'Trump's Surrender is a Historic Miss for Israel'

Conflicts Forum’s compilation of consequential & strategic perspectives from leading Israeli political & security commentators (translated from the Hebrew press), 16 April 2026

“A Society of War Junkies” -- Polls show most Israelis oppose Iran ceasefire: 53.3% oppose ceasefire; 79% back continued fighting in Lebanon /

Raviv Drucker: “Netanyahu is lying to Israelis” on Iran Nuclear Threat /

Israel’s ‘Rational’ Left is more dangerous than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich /

Shin Bet Chief excuses Netanyahu from trial hearings during the ceasefire /

Mossad Next in Line for ‘Netanyahu-ization’

[These compilations are drawn from analysis & commentary by leading Israeli political, security and intelligence commentators in the Hebrew press — as reports published in Hebrew often provide a different window on Israeli internal discourse. Minor edits have been made for clarity].

STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENTS; CONSEQUENTIAL OBSERVATIONS —

Polls show most Israelis oppose Iran ceasefire — 53.3% OPPOSE the Iran ceasefire; 79% back continued fighting in Lebanon (Key points from Times of Israel):

Polls released [last week] showed Netanyahu’s Likud party losing votes on the heels of an unpopular temporary ceasefire with Iran that Trump announced.

Majorities in all three polls disapproved of the Iran truce, with 56% of respondents to Kan, 53% of respondents to Channel 12 and 51% of respondents to Channel 13 saying they opposed the two-week ceasefire. Just 25% of respondents to Kan, 30% of respondents to Channel 12, and 32% of respondents to Channel 13, expressed support for the ceasefire, while other respondents said they didn’t know.

A Kan poll gave the Zionist anti-Netanyahu parties 59 seats, a Channel 12 poll gave them 60, and a Channel 13 poll gave them 55. In total, the Kan poll awarded 51 seats to Netanyahu’s coalition and 59 seats to the Zionist opposition parties, meaning each bloc would have to rely on either defectors from the other bloc or the support of Arab parties to reach the 61 seats needed for a majority government … In total, the Channel 12 poll awarded 60 seats to the Zionist opposition parties and 50 seats to Netanyahu’s coalition — both short of the requisite 61.

Asked by Channel 12 whether Israel and the US, Iran or neither had won the war, 30% said Israel and the US, 19% said Iran and 40% said neither, while the rest said they didn’t know. Channel 13 posed a similar question … 33% of respondents said Israel and the US won the war, 28% said Iran won and 39% said they didn’t know.

Channel 12 also asked respondents whether Israel should continue attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon. A large majority, 79%, supported the continued strikes in Lebanon, while 13% opposed and the rest said they didn’t know. Respondents who supported the continued attacks included 92% of coalition voters and 83% of opposition voters.

Israelis finally revolting against Netanyahu — for agreeing to the US ceasefire with Iran (Jonathan Ofir, Mondoweiss):

“Donald, you wimped out like a duck,” wrote Israeli coalition member and Chair of the National Security Committee, Zvika Fogel, on X earlier this week, lambasting Trump’s announcement of a two-week halt to the war on Iran. Although Fogel is aligned with the far-right Jewish Power Party, headed by Ben-Gvir, his position reflects a near-consensus across the Israeli political spectrum. That consensus is: give war a chance … The push from Israel across the political spectrum is to sustain the momentum of war. And because Israel reads Lebanon as an Iranian proxy, the country is now serving as a proxy for Israel’s rage …

A society of war junkies: It isn’t limited to the Israeli political class. An Israeli poll in early March showed that a whopping 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the war of aggression on Iran ... with 93% of centrist voters saying it should last until all military objectives were achieved ... Among right-wing voters, who make up over two-thirds of the Israeli electorate, support reached 96%, and even among left-wing voters, it stood at 79% … When the war surpassed the one-month mark, Jewish Israeli support dipped, but only to 78%. The war fever has not broken — neither in the Zionist political spectrum, nor in the Israeli public at large … The reason, to put it simply, is that Israelis are war junkies. The same obsession has served Netanyahu well, helping him to stay in power, because nothing unites Israelis like war.

Behind Trump’s ceasefire lies a fateful and dangerous decision for Israel (Ret. Col. Yitzhak Brik, Ma’ariv, 12 April):

The International Pressure Trap — Here lies the inherent flaw in Trump’s strategy … Under heavy domestic and international pressure, Trump may find himself forced to declare “total victory” without achieving his goals, the most important of which is the elimination of the extremist regime of the “Revolutionary Guards”, or he will be content with achieving temporary compromises regarding freedom of navigation or a postponement of Iran’s nuclear program and the renewal of its missile capabilities, a situation in which international pressure (agreements, sanctions or military threats) succeeds in stopping the Iranian clock for a limited time only, but does not dismantle the infrastructure itself. This may be interpreted as a diplomatic achievement, but it will only postpone the end without neutralizing the core threats: the missile array, the nuclear program and the support for (proxy) metastasis throughout the region.

For the State of Israel, this scenario poses a long-term strategic danger. Ending the war without dismantling Iranian capabilities would mean a rapid return of Tehran to an accelerated armaments path. While Iran restores its power, Israel may find itself in the future facing a different US, one whose priorities have changed, especially in the post-Trump er …

Trump’s surrender. A historic miss: All the predictions I wrote before the ceasefire announcement came true in full, one by one. We were moments before the expiration of President Trump’s ultimatum to the Iranians, and on the eve of launching a large-scale attack designed to destroy the Islamic Republic’s electricity, water, bridges, and gas and oil facilities. On the morning of April 7, 2026, the Trump declared: “A whole civilization will die tonight, and it will never come back, I don’t want it to happen, but it probably will”.

However, instead of carrying out the fatal threat, Trump backed down. It was a rare opportunity: a combination of the entry of the Kurds and other minorities into the ground campaign, and massive airstrikes by the US and Israel, could have inspired the Iranian people to take to the streets en masse and lead to the overthrow of the regime. In practice, the heavy pressure from home and from European countries, resulting from the worsening economic crisis following the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, took its toll … That evening [7 April], he announced a two-week ceasefire in an attempt to find a political solution.

The significance of this move is devastating: in his decision, Trump granted de facto recognition of the legitimacy of the extremist regime in Iran. Instead of working to eliminate it, he chose to perpetuate its existence. This is a disastrous decision for Israel and the entire world. As long as the current regime rules in Iran, there is no chance of long-term understandings. Even if agreements are signed, Tehran will wait for the first opportunity, for example, at the end of Trump’s term, to blatantly violate them and continue its unrestrained race to obtain nuclear weapons. Without the defeat of Iran’s extremist police and the disbandment of the Revolutionary Guards, no strategic solution will be found that will ensure Israel’s long-term security and survival.

Raviv Drucker: “Netanyahu is lying to Israelis”, ‘inventing reality’ on Iran nuclear threat (Maariv, 13 April)

Raviv Drucker claims Netanyahu is exaggerating the Iranian threat without intelligence backing, while according to him neither the US nor Israel detect an actual nuclear breakthrough. “We don’t have a single intelligence source who claims this,” [Drucker] continued. “The International Atomic Energy Agency doesn’t claim that. The most that has been claimed to date is that there was a group of scientists who perhaps began to examine a project ... and that was not practical at all. Netanyahu knows that Iran was at least a year away from a bomb, but he decided to ‘do [a] Trump’ -- to invent a reality. The war has not yet provided any real achievements. So they invent [them]”.

Gap between military achievements and public reaction worries Netanyahu (Ben Caspit, Ma’ariv, 12 April):

He’s under pressure … Netanyahu is very concerned about the fact that the public is not translating the phenomenal military campaign achievements (without cynicism) into a long-term political victory. This is hurting his plans. Victory in the elections is what interests him most, and if there is no victory over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, there will be no victory in the elections either. Therefore, yesterday he sent another sweaty tape to the studios, in which he returns, for the umpteenth time, to the concept of “I ordered, I guided, I won” in order to try to convince us, once again, of his eternal greatness. As usual, there were a lot of lies, a lot of exaggerations, and also one negative peak, typical: “… This time I received accurate intelligence, on time, and it told us that Iran was starting to work to turn enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. And as soon as we received this intelligence, we took action”. What is he actually hinting at here? That before the October 7 massacre, he had no intelligence, and therefore did not “order to take action.” And here it is this time!!

Israel’s ‘decline into fascism’ — The ‘Rational’ Left Is More Dangerous than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich (Ofer Cassif, Haaretz)

There are two kinds of enthusiasts for genocide and ethnic cleansing in today’s Israeli public discourse. One are the “haters” – people from the messianic school of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, people who use nationalist and racist rhetoric grounded in hatred, a sense of Jewish supremacy and revenge. The second are the “rationalists” – people like Giora Eiland, Einat Wilf and researchers at the elite think tanks, who, in a calm and polite tone, speak of matters like “national security,” “strategy” and “realism.” They do not engage in racist hatred or ethnic supremacy, but employ the language of pragmatism, in which deportation, starvation and even murder are not a goal, but rather a “work plan” to be judged by its results, whatever the means.

While the liberal public has no trouble labelling the first group as the main danger to Israel, closer examination reveals the latter to be the real (and therefore the most dangerous) driving force of fascist decline. To understand this, we must return to the concept coined by historian Jeffrey Herf in his 1984 book “Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich” … Herf recalls the intellectuals of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich who not only did not reject modernism but also embraced its technology, science and bureaucracy, all the while integrating it with nationalist and anti-humanistic ideology … They extolled technology and made efficiency a supreme value, while casting aside universal ethics. This is exactly the role that the “rational” left is playing in Israel today. When a reservist general like Eiland proposes imposing a complete blockade on northern Gaza, he is not doing so out of Biblical-style notions of revenge. He coldly presents it as a “working plan” for the army based on war doctrine and risk management ...

The greatest danger posed by reactionary Israeli modernism is the exchange of morals with efficiency and justice with expediency. This intellectual structure does not ask, “Is it just?” or “Is this humane?” but “Does it work?” This is instrumental rationalism run wild, using logic and science to achieve goals that violate the values of the Enlightenment and democracy.

For the mainstream Israeli public, the “haters” are an easy group to condemn. They represent a public perceived as ignorant and crazy. By contrast, the “rationalists” look and sound like the “beautiful Israeli.” They come from the army general staff, academia and diplomacy. Their solutions amount to ethnic cleansing and mass starvation, but because of who is proposing them, they come with a “kashrut” certificate and a moral imprimatur. They enable an enlightened person to support barbarous acts without his feeling that he has become barbarous. They turn the transfer into “population displacement for humanitarian needs” and starvation into a “legitimate lever of pressure” … The “rationalists” are the ones building the political and legal infrastructure to enable these practices to be actualized. They act as the bridge by which Kahanist ideas become acceptable and genocidal thought patterns take over the institutions of the state and society ...The reactionary modernist is a danger because he does not work against the system – he corrupts it from within. He uses the language of rights (e.g., “the right of the state to defend itself”) to deny rights to others. He uses statistics to prove that there is no choice but to commit acts that would have been considered unthinkable only a few years ago … Reactionary modernism is the writing on the wall, written in a clean, precise, academic font.

“Blue-and-white ethnic cleansing” of the West Bank (Ron Ben-Yishai, veteran military commentator, Yedioth Ahronoth):

A tour with former security officials [in the West Bank] reveals a disturbing reality … no longer a spontaneous price tag, but systematic actions under the auspices of the government with the ultimate goal of “cleansing” most of Judea and Samaria of Palestinian presence and annexation. “Jewish morality” it is definitely not.

Four generals (res.), a former head of the Shin Bet, and one journalist. We went out into the field to see with our own eyes whether - and to what extent - there is truth in the reports about the wave of Jewish-nationalist crime in Judea and Samaria … It was late in the morning, two [Israeli] boys climbed up the hill and approached us. One … about 16 years old … and the other, thin and short, who looked about 11-12 years old, also blond. Both wore large knitted kippahs with long, thick wigs hanging down from under them, tefillin were tied to the forehead and left arm of each of them, and in their hands were thick sticks …

The tour was initiated by Major General and former Coordinator of Operations in the Territories, Yaakov (Mandy) Or, and a group of security personnel that includes more than a hundred former senior officials from the security establishment, the police and the intelligence community ... We were in the company of three Israeli human rights activists who had volunteered to spend the night in the Bedouin shepherds’ compound so that their presence might deter Jewish [attackers] … “Why did you come here?” I asked [one of the settler boys] … “God gave us this land and it is ours,” he answered and fell silent. I tried to start a conversation, but I quickly despaired because I heard the same content in different versions. The confident reliance on God’s command as the answer to all moral and practical questions and concerns gave me the disturbing feeling that this was a type of Jewish terrorism motivated by religious and nationalist motives, reminiscent of similar phenomena in our region.

What we saw shook us. The generals and the former head of the Shin Bet muttered “shame” and “this is not Jewish morality”. From what we saw and heard on the tour, it was clear to us that this is a phenomenon that has devastating practical consequences for generations, not only for Israel’s international status -- but also for our future as a people and as a state.

These are no longer “price tag” operations. This is also not angry and spontaneous retaliation for a Palestinian terrorist attack or violent riots by young people, but rather sophisticated, organized and funded systematic operations - with the long-term strategic goal being to “cleanse” most of Judea and Samaria of the Palestinian presence and annex it to the State of Israel. We saw how the “decision plan” that Smotrich formulated and published in 2017 is now being implemented on the ground. According to this plan, the Palestinians who insist on staying will exist in small autonomous enclaves around the major Palestinian cities. He not only outlined this process, but also manages and finances it in both his hats: as a minister in the Ministry of Defense and as a minister of finance. Netanyahu and ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Orit Strok are full-time partners.

Shin Bet Chief excuses Netanyahu from his trial hearings during the ceasefire (Uri Misgav, Haaretz):

The classified opinion that Shin Bet security service head David Zini submitted to the court regarding Netanyahu’s trial went entirely against the positions of the organization’s professional staff. In fact, the disagreement was so deep that Zini took a kind of detour to formulate his position. Zini’s conclusion was absurd, namely that the prime minister cannot stay at any one place out of concern that he might be targeted by an Iranian assassin. So what about when Netanyahu appears in the Knesset? Or is working in the Prime Minister’s Office? Or at home? … The “security” argument for canceling his testimony was exactly what Netanyahu had demanded from Zini’s predecessor, Ronen Bar. But Bar refused to provide the goods. He consulted with the Shin Bet’s professionals about security requirements regarding the risk and recommended that the proceedings take place in the Tel Aviv District Court’s basement courtroom, which is fortified and is within range of the city’s air defenses … Bar was removed from his position ... on the grounds that he lacked the prime minister’s confidence …

The real drama is in the Shin Bet itself. Inside this hierarchical organization … where rules are rules, Zini is defying norms … he has insisted on emailing weekly Torah commentary to some of his subordinates. All of this goes hand in hand with his professional assessment that Jewish terror in the West Bank does not constitute a security threat. It reflects the Jewish jihadist mentality he was taught at Har Hamor Yeshiva … Zini was planted inside the Shin Bet as a ticking time bomb … The Shin Bet is now being rattled. A spirit of dejection permeates its corridors – many are retiring and others are thinking of leaving … Netanyahu doesn’t care – the country can burn, if need be. That’s why he’s repeating the madness by appointing Roman Gofman as head of the Mossad, a man who is also unsuited for the job, lacking intelligence experience, or English or Arabic ... but the important thing is that he is loyal to the Netanyahu family.

“Zini without a kippa”— Mossad Next in Line for ‘Netanyahu-ization’ (Yossi Verter, Haaretz):

Within the security establishment, the new Mossad chief has been compared to his Shin Bet counterpart … As fate would have it, the news of Roman Gofman’s appointment as head of the Mossad was published around the time that Channel 13 reported about a secret opinion submitted by the Shin Bet security service … assert[ing] that the defendant, one Netanyahu, cannot stay in one place, such as a courtroom, for a prolonged period of time during the cease-fire out of fear of his safety. Are the two related? Most certainly. At the Shin Bet’s helm stands Major Gen. (res.) Zini … the only reason he was appointed by the PM was his loyalty and obedience – not loyalty to the public or obedience to the law, but loyalty and obedience to the leader.

The Mossad will likewise be, as of June 2, headed by a reservist, a major general with no abilities, knowledge or experience in the organization’s work (unless the High Court of Justice intervenes). Gofman, described as “Zini without a kippa” by defense officials, will also need to show his loyalty and obedience to the man who appointed him … That means they must guard the leader’s secrets, cover for him as needed, refuse to release incriminating documents (such as those sought by a state commission of inquiry) and even lie for him, if it comes to that. Like the justice system, the police, the Civil Service Commission and the government hostages’ coordinator, two central bodies at the heart of national security are now undergoing Netanyahu-ization …That’s how Netanyahu likes the people around him to be – obedient, corrupt, spineless, feckless ... Unlike the Shin Bet, the Mossad operates above the law and in secret, using tools that no other body has. When an organization is headed by a man with distorted values like Gofman, and above him is a corrupt, dangerous, unrestrained and completely cynical prime minister, with no buffer between them, every Israeli should be concerned … It’s an unthinkable scenario …

Holocaust Remembrance Day ten years ago (Amir Shperling, political commentator & comedian):

Ten years ago, some deputy Chief of Staff got up on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. His name was Yair Golan. He looked at us with a dry stare and said that what scares him is recognizing here processes that evoke chills, the kind that happened there, in that Germany, once upon a time. Everyone immediately lost their minds completely. People who had never read a full history book in their lives started yelling at him — that he’s a traitor, a destroyer of Israel, a leftist who trivializes the Holocaust. Our politicians ... demanded he be fired immediately. They told him: “How dare you even say we’re like them? After all, we’re the chosen people, eternal victims with a certificate of liability from the heavens.” Golan took it on the chin, lost the [IDF] Chief of Staff position, and went home.

A full decade has passed. Ten years in which these processes are no longer something you need field glasses from a decorated officer to see. They’ve turned into billboards on the Ayalon Highway. We’ve seen violent militias in our streets, ministers calling to wipe out villages … Suddenly, that speech no longer sounds like the deranged jeremiad of an overly worried military man, but like a wake-up call we missed because we were just flipping channels to reality TV.

THANK YOU to all our readers and subscribers, especially our paid subscribers. This site is fully reader-supported and reader-funded, and we are very grateful for readers’ support.