Israel’s military achievements in its war with Iran will mean little if they are not “anchored to a diplomatic agreement that will ensure that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons,” Shira Efron, research director of the Israel Policy Forum, said on the Haaretz Podcast.
Without such a guarantee, she fears, the “fragile cease-fire” in place will not hold and there will be a regression into the “tit-for-tat war of attrition” that the Trump-imposed cease-fire managed to halt.
Bringing the Iranians back to the negotiating table in good faith, however, she said, will be challenging. From their perspective, after they showed willingness to negotiate, Israel and the United States struck militarily.
“What incentivizes them to trust the negotiation process again? How do you bring them to the negotiation table and make it clear to them that their situation without a nuclear weapon would be better than having a nuclear weapon? Because they can choose, theoretically, the path of North Korea and say ‘If we had a nuclear weapon, no one would have struck us, so getting one is what we should be doing.’ Our challenge is to make sure that this doesn't happen. And I think it's not going to come only from kinetic strikes. It also has to come from diplomacy.”
The quick resolution to the Iran conflict highlighted the depth of the quagmire of the Gaza war, she noted.
“The juxtaposition of Gaza and Iran couldn't be more pronounced. You see an adversary that Israel actually feared and prepared for. There were actual goals of war that were defined and articulated, and we knew when to leave on time. In Gaza, we have very unclear objectives of the war like ‘total victory’ and ‘complete elimination’ of Hamas.”
Efron admitted that she had held out a “fantasy” scenario in which there had been a backroom deal that when Donald Trump committed to attacking Iran, he had conditioned it on Israel agreeing to end the Gaza conflict.
However, she said, based on conversations with Israeli officials, “There are no indications that this condition was there. But there's no question that the president does want to end the war in Gaza. He wants to bring back the hostages.”
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