US President Barack Obama met with his national security team Aug. 5 at the Pentagon to mark the one-year anniversary of the signing of the nuclear agreement between Iran and the six world powers. In remarks he delivered after the meeting, the president praised the agreement, saying that it is working as planned and that although Israel was the country most opposed to the deal, its military and its security community now acknowledge that the agreement had generated significant change.

That same day, shortly after Obama's remarks, the Israeli “Ministry of Defense” released a startling, perhaps unprecedented statement:

"The Israeli defense establishment believes that agreements have value only if they are based on an existing reality and that they have no value if the facts on the ground are completely the opposite of [the concepts] on which an agreement is based. The Munich Agreement did not prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust precisely because their basic assumption, that Nazi Germany could be a partner to any kind of agreement, was wrong, and because the leaders of the world at that time ignored the explicit statements by Hitler and the rest of the leaders of Nazi Germany. Iran today openly announces its aim to destroy the State of Israel, while a US State Department report published this year listed Iran as the world's top sponsor of terrorism. Hence, the defense establishment, like the rest of the Israeli people and many in the world, understands that agreements of the kind signed between the world powers and Iran are not helpful, but only harm the uncompromising struggle that must be undertaken against a terrorist state like Iran."

The statement struck Washington, and many in Tel Aviv, like a thunderstorm on a bright summer day. Even now, people from the parties involved are trying to decipher what lay behind it.