israel, iran, trump, netanyahu

The United States went to extraordinary lengths to protect Iran's negotiators from assassination, and the country it asked to protect them from was its closest ally in the region.

"I can't recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel."

— Trita Parsi, executive vice president, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

The New York Times reported Thursday that the Trump administration harbored serious fears that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran's top negotiators during delicate ceasefire talks, including Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The concerns were so acute that the United States asked other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility of Israeli action against the two officials.

The reporting, later corroborated by The Washington Post, lays bare what should have been obvious from the start: Israel's alignment with American diplomatic objectives during this war was always conditional at best. The US and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran in late February 2026, killing dozens of senior Iranian officials. But by late March, both countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list, clearing a path for high-level negotiations.

Israel apparently decided this path was unacceptable.

The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Islamabad to meet with US Vice President JD Vance. Israeli intelligence services were monitoring the trip and, according to the reporting, Israel remained interested in targeting the Iranian parliament speaker despite American assurances that he was off-limits. The Washington Post reported that cracks between the US and Israeli approaches to the war followed Israel's assassination of top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March, a move that left the Trump administration with progressively fewer people to talk to on the Iranian side.

"They've wiped out everybody," Trump told reporters in late March, suggesting Israel's assassination campaign was making it difficult to find potential negotiating partners. The president's frustration was not performative. It was the complaint of a leader whose ally was systematically eliminating the very people he needed for diplomacy.

Translation: when your ally kills everyone you could make a deal with, you cannot make a deal.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the reporting that Israel "is a state that, on paper, is a US partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine US diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the US engages with in crucial negotiations."

Parsi's diagnosis cuts to the structural problem that has defined every major US-Israel relationship in living memory. Israel receives over $3.8 billion in annual American military aid. It hosts US military facilities. Its leadership maintains close personal ties to Republican donors and Israeli-American lobbying organizations. And yet, when the moment comes to coordinate policy, Israeli leaders have repeatedly acted in ways that directly contradict American diplomatic objectives.

The pattern stretches back through the Reagan administration's tolerance of Israeli settlement expansion, the Bush-era silence on Gaza's siege, and the Obama administration's failed attempt to contain Israeli actions during the 2014 Gaza war. But plotting to assassinate the specific individuals the United States is trying to negotiate with represents a new escalation in this long-running failure of alliance management.

Benjamin Netanyahu has clear reasons to oppose a negotiated settlement. Parsi noted that the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran has come at a steep political cost for the Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu's prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering Trump's favor, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position.

"And of course," Parsi added, "if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as prime minister and face trial over corruption charges."

Netanyahu is not just fighting for political survival. He is fighting for personal liberty. Every diplomatic avenue that might end the war narrows his window for reelection. Every peace deal strengthens his domestic political opponents. The math is simple: war serves Netanyahu. Peace endangers him.

This is not a bug in the system. It is how the system works when personal survival takes precedence over national interest.

The Lebanon dimension compounds the problem. Netanyahu remains entrenched in southern Lebanon, where Israeli troops continue their occupation despite the ceasefire framework. Visiting occupied southern Lebanon earlier this week, Netanyahu declared to Israeli soldiers that "our insistence is that we will not leave... until the threat is removed." Iran has highlighted the Lebanon occupation as a key factor in the US-Iran negotiations, making Netanyahu's refusal to withdraw a direct obstacle to the diplomatic process the United States is trying to advance.

Twenty-two Democrats joined the full GOP caucus to block a Lebanon War Powers Resolution in Congress, enabling what one analysis described as "Netanyahu's sabotage of the US-Iran ceasefire." The American political system, already deeply captured by pro-Israel lobbying, proved unwilling to rein in its most powerful ally even as that ally actively undermined American diplomacy.

The broader context is equally grim. US casualties in Iran continue to rise, according to reporting from The Intercept. The American public receives little information about the war's true cost, while the political machinery at home grinds forward, largely untouched by the consequences of its foreign policy choices.

The assassination plot represents something larger than a single intelligence operation gone rogue. It is the logical endpoint of an alliance in which one partner has so much leverage, so much domestic political protection, and so little accountability that it can openly work against the diplomatic objectives of the country funding its military. The United States asked third parties to protect the people it needed for peace. The country it was worried about sits 5,500 miles away, receiving billions of dollars a year in American weapons, and has spent the better part of two centuries proving it will always pursue its own interests first.

The question was never whether Israel would sabotage the peace process. The question was only how far it would go.