast coalition sounds like a college football conference. I mean, it sounds like they might play against the SEC from time to time So the idea here is that the Gulf states are somehow going to pony up three hundred billion dollars for Iran. The Gulf states obviously don't want to do that after having been bombed thousands of times by Iran. Over the past few months, they're not really in the mood kick in a significant amount of money. three hundred billion dollars is a wildly unrealistic figure anyway. I mean, it's equal to the entire gross domestic product of Iran. There is no way Iran could absorb three hundred billion dollars of investment even if the money was made available And the idea that Iran will be able to tap this money if it makes all of these concessions. I don't think it's going to make many of these concessions. So when Vance talks about it, when other officials talk about it to play it up because they want Iran to be able to play this up for its own domestic audience to say, look, if we sign this deal We are inheriting a windfall of three hundred billion dollars, but I don't think it's actually going to happen Let's talk about what this money is incentivizing. The main thing the United States is trying to do with this deal eventually over the course of negotiations is gain some kind of control or understanding about Iran's nuclear program, right?ike's theoretically one of the reasons why the United States got involved in this war in the first place It is our most constant batle ideological battle with Iran over their nuclear program What do we know about how much of the nuclear program remains intact and how people behind this deal want to manage that moving forward There's an immediate question and there's a longer term question when it comes to the nuclear program. The immediate question is this stockpile of nine hundred ish pounds of near weapons grade uranium that Iran has enriched over the past few years Nobody is quite sure where that stockpile is. It's thought to be entombed in some of the nuclear facilities that the US bombed last summer during the Iran Israel War. But the IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, hasn't been able to inspect any of these facilities since the war. No one is quite sure. So how do you deal with that? For months leading up to this, the Trump administration insisted that the only outcome they would accept is Iran packing up that uranium and sending it to the United States, you know, and you're sort of imagining Donald Trump wanting to have a photo op in the Oval Office with a canister of highly enriched uranium next to him. Please God know. Please God know I could go wrong in so many ways. I mean, that's what I was thinking. Iran has agreed to dispose of this uranium somehow, but how do you do that? when, where, who does it? All of that needs to be worked out That's the immediate issue Then you have all of these other questions that were painstakingly negotiated during the nuclear talks of the Obama years that tried to negotiate last year. What about the rest of Iran's nuclear facilities, right? What about its ability to continue conducting research on centrifuges, which are the machines that enrich uranium? These things still need to be discussed, it took two years when Barack Obama negotiated these things. So if you think Donald Trump and Steve Witcooff and Jared Kushner are going to be able to do this in two months. I'm skeptical So for being straight The current deal isn't really a deal. It's a deal to negotiate to maybe to the same point we were at with Obama's deal Right now it's Trumps deal and we've had a war to get there could very well be Um and it could be a, you know It could be a worse deal in some ways. It could be a deal that you, for example, doesn't address in as much detail these questions around research and weaponization and things like that. NT deal does not seem to be the strong suit of the negotiators from the United States in this regard You know, it could provide more sanctions relief than the JCPOA provided. We don't know. you know, even watching what's happening now, Donald Trump spent a decade attacking Obama for sending what he called pallets of cash to Iran as part of the JCPOA. in particular, there was this decades old dispute. aboutbout a one point seven billion dollars payment that the US government was supposed to make to Iran during the days of the Shah before the revolution in nineteen seventy nine. And so as part of the JCPOA They resolved this dispute and the US agreed to pay this money that it had ower on for like almost half a century at this point U And Trump, you know, for years, attacked Obama for doing this Now there's the possibility that, yes, it won't be a literal pallet of cash loaded onto a seven hundred and forty seven, but p is going to be sending quite significant payments of his own to Iran After the break the Israeli perspective on this deal this deal from Israel's perspective Um I think It was gonna to sum up how we got into this war. I'd say that Benjamin and Yahu went to the White House with a PowerPoint basically pitched his war in Iran as like, let's just do it and be legends They were not included in this peace deal. and it's striking to me to see how little onald Trump seems to be thinking of Israel in this deal and in this moment at all, Is it worth laying out how this war would have ended best case scenario for Israel. I mean, the best case scenario for Israel, and I don't think this was ever a realistic scenario. the scenario that some Israeli officials sold to the White House was We carry out this initial round of decapitation strikes in the first couple of days of the war, assassinate the Supreme leader military officials, other Iranian leaders, and the regime is thrown into disarray at that point And perhaps you see popular uprisings in the streets and people take over the country like a Hollywood movie or It's another u politician takes power. I mean,madinajad who almost twenty years ago was Israel's public enemy number one in Iran, a fervent Holocaust denier, somebody who presided over u the large scale massacre of protesters in Iran He was someone who was floated as a possible replacement for the Iranian regime at the start of this war. He someone of the Israelis or at least some Israelis be brought in to take control and steer Iran in a different direction. So that was very much the idea that this initial wave of strikes in the first few days of the war would send such a shock wave through the system that it would lead to real political change. I mean, The second best outcome would maybe be Deal of some kind that ended the war while also dealing with Israel's security concerns, right? Like somehow bringing Proxy malitias to heal like Hezbollah and Lebanon, which Israel's been fighting you know, sort of on its own, on its own front this whole time Really getting rid of the nuclear program and this deal is just kind of an opening salvo with in regards to the nuclear program No Missiles. in Iran that can strike Israel, right I think for Israel, this is another one of these points of divergence between Israel and the United States. Israel didn't necessarily want or need a deal. to end this war. I think for Israel, there was also a possibility of Collapse in Iran. If you do enough damage to the regime, maybe it will start to lose control of peripheral areas of Iran particularly in some of the ethnic minority areas, the Kurdish regions in the Northwest, the Arab regions in the southwest pererhaps the country would start to spiral out of control. And from an Israeli perspective That didn't look like a bad outcome at the start of the war. That's brutal. It is. I mean, that's brutal It is. Now from an American perspective What happens then? you have a state that falls apart that has know nine hundred pounds of near weapons grade uranium unaccounted for, has lots of other weapons that can fall into the hands of militias and non state actors, might trigger a refugee crisis towards Europe, towards gulf states, towards other part of the world might endanger energy flows through the Strait of Hormas. These are all very, very bad outcomes from an American perspective that again, America has to think about Israel doesn't have to think about. So for the U S, if you couldn't decapitate the regime and make it surrender as Trump initially hoped, This was always going to end with a deal. That was the inevitable outcome of the war. And the question just became, what does that deal look like Whereas for Israel, I think they could have happily lived with a scenario in which there wasn't a deal. There was just a spiral in Iran What is this U S Israeli me in moving forward. because in some ways the more I think about this deal The more I think that The agreement between the U. S. and the Iran with the U. S. and Iran may not be the biggest headline. Like the biggest headline maybe about how dysfunctional the American Israeli relationship has become But you may see it differently. I think you have two issues there. You have the Trump Netanyahu relationship, and then you have the American Israel relationship Netany relationship, you can never figure out how much of this crisis is really a crisis and how much of this is acting on both sides for political effect. So you know, when Trump says publicly as he has in recent weeks that He can't believe the Israelis bombed Beirut and how could they and they're causing so many problems and He says that in public, I strongly suspect that in private, he gave the Israelis some scope to carry out airirstrikes in Beirut as long as they didn't cross certain lines in the process. So again, I think some of that is just theater. but I think there is this much bigger American Israel crisis right now, which is going to be there probably after Netanyahu is gone and after Trump is gone as well, where you have a feeling not just now amongst left wing Democrats, even some more moderate Democrats, but the isolationist wing of the Republican partarty as well, some influential MGa people who think Israel dragged the United States into this war, sold Trump on a plan, a strategy was never workable from the start and sure enough, didn't work There's a lot of anger at Israel over this war. and you know, we've done polling and I've seen polling elsewhere as well, that M more Americans feel Israel is a beneficiary of this war than feel America is a beneficiary of this war. That's not a good place I think, for Israel to be The American people think America is now fighting wars essentially on behalf of another country. I think Isra realel beyond not achieving the goals it's set out to achieve in the war itself in Iran has done real damage to its standing with its closest ally. Benjamin Netnya who is 've led Israel for such a long time now Um There are likely to be elections in the coming months Um, How Will those elections impact how Israel functions, how this relationship between the U. S. and Israel Obviously, that will depend on the outcome. and as we've seen before in Israel, sometimes even having an election doesn't produce an outcome. Sometimes you have to have another one afterwards because no one can form a government So we don't know the exact composition of the parties that are going to run. We don't know exactly when the election is going to be I do think though going into it, One thing that has been very striking, not just over the past few months of this war, but really since october seventh is that No mainstream Israeli Jewish politician, no one who is likely to be a candidate for the premiersship in Israel has really articulated a fundamentally different strategy from the one that Netanyahu has pursued. They have criticized him on tactical grounds, whether it's the way he has pursued the war in Gaza, his lack of attention to the hostage issue in Gaza, the way he's managed relations with the United States. I mean, things like this he's been criticized for, but Fundamentally, what would you do differently? Would you be willing to, for example withdraw Israeli troops from not just Lebanon, but from Syria where they're occupying a chunk of territory and engage in really serious diplomatic outreach to The governmentss there questions like that. No one has made a clean break. Why is that Everyone's always afraid to Is Netanyahu perceived as strong even if also problematic He's been perceived that way, right? This is someone whose whole stick throughout all of his many, many campaigns has been that he is the master when it comes to foreign policy and security policy you know, he's the only one who can keep you safe. But we have this proof that that's not true now We do and I think a great many Israelis believe it, but also I think if you're running in his lane, if you are trying to pull right wing voters or even center right voters away from the Liud partarty right now you don't want to be seen as too soft on security issues. So maybe voters think Netanyahu has bungled everything. He's done a terrible job, but if you're the politician who sounds too dovish you're going to be attacked from the right for that and you worry that that may not Pew electorally. But the result of that is you have all these people who might run for the top job in Israel in a few months. And it's really not clear what any of them would do differently from the man who's been in the job for the pastteen years It's so interesting. It sounds like what you're saying is Even if Benjamin Netanyahu leaves as prrime minister Netanyahu. ism is now like the dominant strain of political thought. in hissue We'll see. I mean, Netanyahuism has become the dominant strain of thought, I think partly because he has just been in power for so long and he has been such a commanding presence in Israeli politics. It's like trying to imagine the Republican Party without Donald Trump, which at this point has become very, very hard to do. Now when Netanyahou passes from the scene when he finally loses an election and he's finally replaced, and maybe he'll retire one day. Maybe he'll decide he's had it, then I don't know, move to Florida and run for Senate there where he might be more popular. Um, point maybe you do have a change. A that point, once electoral politics in Israel are no longer a referendum on Bibi Netanyu There will be some space for alternative ideas. On the other hand, it's also a country that has moved considerably to the right. in recent years. And there isn't exactly a big left wing constituency clamoring for you know a more doavish approach on security matters I'm really grateful for your time Thanks for having me Greg Carlstrom is a Middle East correspondent over at the economist And that's the show What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeeline Ducharm, and Patrick Fort Pai Jsburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and what next TVD Mil Lo Bell is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is our senior Director of podcast Operations. And I'm Mary Harris. They're talking down a bllue sky. I'm not Mary Harris. Thanks for listen get you back here Next time