There was no need to bite one's nails in anticipation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the agreement reached before dawn on Sunday, Nov. 24 between the world powers and Iran. One could have simply compared the new agreement with the demands Netanyahu presented at the government meeting Sept. 17 to predict that the prime minister would harshly attack it. At that time, Netanyahu demanded that US President Barack Obama include four conditions in the understandings with Iran: stopping all uranium enrichment, removal of all enriched uranium from Iran, shutting down the Qom facility and stopping the plutonium enrichment track.

“Only a combination of these four steps will constitute an actual stopping of the nuclear project,” declared Netanyahu, adding, “Until all these steps are achieved the pressure on Iran should be increased and not relaxed — certainly not eased.” He repeated this demand even when it was clear that there would be an interim agreement to test the seriousness of the Tehran regime’s intentions.

And here, the six most powerful nations in the world preferred the language of diplomacy over the discourse of violence. The leaders of the powers in the group called the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) ignored the position of the prime minister of Israel, and relaxed the pressure on Iran in exchange for much less than those four conditions. They were satisfied with a win on points rather than a humiliating knockout. Despite all of Israel’s steps to prevent it — the threats to attack Iran, the sharp public dispute with Obama’s administration and the recruitment of conservatives in Congress against him, the wooing of the French, journeys to Beijing and Moscow and interviews with the British and German media — the forum preferred a temporary and partial agreement over a final, full-blown crisis. Netanyahu, instead of praising the agreement and taking the credit due to him as one of the initiators of the sanctions that caused Iran to ask for a compromise, chose to present Israel as a poor victim. He continues to demand a settlement that would bring Tehran to its knees and present him as the big winner.

The agreement with Iran was signed a short time after the agreement between the United States and Russia that brought about the removal of chemical weapons from Syria. Thus a much more concrete and immediate threat than the Iranian one was removed from the borders of Israel. The decision of the powers to wave a stick instead of landing a blow on the Iranian protectorate in Damascus should have signaled to Netanyahu that this would also be the route they chose to take in the talks with Tehran. It stands to reason that Iran will now be invited to contribute to a renewed effort to end the cruel civil war in Syria. We are witness to the beginning of Iran’s emergence from the international solitary confinement it entered following the revolution in 1979.