There was an acute feeling of dislocation to the nuclear talks over the last weekend in Geneva. For the hundreds of journalists milling around the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel with its $50 hamburgers, it was being cut off for four days from any real details except for a stream of Iranian disinformation, as talks went on between the world powers and Iran on the floors above and in the nearby Palais de Nations.

It was in the contrast between rainy, genteel Geneva and the hot, dusty faraway locations of the nuclear reactors and uranium enrichment centers being discussed. For me and the rest of the small group of Israeli journalists covering the talks, and I think for many Israelis back home, it was the sense that critical decisions regarding our future and fate were being decided over our heads, while Israel seemingly remained a bystander, looking on from the sidelines.

The ostensible Israeli isolation from the talks struck many observers, both on the anti-Israeli far left who reacted with joy at the deal they believe cast the “Israeli warmongers” as clear losers, and those on the right who believe that not only Israel, but the entire international community lost out in its eagerness to appease the Iranians.

For many critics of the interim deal with Iran, the historical lens through which they view it is the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France, under the threat of war, gave Nazi Germany carte blanche to dismember Czechoslovakia. Over the last five days the Geneva-Munich analogy has become such a cliche that pointing out its historical fallacies seems almost unnecessary. But it is still worthwhile putting Geneva in the context of Jewish history.

Munich may be the most infamous conference of 1938, but from a Jewish perspective another international gathering two months earlier could be seen as even worse. On July 6, delegates from nearly 30 countries arrived in the French spa of Evian-les-Bains to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, and to try and see whether any nation would be prepared to give them sanctuary.

Unlike Munich, the Evian Conference has become little more than a footnote to history. Besides the tiny and almost unreachable Dominican Republic, no country agreed to let in large numbers of Jews. For the Germans watching closely, it underlined the world’s apathy to their fate. For the Jews who were allowed in only as observers, not official delegates, it drove home the futility of relying on others. As Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, said after the conference, “The world seemed to be divided into two parts – those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”

Just like the Czechs in Munich, the Jews in 1938 were not to be a party to the deliberations over their own fate. And how neat to continue that analogy to Geneva 2013. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The scenes of jubilation in Tehran on Monday with the return of the Iranian delegation from the talks obscure the fact that Iran has failed. It invested hundreds of billions in building a totally unnecessary nuclear program which, despite all its claims, can only have been meant for one purpose - nuclear weapons capability. On the way they incurred diplomatic isolation and a sanctions regime that cost them further hundreds of billions, hobbling their economy and society to a massive extent - and now they have been forced to stop in return for relatively minor relief in the sanctions.

True, the nuclear capabilities as they stand are still there, and the diplomat double-speak of the interim agreement allowed them to save face, at least at home, and claim they had retained their “right” to continue enriching uranium and building a new plutonium reactor. Iran may still “break out” and try to race forward to weapons capability, but for now they have been reined in, and their only hope of removing the main sanctions is relinquishing a major part of their nuclear infrastructure.

For now the regime in Tehran has survived and is even managing to propagate the illusion of diplomatic victory. But for how long will the Iranian people lay low until they demand a reckoning from its leadership for squandering the national resources of an entire generation?

And for all the talk of Israeli “isolation,” the only accurate assessment of the process that led up to Geneva is that this was to a very large degree a result of unprecedented cooperation between Israel and its allies, including some who very recently would never have been thought of as belonging to that category. The Geneva deal is far from perfect, but it is very hard to see how any agreement would ever have been reached if for the last decade and a half Israel had not been engaged simultaneously in an intensive diplomatic campaign, one of the largest joint intelligence operations in history, and, for at least the last four years since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the Prime Minister’s Office, a public relations offensive - all of this aimed at building pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program.

While it can be debated whether the public attitude of Israel’s previous prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert - that “Iran is the world’s problem and the world must solve it” - or the much more strident Netanyahu approach was more effective, the result remains the same. Israel didn’t have to be at the talks; it was intimately involved in the preparations and immediately briefed by the senior negotiators in the aftermath. The fact that the Iranians were dragged and forced to concede on all material points makes Geneva a victory for Israel. A temporary and limited victory that must be followed up, but a victory nonetheless. And perhaps even a pivotal event in Jewish history when viewed from a more distant perspective.

As we celebrate Hanukkah this week, we tend to forget that the Maccabean kingdom of Judea was never fully independent. The main achievement of the Hasmonean insurrection against the crumbling Seleucid Empire was to carve out a small, semi-autonomous enclave around Jerusalem that continued to exist for the next couple of centuries at the whim of the powers, while regional hegemony passed from Greece to the new regional ascendancy of Rome, until Judea’s final destruction in 70 CE.

For the next nineteen centuries Jews remained at the mercy of whatever authority they lived under, and Evian, the Jewish people’s Munich, was the epitome of their abject dependence. Ten years later a new chapter began, and if Israelis and Jews around the world have not yet realized that they have finally wrested back control of their fate, the events this week in Geneva should serve as a source of reassurance and confidence that we can ourselves make the difficult but necessary decisions in the near future.