While dust settles on Iran, Israel focuses on diplomacy with neighbors in the Middle East

Tel Aviv – While dust settles on Iran after Unprecedented Israeli and American attackS, the United States and Israel has moved their concentration to an ambitious diplomatic thrust that they hope will result in the kind of sustainable political stability that has escaped the region for decades.

Despite an apparent Iranian reluctance, President Donald Trump East Push out with Tehran about his nuclear program. But Israel seems more interested in formalizing diplomatic relations with some of his longtime opponents, as well as ending the 18 -month conflict in Gaza – that Trump has argued several times.

“This victory presents an opportunity for a spectacular expansion of the peace agreements,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday. “We work with enthusiasm.”

The previous Trump administration has negotiated what she called the Abraham agreementsin which Israel has established diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and then normalized its relations with Morocco in 2024 and in Sudan, although this agreement has not yet been ratified.

Having devastated the powerful, Hezbollah supported by Iran militant group in Lebanon, its neighbor in the North, and has seen a Diet adapted to Tehran overturned in Syria In the East, Israel is now interested in establishing formal diplomatic relations with the two countries, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said Gideon Saar on Monday on Monday

Change represents a broader change in Israeli policy towards its neighbors. Until about two weeks ago, the Modus Opérandi of Israel was to assert military domination as a political strategy, according to Michael Oren, who was ambassador of the country to the United States from 2009 to 2013.

“Now, this is the first time that I have seen in history when we have the opportunity to make strategy the strategy. It is not a tactic,” Oren, former member of the Knesset Israel on Friday, or Parliament, who was vice-minister in the Prime Minister’s office.

Before the Terrorist attacks led by Hamas on October 7, 2023Israel relied on a method known in Hebrew as “mowing grass”. The term was used by strategists to describe the country’s periodic attacks against Palestinian activists and their supply of weapons to Gaza, attacks which have been widely criticized by rights defense groups due to the disproportionate number of deaths caused by Israeli forces.

The sentence could also apply to Israel’s behavior towards Iran and its proxies to eliminate military commanders, nuclear scientists and superior councilors to the supreme chief of the country, Ayatollah Ali Khameneiwhile attacking nuclear and military sites. In Lebanon, he has erased large expanses of Hezbollah leadership.

Today, Netanyahu’s most formidable challenge will be to find a resolution to put an end to the conflict in Gaza, where, despite almost 20 months of war, Hamas remains nominally in control.

Under pressure from Trump, who on Truth Social on Sunday again called for an “Gaza Agreement” and “recovering hostages”, negotiations are also always captive to the same disagreements that have long delayed an agreement.

Hamas has refused to release its remaining hostages and surrender – key requests from far -right members of the Netanyahu government, including the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, his Minister of National Security, who both threatened to stop and lower the fragile coalition if he did otherwise. With other legislators, they also called for the complete destruction of Hamas.

Hamas, on the other hand, demanded a permanent truce, a complete withdrawal of the Israeli Gaza forces and the guarantees of humanitarian aid.

The decline of power in Iran, the main patron of Hamas, will probably undermine the confidence and influence of the group, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research center.

“From an Israeli point of view, this is a spectacular change in the acceptance of the Jewish state of the region,” added Plesner, a former member of the Israeli Parliament.

But he warned that as long as Hamas is the director organ in Gaza, an agreement to end the war there “will be something that is possible, but it will be very difficult for the Israeli government to swallow”.

For the moment, Israel is in the ascendant: the Iranian nuclear program has been seriously damaged, its 46 -year -old Islamic regime is weakened and its proxy groups and its allies throughout the region have been largely damaged.

The most important is perhaps that if the Israeli and American attacks against Iran have been criticized publicly, they were also quietly welcomed by its Arab neighborsMuch of which were faster to condemn Iran’s reprisal attack against the American military base in Qatar than the American attack on Iran.

For decades, Iran has favored allied regimes and the proxy militia throughout the Middle East to fight Israel, its main ally in the region, the United States and Iran’s adversaries with a Shiite majority among the Gulf kingdoms led by Sunni.

Israel will now need these states to open a way to sustainable peace, analysts have declared, or even more risk the regional conflict.

“I think we see that Iranial Iran is retired,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, associate professor of political science at the University of United Arab Emirates in Al Ain, in a telephone interview last week. “It probably means a more stable Middle East, a more stable region.”

Israel and the United States would better cultivate what Abdullah described as an “moderation axis” of the Arab kingdoms of the Gulf of Monied, many of which have normalized relations with Israel – a piece on the “resistance axis” used to describe Iran and its regional indirect groups that Israel has largely defeated.

Israel has clearly indicated its intention to continue to attack the Iranian nuclear program if a perceived need occurs. And in Gaza and Lebanon, he continued to launch regular strikes against what she says to be militant targets long after setting up the ceasefire.

But Trump, whose angry explosion seemed to slow down an Israeli strike on Iran after declaring a cease-fire in the region, has shown that he was able to stop Israel’s responses. Oren said that this could help open the way for sustainable stability by retaining the more militant instincts of Israel.

“The difference between tactics and strategy is in the hands of Donald Trump,” said Oren. “To the greatest extent in the history of Israel, our fate is in the hands of a person, and it is not the Prime Minister.”