Five days after American and Iranian negotiators signed a memorandum of understanding that ended three months of stuttering, US-Israeli military strikes on Iran, a single polling figure captured the mood in Tel Aviv: 92 percent of Israelis believe Washington has surrendered what they regard as a hard-won victory over a decades-old enemy. Nearly half of those surveyed said Israel ought to press on with its attacks in Lebanon against the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, regardless of what its principal sponsor in Washington advised. In the history of the US-Israeli alliance, it is difficult to find a comparable moment of public rupture. The depth of Israeli anger is inseparable from the scale of the country's military commitments since the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, which killed 1,139 people inside Israel.

In the years that followed, Israel fought on several fronts simultaneously: it conducted a campaign in Gaza in which, according to reported figures, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed and vast areas of the territory destroyed — a campaign that the United Nations has described as genocide. It struck Iran on two separate occasions, killed thousands in Lebanon while battling Hezbollah, launched repeated ground incursions into Syria, and carried out sporadic strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. War, in other words, had become the organising principle of Israeli public life. Against that backdrop, political leaders across Israel's fractious spectrum voiced support for confrontation with Iran, even as they quarrelled over tactics.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid welcomed the original strikes but described Washington's subsequent decision to negotiate with Tehran as "one of the most shocking failures of Israel's foreign and security policy, and it is entirely on Netanyahu's account." Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, a possible future prime minister, had earlier called the campaign against Iran "the most just war in recent decades against the most bitter enemy." Daniel Bar-Tal, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University, argues that none of this is surprising given the psychological and political environment that decades of conflict have produced in Israel.