What Netanyahu and Israel want out of the war with Iran

0:00Daniel Shapiro:It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, what Israel wants out of the war with Iran. Now they've called it quits, so they're going to just leave each other alone for another week or something. As he was about to get onto a plane early Tuesday morning, President Trump said that Israel and Iran had both agreed, thanks to his pressure, to stop attacking each other. And he said a deal to end the war was maybe only two or three days away. We're in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal. There is no evidence that a deal is close. And in fact, hours later, Israel's military struck sites across southern Lebanon, where it has been fighting the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.

0:49Daniel Shapiro:One of Iran's demands in a peace deal is the end of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Over the weekend, Israel fired missiles at Iran because Iran fired missiles at Israel because Israel had fired at Hezbollah targets near Beirut because Hezbollah had fired on northern Israel. You get the picture. That is Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking Monday in a video statement and saying our battle against Iran and Hezbollah is still not finished. In the last 24 hours, they tried to impose a new equation upon us, and it is an equation I find intolerable and unacceptable. Consider this.

1:34Daniel Shapiro:Trump and Netanyahu started the war with Iran together. Today, Trump wants a speedy end to that war. Netanyahu does not appear to agree.

1:48Daniel Shapiro:From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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2:15Daniel Shapiro:It's Consider This from NPR. President Trump has claimed he doesn't care about the midterm elections with respect to how the war with Iran will impact Republicans running for office. But the war is not popular in the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu also faces elections this fall, and the Israeli public is pressing for military defeat of Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah. We're going to hear now from someone with deep experience navigating U.S.-Israel relations, Daniel Shapiro. He was U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Obama administration, and he is here with me in the studio today.

2:54Welcome, Ambassador. Thanks. Good to be with you. So President Trump's top priority seems to be ending the war. He just this morning said a peace deal is two or three days away. It's not clear exactly what he's basing that on, but that's what he says. Does Israel share that goal, ending the war and ending it fast? The Israeli preference would be to continue the war. Why? They would like to see Iran essentially defeated in a more lasting way. The war started with the target really of bringing down the regime, at least from the Israeli perspective, certainly doing devastating damage to the nuclear program so that it could not be reconstituted in any significant way.

3:37and wiping out a ballistic missile threat that had really emerged as a very significant strategic problem for Israel. In the end, once Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, that became the primary strategic objective for the United States because it was causing global economic chaos, driving gas prices up at home, creating political problems for President Trump. So that's a divergence between U.S. and Israeli interests, which you can see playing out now in the way the prime minister talks about what he wants to achieve, tried to do some additional strikes just over the weekend, and President Trump's desire to wind this down.

4:11So what you're saying is the U.S., or President Trump, to be more specific, President Trump would like to end the war, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, let's get a peace deal, let's get it done. Israel wants something bigger, more permanent. If those two goals have now diverged, does the U.S. hold more leverage here in terms of how and when this war ends? I'm thinking of another thing President Trump just said recently about Netanyahu, and I'm quoting, he'll do whatever I want him to do. Certainly, President Trump has the upper hand here. Prime Minister Netanyahu has portrayed himself to the Israeli people as Donald Trump's best friend, right hand, and them as a duo who together are making decisions on the Middle East's future.

4:55Now that that divergence has opened up, it's very difficult for the prime minister to present himself still as deeply aligned with the president. But he can't really go against him. He has so fused his political identity with his relationship with President Trump, and he's now heading into a very challenging election, that if he were to be belittled in some way or represented as the junior partner who takes orders from President Trump, essentially compromising Israel's ability to make sovereign decisions in its own security because President Trump says no, that's very damaging for him politically.

5:29Daniel Shapiro:As a longtime watcher of Benjamin Netanyahu, how surprising have these last few days been to you in terms of watching Israel's prime minister being, to use your word, belittled by the president of the United States? Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have responded the same way during the Obama presidency when I was the ambassador. He would not have responded the same way during President Biden's administration either. He, at that time, may have felt he had leverage both in his own domestic politics to be in a fight with those presidents who is easier to criticize as somehow falling short on their commitment to Israel security.

6:05He also might have had leverage in Washington where he could have gone to Republicans to criticize a Democratic president. Now he has nowhere to go in Washington. No Republicans are going to go against President Trump. We know that. And Democrats want the war to end. And at home, he therefore doesn't have the same leverage to position himself in opposition to an American president. It would actually do damage to him. So I want to stay with elections. Both countries have elections coming up this fall. President Trump, as we mentioned, would like to bring this unpopular war, unpopular here in the U.S., to a close.

6:38And he would ideally like to do it before the midterms. It sounds like it's different in Israel. Why? Trevor Burrus Israeli since October 7th when Hamas attacked from Gaza have adopted a security doctrine that says threats that could present themselves in that deadly a way must be eliminated. They can't simply be tolerated over the border. So they've, of course, conducted the war in Gaza ferociously. They've also conducted a war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which has attacked across Israel's northern border and had several rounds and exchanges with Iran. And the idea is that those threats need to actually be eliminated, not just managed.

7:18So going into an election when it's clear that on none of those fronts have the threats been eliminated, that's a very frustrating place for Israelis to find themselves and certainly cuts against Prime Minister Netanyahu's presentation of himself to the Israeli public as the one bleeder who can manage Israel security. The one who can keep you safe. One who can keep you safe. That's right.

7:38Daniel Shapiro:Help us understand because it is so complicated. The way that the two fronts are intertwined, by which I mean the Iran war launched together by the U.S. and Israel and Israel's fight in Lebanon, they're separate. But they're deeply related. How much of Netanyahu's calculus in terms of continuing the fight in Lebanon has to do with he doesn't really want the war to end in Iran, at least not on the terms that President Trump might be willing to end it. In fairness, Hezbollah, which really is a proxy of Iran and pursuing Iran's interest, not Lebanon's interest. In fact, the Lebanese government has declared itself against what Hezbollah is doing.

8:20Hezbollah has continued to attack Israel and so any Israeli leader would feel they'd have to respond. And it is true that Iran has tried to link these two and say that it will only agree to a ceasefire if it knows that Israel has stopped its campaign against Hezbollah. But it works the other way as well. If Netanyahu continues the fight, and this happened earlier in the week when he decided to strike in the Beirut suburbs that Hezbollah has as a stronghold, Iran decided that was a red line for them. They launched missiles against Israel. That led to the exchange back and forth since President Trump had to sort of blow the whistle and shut down.

8:56So for both Iran and for Israel, Lebanon becomes a theater which is actually linked and can keep this war going or will have to be embedded into the ceasefire that ends the war altogether. One other factor to mention here is that Netanyahu has corruption charges hanging over him. These are charges that go back years, back to 2020, allegations of bribery, of fraud and so forth. Explain how those charges may be factoring into his political calculations. Listeners may be surprised to understand that the war might not be the number one issue on many Israeli voters' minds. You mentioned the corruption charges that have been part of a trial that has been going on for years.

9:40Also very controversial is that Netanyahu seems prepared to provide a blanket and permanent exemption from military service to a portion of his coalition, The ultra-Orthodox parties whose men, instead of serving in the military, prefer to spend their time in religious studies. Very unpopular with the rest of Israeli society that has been serving for hundreds of days during the course of this war and that thinks the burden should be shared equally. So many Israelis are angry at Netanyahu for those two things. And what he may think is that the way he holds on to right-wing voters who are unhappy with his giving away of this draft exemption, who are unhappy with his corruption, but still concerned about Israel's security and addressing the threats.

10:25And so maybe he can hold on to those swing voters, potential swing voters, by continuing the fight against these hated enemies. I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is that what holds true in U.S. politics is also true in many other countries, including Israel. When a leader, when a president finds himself constrained by courts, Congress here in the U.S., he has more leeway on foreign policy. The same is true in Israel. It sounds like a prime minister, Netanyahu. It's true, although it doesn't cut cleanly. Many Israelis are also exhausted by these wars and are perhaps coming to the reluctant conclusion that there isn't going to be a definitive outcome.

11:05And these enemies aren't going to be just defeated completely. And again, they'll have to return to a policy of having to manage those threats. So while it's true that that inclination perhaps pushes him to try to continue the war, it may serve his politics in the short term. A broader look at Israeli society shows a society really exhausted and needing a break. And I actually think in the end his pursuit of fruitless campaigns, which are not actually advancing toward final outcomes, may in the end become as much of a burden on him as some of the other burdens he's carrying around the military draft issue and around corruption.

11:47Daniel Shapiro:So what is the relationship between these two men now, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump? How much of what we perceive from here as what looks like a rift is political theater versus real disagreement? There's some of both. It's clear there's a divergence of interest. That's absolutely clear. There's also a little bit of a good cop, bad cop game that the two of them have played. They talk very frequently. And so it's certainly possible to have disagreements but continue to be partners. We've seen that before. But that notion that Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted to present going into this election to the Israeli public is that he was Donald Trump's best friend and essentially equal partner in reshaping the Middle East.

12:29That has been really damaged. And at the moment when Donald Trump says, we are stopping, and when it's very clear that he's doing that over Netanyahu's objection and essentially giving instructions, and sometimes in a belittling way, as Trump is capable of, that really is damaging to Netanyahu's public presentation. That is former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro. He's now an Atlantic Council Fellow.

12:53Daniel Shapiro:Thanks for coming in. Thank you. This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Alejandra Marquez-Hantze with audio engineering by Hannah Glovna. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadanan. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. This is Eric Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things. But most times, the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know. I've never seen this happen. Is this true? This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week, This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.