The Israeli cabinet position of “strategy affairs minister” is primarily meant to focus around planning for a war with Iran. It’s a full time job, and it mostly involves pushing the US to threaten Iran more often.
The current minister, Yuval Steinitz, is at the forefront of Israeli officials expressing “concern” tonight at the new US war on ISIS, which they see as potentially getting in the way of long-term US hostility toward Iran.
Steinitz shrugged off ISIS as a “five-year problem,” while declaring Iran a “50-year problem with far greater impact,” and that more moves to stop Iran’s nuclear program ought to come before the new war.
The White House has sought to assure Israel that the new war won’t make them any less unreasonable in their negotiations with Iran, which Israel didn’t want to take place to begin with, but they can take some solace in the fact that the US seems unwilling to make a final deal with Iran.
Other Israeli officials expressed further concern that the US and Iran are on the same side in the ISIS war, with Iran already deploying troops to help Iraq before the US arrived. The “concern” seems to center on the belief that Iran would benefit from ISIS’ defeat, the same reason Israel has long looked the other way on ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria.