Over-sold and under-delivered: Israel’s Netanyahu faces ceasefire backlash

An overwhelming number of Israelis oppose the US-Iran ceasefire deal declared last week, and anticipate a return to the war, a poll has found. The findings match observations by analysts, who say that Israeli political leaders promised a final showdown with Iran, only for the conflict to instead leave the Iranian government still standing.

According to the poll, published by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies (INSS)  on Sunday, 61 percent of respondents said they opposed the ceasefire, announced 90 minutes before United States President Donald Trump’s apocalyptic deadline on Tuesday, in which he had promised to launch devastating attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Additionally, 73 percent said they expected fighting with Iran to restart within the next year.

And the majority of respondents – 69 percent – said they support continued military action in Lebanon, irrespective of talks between the Lebanese and Israeli governments that began in the US on Tuesday. Israel has continued to attack Lebanon, claiming it was excluded from the ceasefire, and killing more than 300 people in the past week in strikes that have led to widespread condemnation.

The expectation among many Israelis had been that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would finally make good on his promise to end what he has long framed as the existential threat from Iran. But the war Israel launched with the US on Iran on February 28 has, despite the death toll and spiralling economic cost, failed to deliver on that promise.

Instead, a two-week ceasefire has been negotiated, reportedly without Israel’s involvement, and the Iranian state endures, battered but unbowed. Tehran’s ballistic missile arsenal remains partly intact, and its strategic reach may even have widened, not least through its grip on the economically vital Strait of Hormuz.

Cargo ships in the Gulf, near the Strait of Hormuz, as seen from northern Ras al-Khaimah, near the border with Oman’s Musandam governance, amid the US-Israel war on Iran, in the United Arab Emirates, March 11, 2026 [Stringer/Reuters]

“He [Netanyahu] did oversell how much the war could accomplish: regime collapse and completely destroying the nuclear program and ballistic missiles, which couldn’t be accomplished,” Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-Israeli political consultant, pollster, and journalist, who recently wrote about the various polls showing resistance to a ceasefire.

Much of the problem for the Israeli leader, she suggested, was his longstanding public opposition to negotiations with Iran, such as his resistance to previous agreements to limit its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief, of the kind that the US now appears to be considering.

“For many years and decades, [Netanyahu] had completely destroyed and delegitimised the idea that diplomacy and agreements – negotiated agreements – would have any impact,” she said, referring to Netanyahu’s previous characterisation of talks between the US and Iran as somehow posing an existential threat to Israel.

Not just Netanyahu

None of Israel’s top political leaders has questioned its reasons for attacking Iran. Instead, opposition leaders, such as Yair Lapid, fell in behind Netanyahu. Lapid told reporters he supported a “just war against evil”, doubting whether Iran could sustain a prolonged war against Israel and the US.

Needless to say, the US ceasefire has been seized upon by Lapid as an apparent capitulation on Netanyahu’s part. “[Netanyahu] has turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters pertaining to the core of our national security,” Lapid wrote on social media after the ceasefire.

The left-wing Democrats leader Yair Golan was equally scathing. “Netanyahu lied,” he wrote. “He promised a ‘historic victory’ and security for generations, and in practice, we got one of the most severe strategic failures Israel has ever known.”

“None of Netanyahu’s critics and rivals questioned the narrative that Iran posed an existential threat,“ Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera of the consensus across Israel’s public and political sphere that Netanyahu, for the large part, had helped create.

“This is why they’re disappointed and this is why they’re beginning to blame Netanyahu,” he said, citing the deadly attacks on Lebanon a day after the ceasefire as an attempt to both deflect attention from the US agreement while trying to curry public favour by being seen to strike the Lebanese armed group, Hezbollah.

However, how long that might placate the Israeli public remained to be seen, he said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid aggressively supported the war on Iran [Evelyn Hockstein/Pool via AP]

Constrained

While many in Israel may chafe at the ceasefire, they have little choice but to follow the lead of the US and Trump.

Nevertheless, despite appearing to have fallen far short of his electorate’s expectations and showing every appearance of having been diplomatically sidelined, Netanyahu has given public support to the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, claiming that the two sides “are in constant coordination”.

“The claims that there is a rift between us are completely false,” he said on Monday. “The exact opposite is true. Anyone who was present in these conversations, and in the daily discussions we hold with the president and his team, can attest to that.”

Irrespective of the reality of the relationship, Israel was unlikely to break with the US while it was leading negotiations with Iran, Mitchell Barak, a political pollster and Netanyahu aide from the 1990s said.

“I really can’t see Netanyahu attacking Iran without Trump’s green light,” he told Al Jazeera. “It’s like I’ve said before, Israel has no foreign policy. It handed it over to the US years ago.”

As for any political embarrassment Netanyahu might experience as a result, Barak was dismissive. “You cannot humiliate Netanyahu. Trust me. It cannot be done. He is always convinced he has made the right decision at the right time.”

However, while Netanyahu may be incapable of experiencing personal embarrassment as a result of setbacks with Iran, he was far from immune from political reversals, Pinkas warned.

“A victory over Iran, and especially a victory that he had been seen as enlisting US support for, would have eclipsed the conversation over the events of October 7, which many people still associate him with,” Pinkas said of the Hamas-led attack of that day, which killed 1,139 people and for which Netanyahu is still accused of avoiding responsibility for, before leading Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, killing more than 70,000 Palestinians.

“Obviously, things are unlikely to remain as they are, but as they stand – in the public mind – that’s now two disasters Netanyahu will be associated with,” Pinkas said.