Daniel sent us this one — and it's a question that's going to get some people in Jerusalem very uncomfortable. He's looking at the whiplash shift from joint US-Israel military action against Iran to Trump announcing a deal with Tehran, with Israel apparently blindsided and Netanyahu insisting everything's fine while his own officials are telling reporters they've been screwed. The core question is: what does Israel do if it's truly been sidelined? What calculus is being worked out right now in Jerusalem to safeguard Israeli interests against an Iranian threat that, by any honest accounting, the war didn't eliminate? And does acting unilaterally inevitably mean fraying the relationship with Washington that Israel depends on?
The first thing to understand is how fast this pivot happened. We're not talking about weeks. Axios reported on June eleventh that Trump's announcement caught Netanyahu completely by surprise — he'd been calling allies close to the administration just trying to figure out what was happening. A US source with direct knowledge said Netanyahu was "in the dark.
The prime minister of Israel, calling around like a journalist working sources.
And that's the diplomatic equivalent of finding out your business partner sold the company while you were in the bathroom. The Ynet piece from today, June thirteenth, has Israeli officials saying things I have never heard them say on the record. "Trump screwed us. We're in trouble. We're no longer in the loop and can't really influence anything.
That's a quote. That's not paraphrased.
Another senior official told Ynet, "No one is happy with this. We understand that it is not good for us and that it harms Israeli interests. What is troubling is that Israel cannot influence it. Its voice is not being heard.
The question of whether Israel has a seat at the table — the answer appears to be no, and Israel's own people are saying so. Which makes Netanyahu's public line interesting. He's insisting he's in complete agreement with Trump.
Those two things cannot coexist in the same logical space, as the prompt puts it. Either Netanyahu is in complete agreement with a deal his own security establishment considers catastrophic, or he's not in agreement and is saying so for political reasons while the actual reality is what those anonymous officials are describing. There's no third option.
Walk me through what's actually in this MOU, because the terms matter for understanding why Israel is panicking.
The memorandum of understanding — and I want to be precise here, it's not a treaty, it's an MOU, which is a less binding framework — has several components. The Strait of Hormuz reopens immediately, no tolls. There's a sixty-day ceasefire extension, including in Lebanon. And then nuclear negotiations begin. Iran would commit to a fifteen-to-twenty-year lockout on enrichment and dismantle nuclear sites, with sanctions relief staggered based on compliance. The US lifts its naval blockade within thirty days.
That's the US version.
That's the US version. Iran's Mehr News published a fourteen-point draft that's very different. Three hundred billion dollars in reconstruction payments from the US and allies. Release of twenty-four billion in frozen Iranian funds, half of it before negotiations even begin. And explicit exclusion of Iran's missile program and support for what they call resistance groups — Hezbollah, the Houthis — from final negotiations entirely.
The US called that a leak bearing no relation to the truth.
But here's what makes this hard to parse: we're in a fog-of-war situation where multiple contradictory statements are all official. Trump says the deal is done, signing Sunday. Iran's foreign ministry says they haven't reached a final decision. The text reportedly still needs approval from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Mojtaba, not Ali.
Right — Ali Khamenei died, his son Mojtaba succeeded him. And that succession is relevant here because Mojtaba's position is less consolidated than his father's was. He may need to show hardliners he didn't capitulate, which could explain the maximalist leak.
We have a deal that may or may not be finalized, that may or may not be signed Sunday, with terms that depend on which side you ask, where the US negotiating partner may not have the internal authority to deliver what's being promised. And Israel is supposed to trust this.
The specific thing Israel cannot trust is the nuclear material question. This is the core of it. The US says they've agreed on removing enriched material from Iran and destroying it, with the US taking part. Iran continues to speak only of diluting uranium inside the country under IAEA supervision — not removing it.
That's the difference between eliminating the threat and pausing it.
If fissile material stays inside Iran, even diluted, the knowledge and the infrastructure remain. Iran could reconstitute its program rapidly after Trump leaves office, or honestly, after the sixty-day window expires and negotiations collapse. Israel's fear is that this deal locks in an Iranian nuclear latency that becomes a permanent feature of the region.
Let's talk about how we got here, because the war was supposed to prevent exactly this outcome. Netanyahu led Israel into a joint military operation with the US — Operation Epic Fury, March twenty twenty-five — with stated objectives of eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat. And by his own defense minister's admission, that didn't happen.
Defense Minister Katz said on June twelfth — and I'm quoting from the Times of Israel — "Israel must ensure that, in the future as well, we retain the ability to act independently to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to prepare accordingly.
That's not a statement you make if the war succeeded. That's a statement you make when you're preparing for what the war failed to do.
It's doubly significant because Katz is saying this while Trump is announcing a deal. He's essentially telling his own military to prepare for operations that would blow up the agreement the American president is celebrating. That's not normal allied behavior.
It's the behavior of an ally that has concluded the patron is no longer acting in its interests.
Which brings us to the question at the heart of this prompt. If Israel has truly been abandoned by the United States on the Iran file, what does Jerusalem do? And I think there are really three options, none of them good.
Lay them out.
Option one: accept the deal, however grudgingly. Stay quiet during the sixty-day window, avoid anything that could be blamed for collapsing the talks, and hope that either the negotiations fail on their own — which is plausible given the gap between the US and Iranian positions — or that the final agreement addresses Israeli concerns in a way the MOU doesn't.
The hope-for-the-best option.
The risk is that the deal doesn't fail, Iran gets sanctions relief and money, keeps its missiles and proxies, keeps fissile material inside the country, and presents itself as having withstood American and Israeli military pressure without surrendering. Which, from Tehran's perspective, is a strategic victory. They traded temporary nuclear concessions for permanent economic relief and preserved their regional network.
Israel is less secure than before the war started.
Iran's deterrent — the Strait of Hormuz — worked. They weaponized a waterway, caused enough economic pain that the US prioritized reopening it over resolving the nuclear issue, and now they're negotiating from a position where their core leverage remains intact.
Option two is the unilateral strike. Katz has ordered the IDF to prepare for it. Israel has the capability — they've demonstrated it before, in Iraq in eighty-one, in Syria in two thousand seven. Iran's facilities are harder, deeper, more dispersed, but Israel has been planning for this for decades.
Catastrophic on multiple levels. If Israel strikes during the sixty-day window, it collapses the deal instantly. The US would almost certainly view it as a betrayal — Trump personally negotiated this, he's announcing it as a historic achievement. Having an ally bomb the other party to your agreement is not something any president can tolerate.
Especially not this president.
And the US response could range from diplomatic condemnation to something far more material. Israel depends on the US for munitions resupply, for intelligence sharing, for diplomatic cover at the UN. The Israel Hayom piece from today quotes a senior diplomatic source saying Israel's conduct "must be coordinated with the US." If Israel acts without coordination — and the US would never coordinate a strike against a country it just signed an MOU with — then that dependency becomes a vulnerability.
The US could cut off resupply.
But the risk exists, and it's existential. Israel cannot sustain extended military operations without American logistical support. The prompt calls it "politically, diplomatically, and militarily dependent" and that's accurate.
Option two is self-defense that might leave you unable to defend yourself in the future.
Option three is what I'd call the middle path, and it's the one that's probably being debated most intensely in Jerusalem right now. Don't strike during the sixty-day window. Use the window to make your case to Washington — privately, intensely, at every level. Document every Iranian violation. Push for the final agreement to include the missile program and the proxies. And extract a clear, explicit commitment from Trump that if negotiations fail, the military option returns to the table with full US participation.
The Israel Hayom source says Trump already told Netanyahu that.
He reportedly told Netanyahu that all the reasons that led the two countries to go to war — nuclear, missiles, and terrorist proxies — would be addressed, "otherwise there would be no deal." And that if negotiations fail and Iran resumes military activity, "the issue of toppling the regime would be on the table for decision-makers in Washington.
Netanyahu has private assurances.
Which is why he's publicly saying he's in complete agreement with Trump. He may be betting that the private assurances are real and the public MOU is theater — that Trump needs to show he's pursuing peace, but the deal will either collapse under its own contradictions or be enforced in a way that actually addresses Israeli concerns.
The problem with that bet is that it requires trusting Trump's follow-through on a deal where the implementation timeline extends past his presidency.
That's the core weakness. Even if Trump is completely sincere — and I'm not making a judgment either way — he can't bind his successor. If the nuclear lockout is fifteen to twenty years, that's three to four presidential terms. Iran knows this. Israel knows this. The MOU is only as durable as the next administration's willingness to enforce it.
Option three is essentially kicking the can down the road while hoping the road doesn't end at an Iranian bomb.
That may be the least bad option available. Because option one accepts a bad deal, option two risks a catastrophic rupture with Washington, and option three at least buys time while preserving the relationship.
Let me push on something. The prompt's author says his bet is that Israel will ultimately act unilaterally. And I think there's an argument that option three isn't really an option — it's just option two on a delay. Because if the negotiations fail, and Israel has spent sixty days watching Iran pocket sanctions relief while keeping its missiles and proxies, the pressure to act becomes overwhelming. And at that point, the US may not rejoin military action. Trump's assurance about toppling the regime being "on the table" is conditional and vague.
There's a domestic political dimension to this that we haven't touched. Netanyahu's leadership. The prompt calls it a total failure, and I think that framing deserves serious engagement.
The war didn't achieve its objectives. Israel is sidelined from the diplomatic process. His own officials are leaking that they've been screwed. That's not a strong position.
Netanyahu has staked his entire legacy on the Iran file. This is the man who gave that speech to Congress in twenty-fifteen warning about the Iran deal. He's spent decades positioning himself as the one leader who would never let Iran go nuclear. If this MOU leaves Iran with nuclear latency, missile capability, and an intact proxy network — after a war that Israel launched with American support — the historical verdict is brutal.
You've got to wonder what the conversation is like between him and Katz. Katz is publicly ordering the IDF to prepare for independent action. That's either coordinated messaging — good cop, bad cop with Washington — or it's a defense minister who doesn't trust his prime minister's diplomatic strategy.
Could be both. Katz needs to maintain credibility with the security establishment. If the IDF believes the political leadership has accepted a deal that leaves Iran nuclear-capable, morale collapses. The preparation order is partly signaling: to the military, to the public, to Washington, to Tehran.
"We are not bound by this.
And the Israel Hayom source explicitly says Israel will not be required to sign the agreement and can defend itself. That's the red line. But they also say Israel must coordinate with the US, and during the sixty-day window, Israel will have to "exercise caution" to avoid creating a crisis — meaning strikes in Beirut are unlikely unless there's a dramatic reason.
Hezbollah gets a sixty-day reprieve too.
That's part of the ceasefire extension. And for Israelis in the north, that's hard to swallow. They've been living under rocket fire, many were displaced, and now the country that helped them go to war is negotiating a deal that doesn't require Hezbollah to disarm.
Let's talk about the Strait of Hormuz, because I think it's the key to understanding why the US is doing this deal without Israel. You mentioned Iran weaponized the waterway. Explain what that actually means in practice.
Roughly twenty percent of global oil transits through the Strait of Hormuz. When Iran threatens to mine it or close it, oil prices spike. Brent crude had been elevated throughout the conflict. The moment news of a potential deal broke, Brent fell to around eighty-nine dollars a barrel, US WTI to about eighty-six fifty. South Korea's Kospi surged nearly eight percent. Japan's Nikkei gained over three percent.
Eight percent in a day.
That's enormous. Markets are screaming for this deal. Every major economy that imports oil — which is almost all of them — wants the Strait open. The US has a G7 summit coming up. The pressure to stabilize energy markets is immense.
Iran's leverage was real.
Real and effective. They demonstrated that even under military assault from the US and Israel, they could cause enough economic pain through asymmetric means to bring the superpower to the table. That's not something Iran's adversaries should feel comfortable about, because it's a playbook that works.
It works regardless of the nuclear question. Even if Iran had zero enrichment capability, the Strait leverage would still exist.
Which is why Israel's concern about the deal not addressing the missile program and proxies is so acute. The nuclear program is one threat vector. Iran has multiple. And the MOU, at least in its current form, only addresses one.
What does the actual calculus in Jerusalem look like right now? Paint me that picture.
I think it's probably three parallel tracks. Track one: Netanyahu works the relationship with Trump directly, relying on their personal history and the private assurances, trying to shape the final agreement from the inside even though Israel isn't formally at the table. Track two: Katz and the IDF prepare operational plans for a unilateral strike, both as a genuine option and as leverage — the message being "if this deal doesn't address our concerns, we have alternatives." Track three: Israeli intelligence and diplomatic corps engage every other actor — the Europeans, the Gulf states, Russia, China — trying to build a coalition of pressure that doesn't depend entirely on Washington.
The Gulf states are interesting here. They don't want a nuclear Iran either.
They also want the Strait open and energy markets stable. The Saudi position is probably quietly sympathetic to Israeli concerns while publicly supporting any deal that reduces regional tension. The Emiratis have been engaging with Iran economically. This isn't twenty-nineteen anymore — the Abraham Accords partners have their own Iran relationships now.
Israel can't necessarily count on them.
Israel can count on them to prefer no Iranian bomb, but not to stick their necks out for an Israeli position that the US has abandoned. That's the reality of being the junior partner in every relationship that matters.
Which brings us back to unilateral action. The prompt argues it's hard to see a way to do that without fraying the US relationship. Is there a scenario where Israel strikes and the relationship survives?
There are historical precedents. Israel struck the Iraqi reactor in eighty-one. The Reagan administration condemned it, supported a UN Security Council resolution, and then — quietly — the relationship continued and even deepened. The Begin Doctrine — never allow a hostile state to acquire nuclear weapons — has been US policy in practice even when the US wouldn't say so publicly.
The difference is that in eighty-one, the US wasn't in the middle of negotiating an agreement with Iraq.
That's the critical difference. And the US wasn't providing the kind of real-time military support to Israel that it has during this conflict. The dependency is deeper now. Israel has burned through munitions stocks. Resupply is coming from the US. If that gets cut off, Israel's ability to sustain operations against Iran — which is much larger and further away than Iraq was — becomes questionable.
The unilateral option exists, but it's a one-shot. You better destroy everything on the first try, because you might not get a second.
Iran's nuclear facilities are hardened, dispersed, and some are deep underground. The Fordow facility is built into a mountain. Even with the bunker busters the US has provided, complete destruction isn't guaranteed. You might set the program back years without eliminating it — and you've now collapsed the diplomatic process, alienated Washington, and unified Iran domestically against you.
That's the nightmare scenario. You strike, you don't fully eliminate the program, you lose American support, and Iran reconstitutes faster because they now have total domestic legitimacy to do so.
Which is why I think option three — the middle path — is probably where Jerusalem lands, at least for now. The sixty-day window gives them time. The deal might collapse on its own. The gap between the US and Iranian positions on nuclear material removal, on missiles, on the proxies — that gap is real and might be unbridgeable.
If it is bridgeable? If Iran makes just enough concessions on nuclear while keeping everything else, and Trump wants the win badly enough to sign?
Then Israel faces the decision for real. And my read of the Israeli security establishment is that they will not accept a deal that leaves Iran with nuclear latency. They've been too clear, for too long, about what they consider an existential threat. Katz's statement wasn't ambiguous. "Israel must retain the ability to act independently to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons." That's not conditional on American approval.
We're watching a slow-motion collision between an ally that has concluded its existence is at stake, and a patron that has concluded its economic and political interests lie elsewhere.
The collision happens the moment the MOU becomes a final agreement that Israel cannot live with. If that moment comes, the question isn't whether Israel acts — it's whether Washington understands why, and whether the relationship can survive the aftermath.
There's one more layer here that I think is worth pulling at. The prompt mentions that Netanyahu provides no visibility to his public about whether the potential agreement safeguards Israel's interests. The Israeli public went to war. They endured rocket fire, they sent their kids to fight, they accepted economic disruption. And now their prime minister is saying "I'm in complete agreement with Trump" while his officials are leaking that the deal is terrible. That's not sustainable.
The domestic legitimacy question is enormous. If this deal goes through and Iran is perceived to have won — sanctions relief, money, preserved capabilities — Netanyahu's coalition probably collapses. The right wing didn't sign up for this. Ben Gvir and Smotrich didn't join the government to watch Iran get a diplomatic victory.
If the coalition collapses, Israel goes to elections in the middle of a sixty-day negotiation window with Iran.
Which is exactly what Iran would want. Political chaos in Jerusalem, a caretaker government that can't make decisive national security decisions, the US dealing with an Israel that doesn't have stable leadership. It's hard to imagine a worse scenario for Israeli interests.
Netanyahu is trapped between Trump, his own security establishment, his coalition, and the Iranian nuclear clock. And he has to navigate all of it while publicly maintaining that everything is fine.
That's the job. And whether he's failed at it, as the prompt argues, or is playing a weak hand as well as anyone could — that's going to be debated for a long time. But the immediate question is what Israel does in the next sixty days, and I think the answer is: prepare for everything, commit to nothing, and hope the deal collapses before you have to choose.
The strategic patience play. From a country not known for strategic patience.
Sometimes the only move is to wait. But waiting isn't passive — it's buying time to position yourself for the moment when waiting stops being an option.
That moment might be Sunday, if Trump actually signs this thing with Iran's foreign minister in Geneva while Netanyahu watches from Jerusalem.
Vice President Vance is reportedly the one who might travel for the ceremony. And yes — the imagery alone would be devastating. The American vice president, shaking hands with Iranian diplomats, celebrating a deal that Israel's own leadership considers a threat to its existence. That's not a photograph any Israeli prime minister wants to see on the front page.
The calculus in Jerusalem right now is essentially: how do we prevent that photograph from becoming the defining image of our Iran policy, without doing something that produces an even worse photograph?
The answer probably involves a lot of phone calls, a lot of back-channel messages, and a very clear private communication to Washington about what Israel's red lines actually are. Not the public statements. The private ones.
Which brings us to the core tension. The prompt describes Israel as having been abandoned by its partner. But abandonment implies the partner owed you something and walked away. The alternative read is that the US is pursuing its own interests, as states do, and Israel's interests don't align with them right now. That's not abandonment — that's the normal operation of a relationship between a superpower and a smaller ally.
The smaller ally's job is to make its interests matter to the superpower. Israel has done that successfully for decades. The question is whether it still can, in this administration, on this issue, after this war.
The war that was supposed to solve the Iran problem and instead gave Iran leverage.
That's the tragic irony. Iran didn't win the war militarily. But they may win the peace diplomatically. And Israel is watching it happen from the outside.
To answer the prompt's question directly: Israel's calculus is probably to avoid unilateral action during the sixty-day window while making unmistakably clear that unilateral action remains an option after it. To work every channel with Washington, to document every Iranian violation, to prepare the military option in parallel, and to pray — and I don't use that word lightly — that the deal collapses under its own weight before Israel has to choose between its security and its alliance.
If the deal doesn't collapse? If Trump gets his signing ceremony and Iran gets its sanctions relief and the nuclear material stays in Iran?
Then Israel chooses security. It always has.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: During the Cold War, a pigment manufacturer in Tasmania produced a shade of green so vivid it was exported to the Soviet Union for use in military map printing — and the specific chromium oxide formulation was later discovered to have unusual near-infrared reflectance properties that made it nearly invisible to early satellite imaging.
...right.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We're produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.
If you got something out of this, leave us a review wherever you listen — it genuinely helps. We'll be back next week.
