From Israel's point of view, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed by Donald Trump and the Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, is a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The Israeli government is biting its tongue for the moment, but its allies in the media and among former officials are unleashing a stream of bitter denunciations of the terms of the deal and of what they see as America's abandonment of their most strategic ally in the region.
Early in the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was triumphant in announcing that Israel and the U.S. were "remaking the face of the Middle East."
“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.
“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”
Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, went so far as to compare the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — "a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared," writes the New York Times.
Indeed, the shock expressed by many prominent Israelis reflects a growing sense of trepidation as Trump negotiated the deal without consulting Jerusalem, leaving them to either acquiesce to a deal that they find totally unacceptable and risk angering Trump, or go it alone against Iran.
“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in an interview.
However, in a press meeting on Wednesday, President Trump specified that no U.S. dollars were going to Iran.
Trump sets the record STRAIGHT when it comes to giving Iran American dollars:
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 17, 2026
"We're not doing anything. We're not putting up money. Only if they're doing things right. If they're doing things right, if people want to invest, they can invest."
"When you talk about billions of… pic.twitter.com/PjBWhM6X4E
According to the MOU, Iran gets to keep its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to 60% while negotiations continue for its final disposition, leading some experts to fret that, with Iran's advanced centrifuge technology, it could create enough weapons-grade uranium to make a bomb in less than 10 days.
President Trump said the U.S. will resume bombing if Iran attempts to build a nuclear weapon.
It gets worse. New York Times:
Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. Some analysts said Iran had effectively chased the U.S. military out of the region, given the deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days.
Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
What really sticks in the craw of some Israeli government officials is that the U.S. blockade was close to causing an "imminent collapse" of the Iranian economy.
The Jerusalem Post reports that "ministers were told that Iran's economy had deteriorated sharply under the US-led naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and that the regime was approaching a critical point."
"The Iranians are now on the verge of economic collapse," cabinet ministers were told.
"There are shortages of basic goods and medicines, and long lines at gas stations," senior security officials reportedly said during Tuesday's cabinet meeting.
The U.S. plan to force the Iranians to cut their oil production, starving the government of critically needed cash, was beginning to work. "The Iranians began reducing oil production, meaning the initial stages of shutting down oil fields had begun," officials said.
The bitter truth is that the U.S. sanctions at the beginning of the 2010s were also sending the Iranian economy to the brink. Barack Obama rescued Tehran at the time by striking the nuclear deal, which gave them hundreds of billions of dollars and access to international financial channels, saving the government.
In truth, it's hard to know how close Iran was to "collapse." But the rush to ink a deal to end the war was not due to any foreign policy goals, but because of political necessity. The war was very unpopular among Trump's strongest supporters, and with the midterm elections coming in a few months, signing a deal may have avoided a GOP wipeout at the polls.
David Horowitz, former editor at the Jerusalem Post and current editor of The Times of Israel, didn't pull any punches in describing the deal as "a catastrophic capitulation to Iran’s aggressors" which "leaves Israel vulnerable and constrained."
The deal manifestly empowers and finances a mass-murdering regime. It elevates the Islamic Republic to a regional powerhouse. It abandons the Iranian people to whom Trump promised that help was on its way.
And it directly endangers and constrains Israel, with terminology that binds Israel to a ceasefire it had no part in negotiating: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, and their allies in the current war, by signing this Memorandum of Understanding, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. (italics added).”
Trump asserted in remarks at the G7 summit on Tuesday that Israel should be showering him with gratitude, since it is only thanks to him that we were not already eliminated in an Iranian nuclear assault.
“If it weren’t for the United States of America — with me, because Obama was the opposite — Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, 100 percent. And every smart person in Israel knows that,” Trump declared. “Without us, without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there’d be no Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did [in tackling Iran].”
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