Five decades of Israeli covert strategy to push US, Iran into confrontation

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to meet US President Donald Trump, there is good reason to expect that he will use the meeting to discourage any move towards ending hostilities in the Gulf. This expectation is grounded in a historical record spanning more than five decades.Declassified intelligence, memoirs by senior American officials, investigative reporting, and academic scholarship further reinforce this assessment. Taken together, these sources point to a recurring pattern: successive Israeli governments, often with the support of elements within the country’s security establishment, have repeatedly sought to obstruct efforts to end regional conflicts or attempts to manage tension between the United States and Iran.While the methods have varied — from intelligence operations and public diplomacy to lobbying and political pressure — the strategic objective has remained strikingly consistent: preserving a state of confrontation between Washington and Tehran while opposing diplomatic initiatives that could weaken Israel’s leverage in shaping US Middle East policy.Prolonging the Iran-Iraq warThe logic underpinning this approach emerged during the Iran-Iraq Wa...