Even in Israel, What POTUS Wants, POTUS Gets

Israel is halting attacks on Iran, while threatening further attacks if Iran reciprocates, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday. He claims Israel had reached its objectives, but the real cause may not be events in Tehran but in Washington.

“At the moment, we are holding our fire because after we struck the terror regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. In the event that the terror regime in Iran makes the mistake of resuming attacks on us—we will respond with overwhelming force.”
—Benjamin Netanyahu

This comes after media reports suggested United States President Donald Trump disapproved of the Iran attacks and Israel conducting them, or a portion of them, anyway.

Deeper motives: The U.S. and Iran are holding peace talks that Israel remains highly suspicious of. Some speculate that Israel was trying to hurt Iran as much as possible before President Trump gets his peace deal. That Israel called off a larger campaign suggests what limits the U.S. is placing on it.

• Last night, Israel’s Channel 12 quoted Trump as saying, “I told Bibi, you’d better be careful what you do, because you could be left alone against Iran very soon.”

During the war, Israel and the U.S. claimed they were on the same page throughout. That isn’t the case today.

Nuclear progress? President Trump claims to have received a major concession from the Iranians in peace negotiations. He told the New York Post on Monday: “They’ve already agreed they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.” He said that was “a very big thing” for moving negotiations forward.

• Iran has always claimed it never intends to have a nuclear weapon. This has never stopped it from constructing all the most important components of a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s position concerns Israel. Media reports suggest the Pentagon is unnerved by “an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran,” per the New York Times.

• This apparently includes spying on U.S. officials, such as Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and War Department official Elbridge Colby. Both Israel and the White House deny the reports.

Israel sees the Iran war as a matter of national survival. The U.S. sees it as a quagmire. These two positions are mutually exclusive. If the two countries keep their current positions, they can’t stay allies for long—as Bible prophecy forecasts.