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 Lebanon.
Picco further contends that these disagreements complicated Washington’s ability to respond positively even after we found other means to ensure that the release of the final American hostage. At the same time, domestic political pressures, primarily from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — including debates surrounding US loan guarantees to Israel — limited the Bush administration’s diplomatic flexibility.
From our perspective, American rhetoric about reciprocal confidence-building had not been matched by policy, reinforcing a pattern of mistrust that would shape later negotiations.
The ‘axis of evil’
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Iran and the United States briefly found themselves pursuing overlapping objectives in Afghanistan. Despite widespread belief, the US did not spend the weeks after September 11, 2001 forging a broad international coalition to topple the Taliban.
As the late US diplomat James Dobbins explained, “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.” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Dobbins also described Iranian participation in the Bonn negotiations as instrumental in helping establish the post-Taliban political framework.
Within weeks, Israel orchestrated a dramatic shift in political dynamics in Washington. The interception of the Karine A ship in the first week of January 2002 was staged by Israel with huge publicity to argue that Iran represented the principal long-term security challenge in the region. David Frum, the speechwriter involved in drafting President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, in which he lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil”, later recalled that Israeli strategic thinking influenced broader discussions about how Iran should be framed within the Axis of Evil.
During this period, particularly at the time of the summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Bush in February 2002, senior Israeli officials argued publicly and privately that Iran—not Iraq—posed the more consequential long-term threat.
Contemporary reporting in The Washington Post suggests that these arguments were repeatedly conveyed to senior members of the Bush administration. For instance, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer explicitly briefed the Bush administration that Iran was “more dangerous than Iraq”. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, confirmed that Israeli communications consistently warned Washington: “Iraq is not the enemy — Iran is the enemy”.
The nuclear file and the JCPOA
The removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003 altered the regional balance but did not diminish Israeli concerns about Iran. As the immediate prospect of military confrontation receded, the Iranian nuclear programme increasingly became the central focus of Israeli diplomacy and intelligence efforts. From that point onward, debates over Iran’s nuclear activities largely displaced earlier discussions about broader regional security.
Several journalists and former intelligence officials have argued that Mossad arranged for information concerning Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility to reach the international community through indirect channels that allowed its original source to remain obscured. Journalist Seymour Hersh, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and others have suggested that Israeli intelligence deliberately passed classified information regarding the Natanz nuclear facility to the Iranian exile group MEK/NCRI in 2002 – while the group was still in the State Department’s terrorist list – to create an international emergency and force International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) action while maintaining plausible deniability.
Israel followed a persistent policy of consistently producing intelligence on Iran to prevent the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue at the IAEA and the Security Council from 2004 to 2012 and again from 2018 onward. In 2004, contents of a laptop allegedly containing thousands of pages of secret technical documents were turned over to Western intelligence services and the IAEA by the MEK. Western governments treated the documents as compelling evidence that Iran had pursued weapons-related research. Others remained unconvinced. Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA Director-General at the time, later wrote that important questions about provenance were never fully resolved. Several investigative journalists similarly argued that the chain of custody remained opaque. They pointed to Israel’s Mossad as the original source passing the files to the MEK to maintain plausibility and mask the direct origin.
The conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 opened perhaps the most significant period of diplomatic engagement between Washington and Tehran since 1979. Israeli leaders, however, viewed the agreement as the collapse of Israeli securitization effort as well as a prelude to the United States’ “pivot to Asia” strategy. Benjamin Netanyahu mounted an unusually visible campaign against the agreement both in Washington and internationally. His address to U.S. Congress without an invitation from the White House was the culmination of such rather unprecedented domestic campaign within the United States.
The conclusion of the JCPOA in 2015 opened perhaps the most significant period of diplomatic engagement between Washington and Tehran since 1979. Israeli leaders, however, viewed the agreement as the collapse of Israeli securitisation effort as well as a prelude to the United States’ “pivot to Asia” strategy.
Netanyahu mounted an unusually visible campaign against the agreement both in Washington and internationally. His address to US Congress without an invitation from the White House was the culmination of such rather unprecedented domestic campaign within the United States.
Memoirs published by senior American officials reveal recurring tensions between Washington and Jerusalem over the possibility of military action. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes repeated disagreements over Israeli pressure for unilateral strikes. Another Defense Secretary Leon Panetta later warned publicly against policies that might leave the United States with no practical alternative but escalation. Former President Barack Obama similarly recalled that Netanyahu consistently pressed for a more confrontational approach than his administration considered prudent.
Drawing Trump into conflict
With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, positions that had previously remained outside the American foreign-policy mainstream moved to the centre of decision-making. In 2018, Netanyahu publicly presented what Israeli officials described as a cache of nuclear documents stolen from Iran. The presentation became an important element in the administration’s broader case for withdrawing from the JCPOA.
The administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement soon evolved into the “Maximum Pressure” campaign, combining sweeping economic sanctions with an increasingly confrontational regional posture.
By early 2020, the relationship had moved beyond economic pressure. The US strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani marked a decisive escalation and fundamentally altered regional deterrence dynamics.
Subsequent reporting suggested that some American officials believed Israeli preferences had contributed to an increasingly confrontational policy trajectory. Accounts published after the strike also describe concern within the administration about the possibility of becoming committed to a wider regional conflict under circumstances Washington did not fully control.
Several officials later expressed concern that unilateral Israeli actions could create circumstances in which the United States would face overwhelming political or military pressure to intervene directly.
Derailing the 2026 memorandum
The negotiations surrounding the Memorandum of Understanding in Islamabad earlier this year illustrate how these historical dynamics continue to shape regional diplomacy.
Public disagreements over the memorandum soon extended beyond the negotiations themselves. Senior officials in both Washington and Tehran accused outside actors of attempting to undermine political support for the agreement.
During an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance stated: “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 accused Israeli government-linked networks of funding American political actors and intentionally framing the negotiation as a “surrender” to make it politically toxic.
Information operations also became part of the diplomatic contest. Israeli media reporting has described Israeli digital influence capabilities directed toward Persian-language online discourse presenting the memorandum as humiliating to Iran. Iranian officials have recently stated publicly that these activities sought to amplify domestic polarisation and weaken political support for negotiations.
I have reviewed only a portion of the historical record, one that reveals a recurring pattern in diplomatic efforts to manage US-Iran differences—efforts in many of which I played a leading role.
After more than four decades of direct involvement in efforts to prevent these fundamental differences from erupting into active hostility and all-out war, I have reached an inescapable conclusion: attempts to manage tensions between Washington and Tehran have repeatedly unfolded within a broader strategic contest. That context has been shaped not only by repeated US failures to honour its commitments but also by the actions of regional actors with profoundly different conceptions of what constitutes stability in the Middle East.
The historical record suggests that successive Israeli governments have repeatedly viewed sustained US-Iranian confrontation as strategically preferable. Recognising and countering this systemic manipulation of intelligence, media, and domestic politics on both sides of the divide is essential if future diplomatic initiatives are to avoid the fate of so many previous efforts.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.