Trump Goes Begging to Netanyahu; Iran Trap Closes

Trump's selling peace from one podium while Smotrich's promising to flatten Beirut from another. One Israeli strike ends the whole deal. Right, so Donald Trump is doing his strange little victory lap about an Iran peace deal that he says is largely negotiated, the Strait of Hormuz reopening on his terms, frozen funds about to move, the whole region apparently lining up to thank him for ending a war he started. And while he is doing that, Benjamin Netanyahu's government has spent the last week threatening to flatten Beirut's southern suburbs, pushing Israeli ground forces beyond the Yellow Line into southern Lebanon, hitting the Qaraoun reservoir area, and producing a finance minister who has reportedly said that for every explosive drone fired at Israel, ten buildings in Beirut should fall. Bezalel Smotrich, the man saying that, is not some fringe lunatic shouting from a hilltop. He sits in cabinet. He votes on budgets. He gets briefings. And what he has just done, with one ugly sentence, is take Trump's deal and stick a bomb under it. Because Iran's whole position right now, the position being relayed through figures such as Mohammad Marandi, the Iranian academic close to the Tehran negotiation team, and through Hezbollah's political council member Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, is that Lebanon is part of the deal. An Israeli attack on Beirut or the Dahiyeh, the southern suburb that has functioned as Hezbollah's political and operational heartland for decades, destroys the negotiation path. That is not commentary from people on the outside. That is the condition being placed on the table by people inside the room. Netanyahu's coalition has just publicly volunteered to do the one thing that wrecks Trump's whole settlement. Cracking diplomatic work from the gang in Tel Aviv. Really inspired stuff.