Amid revelations that the U.S. transferred $1.7 billion to Iran at the beginning of the year, the White House has insisted (a) that the payments were intended to settle a 30-year-old dispute between the two countries over an aborted arms deal and (b) that the money was transferred in cash rather than by wire “precisely because,” in the president’s own words, “we are so strict in maintaining sanctions [that] we could not wire the money.” Mark Dubowitz and Annie Fixler disprove the explanation and trace the consequences of the transfer:

U.S. regulations permit all transactions between the American and Iranian financial systems related to settlements [of the arms-deal dispute]. Moreover, Washington wired payments to Iran in July 2015 and again in April 2016, further disproving the president’s statement.

It is certainly possible that banks were unwilling to wire the $1.7 billion no matter what guarantees they got from the administration. Banks have a healthy fear of sanctions and their penalties. If so, it raises a troubling question: how did Tehran receive the billions of dollars in sanctions relief released under both the interim and final nuclear agreements?

During the nuclear negotiations, the clerical regime received access to about $700 million per month, totaling $11.9 billion between January 2014 and July 2015. . . . If no mechanism existed to transfer the funds through the formal financial system, what mechanism was used to transfer the $11.9 billion? A senior official admitted that “some” of this money was sent in cash, and that “we had to find all these strange ways of delivering the monthly allotment.” . . .

Of course, cash is useful for funding outlawed organizations likes Hamas and Hizballah, or Shiite militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, or subversive activities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In other words, write Dubowitz and Fixler, the “nuclear deal has already led the United States to fund terrorists, sectarian warfare, and chaos in the Middle East.”

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.