The MOU may end the war, but it has not ended the danger – and Israel knows the job is only half-done

Few people expected the US-Israel war against Iran to end this way. I certainly did not.

At the beginning, there was a rare, almost electric clarity in the air. After years of threats, proxies, rockets, drones, tunnels, enrichment, denial, delay, and diplomatic theatre, something decisive was finally being done. Not because war is desirable. It is not. Not because military action is clean. It never is. But because the Iranian regime had built an architecture of danger so vast that doing nothing had become its own form of recklessness.

The goals were not mysterious. Stop Iran’s nuclear march. Break its ballistic missile shield. Cut oxygen to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the wider proxy empire. Reopen the future for a region held hostage by Tehran’s revolutionary ambitions. Give the Iranian people, long brutalized by their own rulers, a glimpse of daylight.

And then came the MOU. Suddenly, the music changed.

Instead of strategic completion, we have strategic suspension. Instead of dismantlement, we have delay. Instead of a transformed regional equation, we have a document that appears to push the hardest questions into another 60 days of talks, while offering Iran immediate breathing space, oil access, possible funds, and the political oxygen of survival. Iran’s nuclear stockpile is not clearly removed. Its ballistic missiles remain. Hezbollah remains. Hamas remains. The regime remains. The problem has not been solved; it has been rolled carefully, ceremonially, and dangerously down the road.

That is why Israelis are seething. And they are right to be.

Israel was not a side issue in this war. Israel was the target at the heart of the matter. Israeli civilians were the intended victims of Iran’s long strategy. Israeli towns, northern communities, soldiers, families, reservists, children, and evacuees have lived under the shadow of Tehran’s proxies for years. Yet, in the critical diplomatic moment, Israel appears to have been treated less as a sovereign partner than as a security attachment to an American bargain.

This is not how allies should be handled.

I say that with deep respect for the United States. No serious friend of Israel can casually dismiss the scale of American support, military........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)