Al JazeeraBy Javad ZarifTuesday July 28, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to an image of a bomb while addressing the 67th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City on September 27, 2012 [Lucas Jackson/Reuters]
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets US President Donald Trump, history offers strong grounds to expect that he will press against any attempt to halt the hostilities in the Gulf. More than five decades of regional diplomacy point in that direction.
Declassified intelligence records, accounts by senior American officials, investigative journalism and academic research add weight to this assessment. Together, they reveal a recurring pattern in which successive Israeli governments, frequently aided by elements of the country’s security establishment, have worked to derail efforts to end regional wars or ease tensions between the United States and Iran.
The tactics have shifted over time — encompassing intelligence activity, public diplomacy, lobbying and political pressure — but the strategic aim has remained notably stable: maintain confrontation between Washington and Tehran and resist diplomatic initiatives that might reduce Israel’s influence over US policy in the Middle East.
Keeping the Iran-Iraq war alive
This strategic logic took shape during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. Scholars including Trita Parsi and David Menashri have argued that Israeli thinking at the time favoured denying either Iran or Iraq a decisive victory and preventing an early end to the conflict. From that standpoint, a drawn-out war would drain both regional powers economically and militarily.
Research into wartime media indicates that Israeli state broadcasting also played a role in the wider struggle for psychological influence. When Iranian decision-makers appeared reluctant, broadcasts stressed Iraqi weaknesses; when Iraqi and Arab audiences needed reassurance, they highlighted Iranian reversals. Scholars of wartime communications say this messaging was intended to shape expectations on both sides, harden resistance to political compromise and strengthen incentives to keep fighting.
‘Goodwill begets goodwill’
The 1991 release of Western hostages in Lebanon seemed to create an opening, however limited, for managing tensions between Iran and the United States. Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani had encouraged my cooperation with international mediation, and many expected the administration of US President George H W Bush to respond in keeping with his 1989 inaugural promise that “goodwill begets goodwill”.
That opening was ultimately lost, according to United Nations mediator Giandomenico Picco, who coordinated much of the hostage diplomacy. In Man Without a Gun, Picco says Israeli officials disrupted parts of the negotiated framework. Israel declined to carry out agreed arrangements for releasing Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners, deliberately obstructing the freedom of the remaining American hostages.
As Iran’s negotiator, I was abruptly informed by Picco that Israel had frozen the process until the fate of missing Israeli servicemen was resolved. That issue belonged to a separate search arrangement concerning four missing Iranian diplomats and an Israeli airman, all of whom had disappeared in Lebanon nearly a decade earlier.
Picco also argues that these disputes made it harder for Washington to offer a positive response, even after we secured the final American hostage’s release through other means. Meanwhile, domestic political pressure — chiefly from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), including disputes over US loan guarantees for Israel — narrowed the Bush administration’s room for diplomatic manoeuvre.
From our vantage point, Washington’s language about reciprocal confidence-building had not translated into action. The result was deeper mistrust that would weigh on future negotiations.
The ‘axis of evil’
After the September 11 attacks, Iran and the United States briefly pursued overlapping goals in Afghanistan. Contrary to a widely held account, Washington did not spend the weeks following September 11, 2001 assembling a broad international alliance to remove the Taliban.
As the late US diplomat James Dobbins put it, “It would be more accurate to state that the United States moved to join an existing coalition [put in place by Iran] that had been trying to overthrow the Taliban since the mid-1990s.” Dobbins and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell also said Iran’s role in the Bonn negotiations proved crucial to establishing the post-Taliban political order.
Within weeks, however, Israel helped drive a sharp change in Washington’s political climate. Israel staged the interception of the Karine A ship in the first week of January 2002 with extensive publicity, using it to portray Iran as the region’s primary long-term security threat. David Frum, who helped draft President George W Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address placing Iran alongside Iraq and North Korea in an “axis of evil”, later recalled that Israeli strategic thinking influenced the wider debate over Iran’s inclusion in that formulation.
Throughout that period — especially around the February 2002 summit between Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — senior Israeli officials argued in public and private that Iran, rather than Iraq, presented the more serious long-term danger.
Reporting at the time by The Washington Post indicated that the message was repeatedly delivered to senior Bush administration figures. Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, for example, explicitly told the administration that Iran was “more dangerous than Iraq”. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, later confirmed that Israeli communications consistently warned Washington: “Iraq is not the enemy — Iran is the enemy”.
The nuclear file and the JCPOA
The 2003 removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein transformed the regional balance but did little to ease Israel’s concerns about Iran. As the immediate likelihood of military confrontation diminished, Iran’s nuclear programme moved to the centre of Israeli intelligence and diplomatic activity. From then on, disputes over Iranian nuclear work largely eclipsed broader discussions of regional security.
Journalists and former intelligence officials have said Mossad arranged for information about Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility to reach the international community through intermediaries, concealing its initial source. Journalist Seymour Hersh, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and others have suggested that Israeli intelligence in 2002 intentionally supplied classified details about Natanz to the Iranian exile organisation MEK/NCRI — then still on the US State Department’s “terrorist” list. The alleged purpose was to trigger an international crisis, compel action by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and preserve plausible deniability.
Israel pursued a sustained policy of generating intelligence on Iran to prevent the nuclear dispute from being resolved at the IAEA and UN Security Council between 2004 and 2012, and again from 2018 onward. In 2004, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) provided Western intelligence agencies and the IAEA with the contents of a laptop said to hold thousands of pages of secret technical material. Western governments presented the documents as powerful evidence that Iran had conducted weapons-related research, but doubts persisted. Mohamed ElBaradei, then the IAEA director-general, later wrote that significant questions about their provenance were never fully answered. Investigative journalists likewise said the chain of custody was unclear, identifying Israel’s Mossad as the original source that allegedly routed the material through the MEK to obscure its direct origins and maintain plausibility.
The 2015 conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) ushered in perhaps the most consequential phase of diplomacy between Washington and Tehran since 1979. Israeli leaders, however, saw the accord as both a breakdown of Israel’s securitisation campaign and a precursor to the United States’ “pivot to Asia” strategy. Netanyahu launched an exceptionally public effort to defeat the agreement in Washington and abroad. The campaign culminated in his speech to the US Congress, delivered without an invitation from the White House — a highly unusual intervention in America’s domestic political debate.
Memoirs by senior US officials document repeated friction between Washington and Jerusalem over possible military action. Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates recounts recurring disputes over Israeli pressure for unilateral strikes. His successor, Leon Panetta, later publicly cautioned against policies that could leave the US with no realistic option except escalation. Former President Barack Obama similarly recalled that Netanyahu repeatedly advocated a more confrontational course than his administration considered wise.
Pulling Trump towards conflict
Donald Trump’s election brought ideas once considered outside the US foreign-policy mainstream into the heart of government decision-making. In 2018, Netanyahu publicly unveiled what Israeli officials called a collection of nuclear documents stolen from Iran. His presentation became a key part of the administration’s wider argument for abandoning the JCPOA.
Washington’s exit from the nuclear accord soon gave way to the “maximum pressure” campaign, which paired far-reaching economic sanctions with a steadily more confrontational regional stance.
By early 2020, the relationship had advanced well beyond financial pressure. The US strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani represented a major escalation and fundamentally reshaped regional deterrence.
Later reporting indicated that some US officials believed Israeli preferences had helped push policy down an increasingly confrontational path. Accounts published after the strike also described concerns inside the administration that Washington could be drawn into a wider regional war under conditions it did not fully control.
Several officials subsequently voiced fears that unilateral Israeli operations might create a situation in which political or military pressure would all but compel direct US intervention.
Undermining the 2026 memorandum
Negotiations over the memorandum of understanding reached in Islamabad earlier this year show how these longstanding forces continue to influence regional diplomacy.
Public disputes over the memorandum quickly spread beyond the negotiating process. Senior officials in Washington and Tehran both accused external actors of working to erode political backing for the deal.
Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this month, US Vice President JD Vance said: “There are some people within [the Israeli] system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely”. Vance alleged that networks linked to the Israeli government were financing American political figures and deliberately depicting the negotiation as a “surrender” to render it politically poisonous.
The diplomatic struggle also extended into information operations. Israeli media reports have detailed Israeli digital influence capabilities aimed at Persian-language online debate and portraying the memorandum as a humiliation for Iran. Iranian officials recently said in public that these efforts were designed to deepen domestic polarisation and undermine political support for negotiations.
This is only part of the historical record, but it exposes a repeated pattern surrounding attempts to manage US-Iranian differences — many of which I helped lead.
More than four decades of direct involvement in efforts to stop those fundamental disputes from turning into open hostility and full-scale war have led me to an unavoidable conclusion: initiatives to contain tensions between Washington and Tehran have consistently taken place within a larger strategic struggle. That environment has been shaped not only by repeated American failures to fulfil commitments, but also by regional players whose definitions of stability in the Middle East differ profoundly.
The record indicates that successive Israeli governments have repeatedly considered enduring confrontation between the US and Iran strategically advantageous. If future diplomacy is to escape the fate of so many earlier initiatives, both sides must recognise and counter the systematic manipulation of intelligence, media and domestic politics across the divide.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Hiiraan Online’s editorial stance.
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Javad Zarif is a professor of Global Studies at University of Tehran. He is a former Vice President and Foreign Minister of Iran and the co-architect of the Iran nuclear deal
