One cannot blame Israel’s interim Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for jumping the line to praise President Donald Trump’s “determined, strong and quick action" in assassinating Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Almost no one in the world is more involved in the conflict between the United States and Iran than the Israeli prime minister accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The signal for the deterioration from diplomacy to the violence that is now threatening a conflagration in the Middle East was given with Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran and restore sanctions on the regime, subsequently tightening them. As Netanyahu himself testified, he was the one who convinced Trump to withdraw from the world powers’ agreement with Tehran.

A senior Israeli military source told our colleague Ben Caspit last month that Soleimani was adept at keeping Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei away from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the country’s Reformists. Soleimani would likely not have managed it without the help of the Trump-Netanyahu duo. Their rejection of the 2015 nuclear agreement and refusal to demand improvements in the deal rather than jettisoning it weakened Iran’s pragmatists. Khamenei backed the nuclear agreement at the time, overriding Soleimani’s objections and expressing public support for Rouhani’s engagement policy. The US withdrawal from the deal and its tightened sanctions on Iran portrayed the Iranian president as a leader led astray by the West, and embarrassed Khamenei, as well. In the zero-sum game between the pragmatic and Soleimani camps, the result was one-nil in favor of the latter.

In the short term, Soleimani’s elimination from the Middle Eastern arena in general, and the anti-Israel one in particular, may undermine Iran’s operational capabilities and those of its proxies in the region. However, in the mid- and long-term, US conduct (it is hard to describe it as a policy) plays into the hands of Soleimani’s successors and of their partners on Israel’s northern front. The voice of Iran’s pragmatists calling for reforms has been silenced by the nationalist fervor gripping the public, for whom Iran’s honor is at stake and there is nothing more to be lost. Manifestations of this sentiment were expressed in the Iraqi parliament’s decision to demand the pullout of American troops and in anti-American demonstrations in Sunni Arab states. Egypt, Iran’s major rival, had no choice but to practice restraint over the condolence visit paid by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to Tehran.

The strategic implications of the assassination must be examined according to Netanyahu’s scale of threats. For him, the Iranian nuclear program represents the top stage of the scale, the ultimate threat to Israel’s existence. It is hard to believe that harsher sanctions on Iran, which did not dissuade it from resuming some nuclear activity prior to the assassination, would change its position now that it has been humiliated for the whole world to see.