News24 | Netanyahu caught between the US, Lebanon war, and Iran ceasefire

The ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran that began on 8 April is balanced, by all accounts, on a knife’s edge.

Over the weekend, Iran and Israel both exchanged fire, only halting after the intervention of US President Donald Trump on Monday. However, while that round of violence may have paused after Trump called on both sides to “stop shooting”, Israel’s strikes on southern Lebanon – whose cessation is one of Iran’s key conditions for any agreement – continue. And Iran and the US have also exchanged attacks, with Trump threatening to restart full-scale conflict.

For Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it had all appeared so much simpler when the US and Israel launched the war on Iran. After years of reported attempts, he had finally persuaded a US president to join him in attacking regional nemesis Iran, and had launched widespread attacks on neighbouring Lebanon.

Both attacks provided a rare moment of unity for both the Israeli public and the country’s politicians, who ignored the mounting death toll and united behind Netanyahu in cheering on the perceived existential battle that, for decades, prominent politicians and media voices had told them was inevitable.

Three months later, with Israeli elections looming, the position is very different. Rather than the swift victory reportedly promised to Trump by Netanyahu, the US president finds himself enmeshed in precisely the kind of expensive and costly “forever war” he campaigned against.

Israel and Netanyahu are caught between a war in Lebanon that domestic audiences continue to thirst for, and an ally in the US that needs it to halt to broker a desperately needed truce with Iran.

READ | Israel bombs Iran in defiance of Trump insisting Netanyahu ‘doesn’t call the shots’

“He’s [Netanyahu] in a major bind, both political and diplomatic,” Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera, outlining what he described as the political cost to Netanyahu of three “failed” wars: in Gaza, where Hamas retains control, in Lebanon, where – despite the prime minister’s promises – Hezbollah has yet to be eliminated, and in Iran.

“Diplomatically, Israel is isolated, and perceptions of it are negative,” Pinkas said.

The latest flare-up between Iran and Israel had been prompted by a Sunday night strike by Israel, not on Iran, but on the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Iran has insisted that any agreement with the US to end the regional conflict must include a ceasefire between Israel and the pro-Iran Hezbollah. At the same time, Iran has reiterated its b