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Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-206231708
Israel Watches the Iran Ceasefire Unravel
(Substack) Nadav Eyal - As far as Tehran is concerned, it never signed anything guaranteeing free movement through the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, the MoU contains no sentence restoring business as usual in the strait, no guarantee of complete freedom of maritime passage. What it does say is that Iran and Oman will establish some set of arrangements for passage. For the first time in its modern history, this hands Iran genuine leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and the Iranians are not about to let it go. They are further emboldened by what they read as American weakness. So they keep attacking ships across Hormuz. The Israelis regarded the MoU from the outset as a flawed document that left deep ambiguity on a range of issues. They understood the advantage it conferred on the Iranians. It was the recommendation of Israel's defense establishment not to halt the war during the ceasefire and MoU negotiations - to keep hitting the Iranians, and to hit them hard, so they would grasp that this was not a retreat, and certainly not a surrender. Hizbullah and Hamas are emboldened now, pressing new demands in the war's aftermath, pointing out that their patron was not broken - not by the region's most powerful military, Israel, nor by the world's foremost superpower, the U.S. Senior Israeli sources say that Tehran may now believe it has trapped the Trump administration into a kind of submission - a misreading for anyone who actually knows this administration. The writer is a Senior Scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).