As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to meet US President Donald Trump, there is good reason to expect that he will use the meeting to discourage any move towards ending hostilities in the Gulf. This expectation is grounded in a historical record spanning more than five decades.

Declassified intelligence, memoirs by senior American officials, investigative reporting, and academic scholarship further reinforce this assessment. Taken together, these sources point to a recurring pattern: successive Israeli governments, often with the support of elements within the country’s security establishment, have repeatedly sought to obstruct efforts to end regional conflicts or attempts to manage tension between the United States and Iran.

While the methods have varied — from intelligence operations and public diplomacy to lobbying and political pressure — the strategic objective has remained strikingly consistent: preserving a state of confrontation between Washington and Tehran while opposing diplomatic initiatives that could weaken Israel’s leverage in shaping US Middle East policy.

Prolonging the Iran-Iraq war

The logic underpinning this approach emerged during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Several scholars, including Trita Parsi and David Menashri, argue that Israeli strategic thinking at the time favoured preventing either Iran or Iraq from securing a decisive victory or ending the war.  A prolonged conflict, from this perspective, would leave both regional rivals militarily and economically weakened.

According to several studies of wartime media, Israeli state broadcasting also became part of the broader contest for psychological influence. Broadcasts emphasised Iraqi vulnerabilities when Iranian decision-makers appeared hesitant while highlighting Iranian setbacks when Iraqi and Arab audiences required reassurance. Scholars of wartime communications argue that this messaging sought to influence public expectations on both sides, making political compromise more difficult and reinforcing incentives to continue the conflict.

‘Goodwill begets goodwill’

The release of Western hostages in Lebanon in 1991 appeared to offer an opportunity for modest conflict management in US-Iranian relations. Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani had encouraged my own cooperation with international mediation efforts, and many observers expected US President George H W Bush’s administration to reciprocate in accordance with his inaugural pledge in 1989 that “goodwill begets goodwill”.

According to United Nations mediator Giandomenico Picco, who coordinated much of the hostage diplomacy, that opportunity ultimately went unrealised. In his book Man Without a Gun, Picco argues that Israeli officials foiled aspects of the negotiated framework. Deliberately impeding the release of remaining American hostages, Israel refused to implement agreed-upon arrangements involving the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners.

As the Iranian negotiator, I was suddenly notified by Picco that Israel had stalled the process, pending the resolution of the fate of missing Israeli servicemen, which was the subject of a separate search arrangement involving the fate of four missing Iranian diplomats and an Israeli airman, all of whom had been missing for nearly a decade in........

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