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US teen deported, Israeli rabbi wounded as tensions mount for Jewish activists in the West Bank

(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Having spent the night in an immigrant detention center in Ramle, Israel, Leila Stillman-Utterback, still handcuffed, began to daven shacharit, the morning prayers, as dawn broke.

“I think the police officers were very confused, because that was not the image of an activist that they had,” said the 18-year-old Vermont native.

Now, after being deported and banned by Israel for 10 years, she is unsure when she will be able to confuse people in Israel again.

In two separate incidents this past week, the right-wing Israeli government’s conflict with the Jewish left, both at home and abroad, reached new heights as American and Israeli Jews attempted to accompany Palestinians during their olive harvest in the West Bank. Harvesters have faced repeated restrictions by the Israeli military and a string of threats and attacks by local Israeli settlers.

In the first incident, Stillman-Utterback and another Jewish American were accused of violating the terms of their tourist visas and entering a closed military zone. The two were detained, deported and banned for 10 years from Israel.

Days later, armed Israeli settlers confronted a delegation of Jewish American activists. An Israeli dressed in partial military fatigues shot a live bullet into the air and a drone struck and injured a rabbi on the scene. The incident was caught on camera.

“These two incidents, one after another, are just evidence both of the danger of what’s happening, and that the Israeli government has made a decision that, rather than address the horrific violence by settlers, they’re going to … penalize American Jews who are here because they care about this land and the people who live here,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of the progressive Jewish organization T’ruah, who was present at the second incident.

The clashes and deportations of American Jewish activists, most of whom with deep connections to their Jewish communities as well as Israel, left Jewish groups and those affected dismayed.

The rabbinical associations for the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement saying they were “appalled by the attack on a group of rabbis, including members from all three of our organizations, by radical settlers” in the West Bank.

“We demand that the attackers be held accountable for their actions and that the Israeli government use its authority to end such provocations and attacks,” they said. An Israeli Reform rabbi and member of parliament, Gilad Kariv, plans to raise the issue in the Knesset.

This year has seen an uptick in Israeli and international activists providing a protective presence for Palestinians attempting to complete the all-important olive harvest, which is a cultural touchstone as well as an economic lifeline for rural Palestinians facing high unemployment.

Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 27, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented 126 olive harvest-related settler attacks against Palestinians resulting in casualties, property damage, or both, a record pace. In addition, Palestinian farmers have been consistently presented with closed military zone orders for up to 24 hours in the areas they wish to harvest.

In mid-October, Israel detained and deported 32 foreign activists who were accompanying Palestinian harvesters near Burin.

Stillman-Utterback joined 10 other Jews — seven Israelis, and three other foreigners — on Oct. 29 as part of a solidarity harvest in Burin organized by Rabbis for Human Rights.

When she graduated from high school this past spring, Stillman-Utterback knew she wanted to spend a gap year in Israel. Stillman-Utterback’s mother is a rabbi, and she worked as a Hebrew school teacher while spending her summers at Eden Village, a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York. She was also on the Jewish Youth Climate Movement’s executive board in high school, and she was named a Bronfman Fellow, a cohort of high-achieving Jewish teens, two years ago.

“My anchors in my life and a lot of my communities that are really important to me are all Jewish,” Stillman-Utterback told JTA.

Having gone on multiple summer trips to Israel over the years, Stillman-Utterback spent the 2022-2023 school year living in Jerusalem with her family. She attended many of the pro-democracy protests outside the Knesset that year, calling them “inspiring.”

“I learned about Israel through the perspective of Jewish values like tikkun olam and b’tselem elohim,” she explained, using Hebrew terms meaning social action and the concept that all humans are created in God’s image. “That every human being is made in the image of Hashem, and that is how I was learning about and looking at the conflict.”

Along with the other woman deported by Israel, Stillman-Utterback had come to Israel this fall as a part of the Achvat Amim program, which is connected to the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair. The five-month volunteer program in Jerusalem focuses on “self-determination of all people.”

Stillman-Utterback joined half a dozen harvests before the one that led to her deportation.

Before the latest and last action, the activists were stopped by Israeli soldiers at a “flying checkpoint” at the entrance of the village of Burin. An organizer was handed a closed military zone order, prohibiting the group from entering the area. According to one of the volunteers, they decided to take another route to join the harvest in an area that they believed was not included in the order.

Shortly after arriving at the new area, organizers learned that their bus drivers had been detained by the Israeli military, with their keys confiscated. Upon hearing this, they decided to bring the group to the soldiers, according to one volunteer present. The volunteer asked for anonymity because Israeli authorities later demanded the activists sign a statement promising not to speak publicly about the incident.

After the activists were held for 90 minutes by the soldiers, Israeli police arrived and announced they were detaining the entire bus because the participants were aware they had entered a closed military zone. The volunteers were escorted to the police station in the Israeli settlement of Ariel. Those with Israeli citizenship or with visas other than a student or tourist visa were released shortly thereafter.

According to Michal Pomerantz, the lawyer for the deported women, Stillman-Utterback and another Jewish-American woman on tourist visas were brought to an immigration tribunal in Ramle. With the proceedings carried out in Hebrew, they were unaware that it was a deportation proceeding and that the man they were speaking to was a judge, according to Pomerantz.

Israeli authorities say the participants ignored the initial warning and were aware they were in a closed military zone. One of the other detained participants said the group believed they had moved to an area that was not under the order.

“The policeman asked [Stillman-Utterback], ‘Why didn’t you get off the bus?’” recounted Pomerantz. “I mean, it was an 18-year-old in the middle of the West Bank. She had no idea where she was.”

The head of Hashomer Hatzair wrote a letter to Israeli authorities vouching for the two women while asserting they were engaged in a Zionist program oriented around “coexistence.” Pomerantz says this plea didn’t make a difference to immigration officials. Neither did telling Israeli officials that they were Jewish.

Faced with either appealing the decision and spending the weekend in an immigration prison or accepting a flight out of Israel, both women accepted the offer to be flown out, leaving the country on Friday.

“They basically are getting deported over being in a closed military zone for a couple of minutes,” said Becca Strober, the executive director of Achvat Amim.

The deportation of foreign Jews engaged in solidarity activism with Palestinians is a relatively new phenomenon. Strober recalled one such action she and others took in 2016 in which they deliberately entered a declared closed military zone. In that case, while six Israeli activists were detained, the American citizens were left alone.

The closest example to the case in Burin is that of Leo Franks, a British Jew who arrived in Israel last year on a tourist visa with plans to immigrate. After being detained for pro-Palestinian activism work in the West Bank, Franks had his immigration application denied and was ordered to leave the country within seven days.

“For a state that claims to be a Jewish state for all Jews,” said Strober, “if you just show up one day and stand in support of Palestinians by doing something as basic as picking olives together, actually, then your Jewishness is irrelevant.”

Jewish and other groups organizing solidarity harvests this year complain that while there were previously mechanisms for coordinating harvests with the military, this year they are largely unable to do so.

Organizers for Rabbis for Human Rights say they have been presented with closed military zone orders the majority of the time they arrive at Palestinians’ olive groves. Pomerantz and a team of lawyers have been involved in an ongoing case with the Israeli Supreme Court for the last three years, claiming that military zone closures are being misused by the army for political instead of security purposes.

“Our ability to be protected by the army has really broken down,” said one of the other Jewish volunteers who was detained in Burin. “And especially with this Netanyahu-led coalition, we’re treated as traitors. We’re treated as suspects, as anarchists, as people coming with some kind of foreign agenda.

“But we affirm that we’re doing this for the sake of Israeli society, as much as we’re doing it for the liberation of Palestinians.”

In a joint statement made by the IDF and Israeli police after the incident, authorities said they had conducted an operation in Burin together with the Population and Immigration Authority after discovering activities by Israeli and foreign activists in the area that were “endangering public security and causing friction on the ground.” Subsequently, they worked to “locate and stop foreign elements involved in incitement and provocations which create disturbances of the public order.”

The statement went on to say that the two women had violated the terms of their tourist visas. Though at first promising to do so, a spokesperson for the IDF did not comment further to JTA.

Rabbi Jacobs said she organized a trip to the West Bank this year in response to the changing conditions on the ground.

“Settler violence has just gone up extraordinarily in the last couple of years during the war,” Jacobs told JTA. “When we’ve been watching it from afar, as many of our Israeli and Palestinian colleagues have been affected by it, it seemed appropriate that even if we can’t as Americans be here every day, that we would at least find a time for a group of us to be here.”

Working with Rabbis for Human Rights on the ground, Jacobs and eight other rabbis — several of whom had already flown to Israel to attend the World Zionist Congress — first went out picking olives in the Palestinian village of Battir before staying overnight with Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley. Such shepherds report an onslaught of physical attacks by Israeli settlers while being mostly prevented by settlers and soldiers from grazing their flocks in lands now often located in military firing zones or nearby Israeli settlements or outposts.

On Tuesday, the group then went to fields near Deir Istiya to pick olives with local Palestinians, joining other solidarity activists, a few of whom wore markers of Jewish observance such as tzitzit and kippot. The local Palestinians had been unable to reach their olive groves this year due to restrictions from Israeli soldiers and local settlers. The rabbis and Palestinians managed to pick the olives for a short time as a drone buzzed overhead. At times the drone came close to the harvesters.

At one point, the drone swooped down and struck Rabbi Dana Sharon from Rabbis for Human Rights, leaving a deep gash on her shoulder.

Soon after, two armed Israelis arrived, dressed in partial military fatigues and claiming to be a part of the security coordinator team of the nearby settlement of Revava. “The drone is a property of the [settlement security guards]!” shouted the men. Though the drone was returned, shouting ensued, with one of the harvesters shouting back. One of the men then shot a live round in the air before retreating.

Soon after, Israeli soldiers in uniform approached the group of olive harvesters, saying they were told by the two armed Israelis that the group of rabbis and olive harvesters had taken their drone and attacked them. These soldiers relented when shown videos by the harvesters suggesting otherwise.

The shock of the encounter was palpable among the group of visiting American rabbis, who hailed from a combination of Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative congregations. One stunned rabbi asked an Israeli working for Rabbis for Human Rights about the gunshot, “That was a blank, right?” It was not.

The men have not been identified but appear to reflect a blurring of the lines between settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.

In a statement to JTA, the IDF identified the men the group thought were armed settlers as soldiers.

“IDF soldiers operated a drone that hit harvesters,” the statement said. “The incident is under review.”

According to the IDF, the soldiers arrived “to collect the drone, during which they fired shots in the air.” The incident was “unusual” and ”included unprofessional behavior” by the soldiers, said the IDF, which said without offering specifics that “disciplinary action” would be taken.

According to Jacobs, different IDF soldiers in uniform were present from the beginning when the group began the harvest. By Jacobs’ account, these soldiers did nothing as the drone came closer and when the armed men confronted the group.

“I don’t think this [incident] is unusual, though,” she said. “Settlers in IDF uniforms harass Palestinians every day and sometimes wound and kill them. What was unusual was that this group included American and Israeli rabbis, which is likely the reason the IDF is responding at all [to requests for comment].”

Rabbi Sarah Reines, of Temple Emanu-El in New York, looks back on her three-day trip in the West Bank heartened by the Palestinian communities she visited and committed to continued solidarity.

Reines praised “these people’s resilience and their ability to discern the difference between Israelis who threaten them and cause them harm, those who are neutral, and those who are friends.”

She added, “The rising danger only increases my resolve to represent the highest Jewish values of respect, lovingkindness, peace and preservation of life in the land Jews call home.”

In the case of Stillman-Utterback, her deportation and banning left her with “a sense of betrayal,” one that she is now processing from back in the United States.

“It sent me the message that, despite being Jewish in a state that was created for Jews, I’m not the right kind of Jew, or maybe not even Jewish at all, in the eyes of the state and the army and the police,” said Stillman-Utterback.

The post US teen deported, Israeli rabbi wounded as tensions mount for Jewish activists in the West Bank appeared first on The Forward.

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What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av

As we chant Lamentations on the floor, in the dark, on Wednesday night for Tisha B’Av, we will open with the word “eikha” — “how.”

That same word became the refrain of a recent eight day visit I made to Israel and the West Bank.

I traveled to Jerusalem for a week of immersive learning with 150 rabbis and cantors at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s annual Rabbinic Torah Seminar. But my learning wasn’t restricted to the beit midrash. I spent time with cousins finishing combat service; friends working late into the night in the Knesset before its dissolution; people working to build shared society in Haifa; and families grieving the loss of loved ones. And at every turn, I found myself asking “eikha.”

“Eikha is more than a question. It is the sound made when the distance between what should be and what is becomes almost impossible to bear. Naming that distance is at the heart of Tisha B’Av — and, for me, at the heart of thinking honestly about Israel today. How will Israel move from this moment of profound moral and political fracture toward the future our prophets imagined?

On a visit to the West Bank with Rabbis for Human Rights, I connected with Israelis from across the country who had come to be a protective presence for Palestinians in Jenata, near the settler outpost of Havat Eitam. The Palestinians there face violence and intimidation in an area formally under Palestinian civil authority. We heard from a man whose brother had recently been killed by settlers, and we learned that their imam was jailed just that morning to prevent Friday prayers from moving forward as planned.

Then we were told to leave. The corner of the village we were visiting was declared a 24-hour closed military zone.

Next we traveled to Umm al-Khair, a Palestinian herding community where the Hathaleen family buried their son Awdah almost a year ago, after he was shot and killed by an Israeli settler who still walks free. Since his death, settlers have built caravans encroaching into the village, with some only a few meters from homes. This encroachment has triggered the declaration of another “closed military zone,” cutting the family off from their own bathroom and animals. They must use a neighbor’s bathroom and can only feed their animals when a soldier comes to allow it.

I asked a soldier standing guard that day whether any of it troubled him.

“Doesn’t Oct. 7 trouble you?” he replied.

I don’t know what that soldier has seen, or what he has lost. But I know his response took two griefs and set them against each other, as though one atrocity could justify another. “Eikha”: How do we nurse our deepest wounds without allowing them to justify our wounding others? How do we stay safe and moral?

This past Shabbat was Shabbat Hazon — the “Sabbath of Vision” — so named for the opening word of the Haftara, which describes Isaiah’s vision of a devastated but ultimately redeemed Jerusalem. That reading, in our current context, must push us — and, God willing, Israel’s next political leaders — to articulate compelling responses to the questions bearing down on Israeli society and on Judaism itself. To ask how we came to a point of such dire trouble, and realize a vision for redemption from it.

I keep thinking about the way slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin would remind his fellow captives, citing Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words, that if they could hold onto a “why,” they could endure any “how.”

Israel and the Jewish people have profound whys. We are meant to be, in the words of “Hatikvah,” “a free people in our own land.” And to be, in the words of the Torah, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

This Tisha B’Av, as we mourn the destruction that shattered Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago, we must also reckon honestly with the forms of inhumanity that threaten its moral future and physical safety today.

We must understand that our freedom, our holiness and our humanity are bound up in that of the Hathaleen family, and the besieged villagers of Jenata. During my visit, an Israeli cousin of mine acknowledged that everything I had seen in the West Bank was real and terrible — and that he didn’t want Palestinians living so close to Israel, out of fear of an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank. What I wish all of us could better understand: If Jewish freedom depends upon denying Palestinian freedom, then it is neither the freedom of “Hatikvah” nor the holiness the Torah demands. I also don’t think it will make us safe.

This is, I think, the particular question facing rabbis and Jewish communal leaders like me right now: how do we hold onto our right — our obligation — to name Israel’s failures honestly, as people bound to this place and this story, without having our words weaponized to delegitimize and demonize the entire project? My criticism of what I saw in Jenata and Umm al-Khair comes from love — the same love that makes looking away impossible. Learning how to hold both at once, unflinching criticism and unwavering commitment, may be the most urgent “eikha” of this particular moment.

After Tisha B’Av comes the Shivah d’Nehemta — the Seven Weeks of Consolation that carry us into Rosh Hashanah.

In those weeks, the questions of “eikha” don’t disappear. They deepen. These weeks lead us into Elul, a time of intense heshbon hanefesh — accounting of the soul. The pairing of consolation with accounting suggests that renewal comes not through answering our questions, but through finding the courage to keep asking them.

How do we protect ourselves without surrendering our humanity? How do we acknowledge our own suffering without turning it into permission to inflict suffering on others?

Those are Israel’s questions as they move toward their October elections. They are ours as well, as we navigate being Jews in this moment.

The post What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av appeared first on The Forward.

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To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con

Progressive Jewish groups across the country this week are using the fast day of Tisha B’av to protest national immigration policies, gathering outside ICE facilities, immigration courts,city halls and in San Diego’s case, culminating at a convention center. Tisha B’av protests are also planned in Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Tisha B’av commemorates several Jewish national tragedies, including the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. Protest organizers connect the torment tied to the destruction and ensuing exile, recounted in the book of Lamentations, to the pain experienced by immigrant families today.

“We had our sacred spaces taken away from us and we became wanderers,” Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, leader of San Diego synagogue Dor Hadash and one of the protest organizers, said in an interview. “And what is happening to the people who are in our streets? They’ve already been made wanderers once — having to escape torture, persecution, degradation — and now we’re doing it to them again.”

The protesters in San Diego — representing Jewish groups, labor unions, left-wing political organizations and social justice nonprofits — will begin by reading from Lamentations outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, where immigrants are often detained following their hearings. They then will march to the San Diego Convention Center. They also plan to recite kaddish for people who have died in ICE custody or at ICE protests.

The immigration protests are part of a long history of Jewish groups using Tisha B’av as an opportunity to reflect on social ills. And while they will occur across the country, the protests are not nationally organized, according to their organizers. Instead, each one has a particular local resonance.

“San Diego is a border city,” Rothbaum said, “and the fact that we have a government that says the people born on this side of the border are more important, more precious, more sacred than people born on the other side of that border is blasphemy.”

Rothbaum’s involvement in Tisha B’av immigration actions dates back to the first Trump administration, when he was working in Massachusetts. A similar rally will unfold there this week outside New England’s ICE headquarters.

That event will include an Erev Tisha B’av program led by the state’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action.

Cindy Rowe, the alliance’s president and CEO, will also speak about Tisha B’av at a rally at Boston City Hall to protect the temporary protected status of Haitian immigrants, which expires Thursday. Massachusetts is home to roughly 45,000 Haitian immigrants whose legal status could be in jeopardy after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that President Trump has broad authority to deport them.

The expiration of Haitians’ temporary protected status on Tisha B’av was “a cruel twist of fate,” Rowe said.

Tisha B’av represents “a day of mourning for the destruction of communities, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now in our modern day,” Rowe said. “The destruction of our own community right in front of our eyes.”

More than a dozen Jewish groups — including several synagogues, a JCC and various social justice groups — are partnering with multifaith organizations and labor unions on a Thursday afternoon event in Los Angeles, which will include testimony from clergy who have witnessed the conditions of detention in ICE facilities.

These groups held a similar event last year, when the spectacle of immigration enforcement raids was winning daily headlines. The media focus has since dwindled, but ICE detentions continue apace, according to Brooke Wirtschafter, executive director of Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, a progressive group that focuses on local issues like housing and immigration.

“It is very much alive and real in Los Angeles in 2026,” Wirtschafter said. “If it is less dramatic than it was in 2025, it’s still very active, and so it’s important to us to continue to raise the issue.”

Likewise, a Jewish-themed immigration protest outside Comic-Con might feel dissonant to the traveling fans encountering it. Rothbaum wants it to turn heads.

“I hope when they come out and they see this group — and then they see Jews are part of this group — that they’ll think for a second before they go to the next thing, ‘Hey, what is my ethical obligation?’” Rothbaum said. “What are Americans’ ethical obligations to the people who come here, either escaping torment or looking for a better life?”

The post To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con appeared first on The Forward.

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Israel alarmed by reports of a possible US-Saudi nuclear deal

(JTA) — A potential U.S. civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which The New York Times has reported could be announced by the Trump administration as early as Wednesday, is alarming some Israelis and Americans.

Critics are concerned that the deal, through which U.S. companies would help Saudi Arabia build civilian nuclear energy plants, could allow Saudi Arabia to eventually develop nuclear weapons.  The proposed plants would have the capacity to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel without pervasive oversight.

The arrangement would also remove one of the key incentives to encourage Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. The Biden administration had been in the process of exchanging such nuclear access for Saudi acceptance of open ties with the Jewish state when the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, upended the efforts.

Now, a number of media outlets, including the Times and The Wall Street Journal, are reporting that President Donald Trump plans to move ahead with the civilian nuclear program without such strings attached, though a deal has not yet been publicly announced by the Trump administration or formally acknowledged by the Israeli government.

According to Reuters, the nuclear deal would be given to Congress for review but could only be blocked by a two-thirds majority.

When quizzed by Army Radio on the deal, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar said Israel has been clear with the United States about its red lines but would not say if such a deal crossed that line.

These are conversations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is having with security experts, he said.

Israeli opposition politicians were blunter about the potential danger. Former Israeli Defense Ministers Avigdor Liberman and Benny Gantz both warned a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal could spark a regional arms race.

That could happen because a nuclear Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, could spur its Shi’a rival, Iran, to take even more aggressive steps toward building a nuclear bomb. Iran already possesses enrichment capabilities, and the point of the current war launched by the United States and Israel is to keep it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Liberman, who heads Yisrael Beytenu, wrote on X that “a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia will end with nuclear weapons [production] and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”

Yair Golan, a former IDF major general who was a deputy chief of staff and now heads the opposition Democrat Party, said that the long desired Israeli-Saudi deal would have  created important diplomatic ties and anchor a regional strategic alliance against Iran.

To give Saudi Arabia nuclear capabilities “without stringent monitoring requirements and without a framework of relations with Israel as a condition creates a dangerous reality for the State of Israel,” Golan wrote on X.

At the White House on Tuesday, Trump spoke broadly about other countries joining the Abraham Accords, the regional normalization agreements he brokered at the end of his first term in 2020, but did not mention Saudi Arabia.

The accords created a regional rubric under which Israel normalized ties with some Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden had sought to bring Saudi Arabia into the pact.

Tensions throughout the region following the Oct. 7 attack and the Gaza war, however, pushed Saudi-Israel normalization further out of reach. The Saudi demands for normalization sharpened in the subsequent years and include Palestinian statehood or, at the very least, progress toward that goal. The Netanyahu government has adamantly rejected such a condition in the wake of the attack and the Israeli public has increasingly opposed the concept as well.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died last week, was an ardent advocate for an Israeli-Saudi deal. He had pushed Trump not to make concessions to Saudi Arabia without the kingdom moving closer to Israel.

Graham had continued to work on normalization in the months leading up to his death. He told CBS News in June, “We’re going to try to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords to end the Arab-Israeli conflict in 2026.”

Dan Shapiro, who worked during the Biden administration as a senior adviser on Middle East regional integration for the State Department, said Wednesday that a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal would  make such normalization more difficult.

The plan originally was for a civil nuclear energy agreement with sufficient safeguards against proliferation to be part of a package that would include normalization with Israel, he said.

“It appears that the Trump administration has given it away without normalization,” Shapiro told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Trump’s deal “seems to have abandoned a very important point of leverage to advance another important regional goal of the United States,” he said.

“This was supposed to be a major carrot for Saudi Arabia if they were to normalize with Israel, and now that carrot has been provided without it.”As a result, he said, “the whole incentive structure would have to be redone.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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