🇮🇱 Netanyahu is caught between the enemy he wants to hit and the ally he cannot lose
“Israel has two imperatives that are in conflict with one another,” Kamran Bokhari of the Middle East Policy Council told Al Jazeera.
The way he frames it, the two pulls are simple and impossible at once, “one is to counter Iran and Hezbollah. On the other hand, it also needs to maintain a very close relationship with the United States.”
That leaves Netanyahu with two open questions he does not control, whether he can keep the Trump administration from offering, in Bokhari's words, “too many concessions to Iran,” and whether the Israeli military winds down its Lebanon campaign or stops it outright.
Bokhari reads the Israeli calculus as a waiting game, “let's see where this goes. It could very well be that when the 60-day negotiations begin and somewhere down the line this process collapses, that's where we can swing back and say it's time to go back to the military option. I think that's the Israeli calculus here.”
So the patience is real, but it is patience with a trigger underneath it.
Source: Al Jazeera / Writer: Daniyal
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