There are two major reasons why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should pull back from his hard-line opposition to the Iranian nuclear deal. First, Iran is on a path toward international rehabilitation, whereby the United States and its European allies will increasingly be working with Tehran on regional security in the Middle East. Second, geosectarianism is reshaping the regional strategic environment to where the bulk of the threat to Israeli security will be from Sunni as opposed to Shiite actors.

Ever since the signing of the July 14 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a large number of serious voices from within Israel’s security establishment have come out criticizing the Netanyahu administration’s opposition to the deal. Many of these critics hold the view that the threat is not from a nuclear Iran, but rather an Iran that is on the path toward international rehabilitation. Intuitively, an Iranian regime unencumbered by sanctions indeed has far more room to pursue its anti-Israel policies. However, it is important to take stock of the constraints upon the Islamic Republic in light of the nuclear deal.

It is unlikely that a Tehran that has made the strategic decision to end its international isolation will engage in activities that could reverse its current course. More important, Iran needs to focus on rebuilding its economy. And on the foreign policy front, it is facing serious crises throughout its sphere of influence, which will preoccupy Iranian strategic planners and thus limit its ability to alter the balance of power currently in favor of Israel. It is interesting to note that those very forces (Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and the many other Salafist-jihadist militias that have their epicenter in Syria) that threaten Iranian interests are a bigger threat to Israeli national security. While Tehran is working to limit the extent to which these entities undermine the fabric of its regional sphere of influence, Israel faces a far greater challenge from these forces, which pose a direct threat to its national security. Furthermore, Tel Aviv has very few tools to deal with them. Jacky Hugi has argued in these pages that it is in Israel’s interest that the Syrian regime survives, because its collapse will destabilize Israel’s northern frontier.

In recent years, Israel has had to deal with threats from Lebanon’s Hezbollah as well as Palestinian Hamas and other smaller groups. The key thing here is that these two nonstate actors have been sponsored by various states, in particular Syria, whose influence ensured that Hezbollah and Hamas operated within certain boundaries. However, we are now in an age where the Arab world is experiencing the weakening and collapse of states coupled with the rise of jihadi nonstate actors of various stripes. While the situations in Egypt and Jordan are currently not as bad as that in Syria, the growing inability of Cairo and Amman to control their territories is a bigger threat to Israel than an Iran on the path toward rehabilitation. The geosectarian struggle between the Iran-led Shiite camp and the Saudi-led Sunni Arab camp is exacerbating the chaos brought about by state meltdown and growing transnational jihadism.