Sunday looked like a bleak day for Israel.

As talks opened in Burgenstock, Switzerland, on a US-Iran deal that could hardly be more high stakes for the country, Jerusalem was nowhere to be found, or heard.

Relegated to the role of armchair quarterback, Israel could only figuratively yell at the TV as its closest ally — the country that joined it in war against its arch-nemesis Iran some 100 days ago — began formally negotiating with Tehran on a permanent end to the conflict.

As US Vice President JD Vance arrived at the Qatari-owned resort where talks were being held Sunday morning, he was greeted by delegations from Doha, Islamabad, and Tehran, all of whom have a seat at the table.

The first item on their agenda, according to reports, was an emergency session on Israel’s conflict with the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon. Of the two states and one terror proxy with skin in the game, only Hezbollah, closely controlled and funded by Iran, could be said to have anything resembling representation in the negotiations.

After two and a half years of steadily weakening Iran and its proxies, and proving itself as a powerful regional actor that could fight as an equal alongside the world’s superpower, Israel is now seeing Tehran gain influence over both Washington and the regional agenda.

The US-Iran memorandum of understanding and the talks now unfolding in Switzerland remain fresh and vulnerable to collapse. Yet even if they hold, they are unlikely to mark the end of Israel’s fight against Iran so much as the start of a new phase — one in which Israel’s next confrontation may be more solitary than it once hoped.

As negotiators in Switzerland prepared to discuss the future of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, the absence of both Israel and Lebanon suggests worringly that Jerusalem had been placed in much the same category as Lebanon’s weak central government — or, more troublingly, as an American proxy much as Hezbollah is Iran’s.

While many in Israel understood that any end to the war would ultimately require American-brokered compromises, the rhetoric coming out of Washington has been strikingly unsympathetic to Israeli concerns.

Vance, who did not mention Israel at all in his opening remarks at the negotiations, has made little effort to hide his impatience with the US’s “very small partner,” in the words of his boss US President Donald Trump.

He has dismissed concerns over the memorandum of understanding and emerging nuclear negotiations, telling reporters he found “this whole freakout in Israel a little bit odd” and a sign of unwarranted “mistrust.”

He has argued that “you can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem,” urged Israeli critics to “wake up and smell the reality,” and, at a recent White........

© The Times of Israel