When there is no clear winner in the war, diplomats have a word for it settlement. Neither surrender nor triumph settlement. Now that word hangs over Jerusalem, like a cloud that no man will name. The deal that is being worked out in shuttle diplomacy via Doha, Muscat and the back channels of Islamabad is the kind of deal that allows a president to claim a victory on Truth Social, while the country that has done the bulk of the fighting is left to count the bounty.

During the weekend, Donald Trump announced to the world that an agreement had been "largely negotiated," the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, and his call with Benjamin Netanyahu had "gone very well. As usual, Tehran challenged him within hours. State media declared that the strait would remain under Iran's control with safe-passage co-ordinated through Oman, not Washington. The 14-point memorandum of understanding that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are working on to write is one page long and it's a single page, as anyone who has read a treaty knows, that's where the trouble usually begins.

On the table is really a 60-day ceasefire that can be renewed by mutual consent. In that period, Iran removes mine-clearing barges from the strait, provides for resumed shipping without tolls and makes verbal, and apparently some written, assurances that any eventual agreement will include the eventual "disposal" of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In exchange, the United States will remove its naval blockade of Iranian ports, which was imposed on April 17, and gradually ease sanctions, and unfreeze a portion of the estimated 24 billion dollars in Iranian assets held in foreign banks. That could happen the first day and half. The nuclear issue, the issue that sparked the war in February, is put off until talks are held in the 60 days.

This is where the disparity of readings lies between Tel Aviv and Tehran.

The framework is a silent relief for Iran. Its economy is in shambles, its currency is in freefall and its leadership is split between those who want retribution and those who want oil money back. A senior Iranian source in Tehran told Al Jazeera that the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has approved the general outline. The regime continues, the enrichment programme is not dismantled, but rather suspended, and the stockpile of over 400 kg of near-weapons-grade uranium sits on Iranian soil, at least for the time being. Tehran has already started briefing that the strait will "not return to its pre-war status," meaning Iran plans to not let go of the "throat" of world shipping even once the mines have been removed.

This is the worst of both worlds for Israel. Three days later, on Feb. 28, the nation joined the United States for a war dubbed Operation Epic Fury, with three aims: to dismantle the Iranian nuclear programme, to weaken the Iranian missile arsenal and to disrupt its support for proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. None of those goals have been officially achieved three months since the tenuous ceasefire. The Israelis are asked to sign a memorandum that does not deal with any of their red lines, but rather with relief they would have sought anyway in exchange for the strait, which is a problem only because of Washington's imposition of a blockade.

There's a more subdued debate swirling in Israeli security circles that should be heard more. Iran's fear is not only that it will retain its uranium. The worry is that the very structure of the deal which promises to extend an existing ceasefire, conclude the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and obligate Iran to "not interfere in regional affairs" is a straitjacket for Israel. As outlined in the draft language reported by Axios and Channel 12, Israel will still have the ability to respond to “imminent threats.” But who's imminent? The same Americans who, two months ago, were privately telling Jerusalem that Beirut strikes were imperilling the talks? The right to self-defence is not a license to freedom of action, and any Israeli prime minister who ever read the fine print of a ceasefire, brokered by Washington, knows the difference.

That is why Netanyahu assembled his coalition leaders and security chiefs for an urgent late-night meeting last weekend, why an anonymous Israeli official told Channel 12 that envoy Witkoff was pressing the deal “at almost any price” and why the prime minister has, since then, only issued one statement on the subject, that Iran will never get a bomb. The line is the one he is able to hold up in front of an unhappy cabinet. The blossoming terms, which Yisroel Beytenu's Avigdor Liberman, no shrinking violet, has denounced as "a catastrophe," are prompting him to accuse the government of turning Israel into "a banana republic. That's how it sounds in the coalition. The other discussion, the one in IDF planning rooms, is what will happen if Iran's uranium has not budged from a single square inch and the inspectors have nothing new to inspect on day 61.

It's obvious even to Trump's own party. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a hawk who chairs the Senate Budget Committee and has rarely been at odds with the president, threatened on X that a deal that leaves Iran able to choke off the flow of Gulf oil "will be a nightmare for Israel" and would leave the world "wondering why the war started to begin with. The rumoured framework is a "disastrous mistake" driven by "some voices in the administration," Ted Cruz said. Roger Wicker was blunt: it has been a disaster. Of course, Graham retracted his criticism within 48 hours and called the president "simply brilliant" but the original tweet remains as testament to the doubt within the coalition that funded the war.

The economics speak the truth that Trump can't tell in the TV. When the strait was closed on March 4 it led to the biggest oil supply cut in the history of the global market, according to the International Energy Agency larger than the 1973 and 1990 events. In the first week of the war, Brent crude passed the 120-dollar mark. Energy prices, as seen by the World Bank in April, are expected to rise 24 percent year-on-year in 2026, the largest price gain since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A closure of the Strait of Hormuz by one-quarter alone would drive an additional 0.6 percentage point to American headline inflation and 0.2 point to core, according to estimates from the Dallas Fed. Goldman Sachs took it one step further: the bank said in its worst-case scenario that Brent will remain at 100 dollars until the end of the fourth quarter. Petrol prices in the United States, which the White House can't afford to get wrong, became the political clock ticking under the negotiations during Memorial Day weekend.

The pain has been even worse in Asia. India, the world's third-largest crude importer, exported a total of 174.9 billion dollars of oil and petroleum products during the financial year ending in March, which is 22 percent of the total value of exports. The message conveyed by Prime Minister Modi in mid-May, when he spoke on television asking Indians to reduce their consumption of fuel, work from home, forego foreign vacations and stop purchasing gold, was less about the moral qualities of citizens and more about a current account deficit that was starting to strain. Tata-owned jeweller Titan's shares tumbled 6 per cent in a day. IndiGo fell almost 3. Last week, Marco Rubio came to New Delhi with an invitation to Modi in his pocket to visit the White House, and the topic of conversation on the table was the energy portfolio, with Washington peddling its oil and gas products as a way for India to replace Russian crude it has started buying again.

What these celebratory press releases won't mention is this: if the proposed deal is signed, it means the restoration of approximately the January 2026 reality minus the bombing, minus the dead, minus the trust that had been extended by Jerusalem to the American envoy class. Iran has its regime, still has its centrifuges in the ground and walks away with somewhere between twelve billion and twenty-four billion dollars in freed assets and it still has its finger on the strait it briefly shut down. The U.S. restarts the oil supply before its midterm political season in earnest. Israel is granted a paragraph which states it has the right to defend itself if it asks nicely, and a 60-day clock that starts ticking on a nuclear conversation no one in Tehran wants.

The MOU that's being discussed will ultimately just be what its name would suggest: an understanding. It was no treaty, no settlement, no victory. The harder argument one Israeli strategists are quietly making to anyone who will listen is that a paper deal that came about under American economic pressure, and not Israeli military pressure, gives Tehran what it was supposed to lose after 12 weeks of war: time. Now is the time to build centrifuges again, now is the time to reconnect proxy networks, now is the time to rearm Hezbollah, all under the guise of a Lebanese cease-fire nobody is enforcing.

Come the time in five years when the historians are sitting down to write the second draft of this conflict, the question will not be whether Trump got a deal. He will get one. The issue will be whether the deal it received was worth the war that led to it and whether Israel, which did most of the fighting, received anything more tangible than a paper marked "guarantee.

That's a verdict that no signing ceremony in the Rose Garden can bring.