Israeli Ministers Say U.S.-Iran Peace Deal Does Not Bind Israel, Israel Will Not Abandon Conquered Territories
Top Israeli officials said not only that Israel is not bound by the U.S.-Iran peace pact to be signed on Friday, but also that it will not abandon the territories it has illegally seized in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.
The nation’s ministers of defense, finance, and national security denounced the agreement, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only warned that Israel will never permit Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.
On Sunday, Israel struck targets in Lebanon, supposedly to respond to a Hezbollah attack on Israel.
Minister of National Security
In a 370-word jeremiad on X, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, declared that Israel is “not subject to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign nation!”
Whether that means Israel will no longer fleece American taxpayers to the tune of more than $3 billion annually is unclear. But Ben-Gvir made clear his nation has no obligations to the United States, despite more than $300 billion in aid since 1946.
“Our duty is to the citizens of Israel, to the soldiers of the IDF, and to the Jewish people, and our historical duty to the persecuted and murdered Jews over thousands of years of exile, to provide security to Jews in the Land of Israel,” Ben-Gvir fumed on X:
Every time we succumbed to international pressure at the expense of Israel’s security, we paid a blood price with interest. It was true in the Oslo Accords, it was true in the Lebanon agreement in 2006, and it was true in every period of containment in Gaza that exploded in our faces.
We emphasize: We love the USA and are grateful to President Trump. And yet, the State of Israel is not a banana republic.
Despite all that “love,” for the “USA,” Israel’s espionage here is “critical” and “unhinged,” a recent Pentagon report says.
“We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security, and it does not bind us in any way,” Ben-Gvir continued:
We must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah, we must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have captured and cleared of terror infrastructure, we must not return to a situation where thousands of terrorists sit on the fences of northern settlements, and certainly we must not remain silent for a moment in the face of fire directed at the State of Israel. …
The days are over when the Jew took blows and kept silent. Never again!
Minister of Defense
Israel Katz, minister of defense, unspooled an even longer screed about what Israel “expects” of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Conceding that Israel and the United States enjoy a “shared interest,” Katz wrote that “Israel must ensure that in the future as well, we will have the ability to act independently to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to prepare accordingly.”
Beyond that, Israel will not withdraw from the territories it has conquered in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon, which Katz euphemistically called “security zones.”
“The IDF will continue to defend our borders and our citizens from the peak of Mount Hermon, the mountains of Lebanon, the areas of our land in the Samaria region, and most of the territory of Gaza — against the threats posed by jihadist forces and organizations, as a central lesson from the events of October 7,” he wrote:
The IDF will not withdraw from the terrorist camps in northern Samaria, which have been evacuated of residents, and if necessary, the operation will be expanded to additional terrorist camps.
Our security doctrine is sharp and clear: We act against both near and distant threats and strive for decisive outcomes rather than compromises and concessions.
That warning comports with the Greater Israel Project, which envisions Israel as encompassing all the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee boosted that deranged idea during a disastrous interview with Tucker Carlson.
Finance Minister, Prime Minister
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, “another far-right member of Netanyahu’s coalition, has also demanded that Israel ‘stand firm on our principles and guarantee the IDF full freedom of action to keep pushing Hezbollah back,’ referring to the Israel Defense Forces,” The Washington Post reported:
“The agreement with Iran is bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period,” Smotrich said.
For his part, Netanyahu repeated what he said on learning of the agreement last week.
“With an agreement, without an agreement — as long as I am Prime Minister of Israel, Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” he wrote on X over video of his remarks. And, he continued, he is “responsible for Israel’s security.” Translation: Israel will do what is in its interests without regard to the United States.
Katz and Netanyahu also defended Sunday’s strikes in Beirut, Lebanon.
“In response to continued Hezbollah attacks on Israel’s territory, including a terror drone strike this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz authorized an IDF surgical strike on a Hezbollah terrorist target in the Dahieh quarter of Beirut,” Katz and Netanyahu wrote on X. “Israel will not tolerate firing at its territory.”
“Israel said the strikes were in retaliation for Hezbollah’s launch of drones and rockets toward northern Israel,” The New York Times reported:
While Hezbollah claimed several attacks on Israeli military positions in southern Lebanon on Sunday, it did not say that it had fired across the border into Israeli territory.
Israel seeks to annex southern Lebanon up to the Litani River as part of the Greater Israel Project.
On Friday in Switzerland, U.S. and Iranian officials expect to formalize Sunday’s digitally signed agreement.
Israel, apparently, hopes to sabotage that agreement.
“Two Israeli defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, said there had been no coordination with the United States before the strike, only a notification to the U.S. military a few minutes before it began,” the Times reported:
The two officials said that the assessment within Israel’s military intelligence corps was that such a bombing could be interpreted internationally as an Israeli attempt to disrupt the emerging deal with Iran and could create tension between Israel and the Trump administration.
