Arab and Israeli leaders are insisting that any U.S. deal with Iran also include provisions to address Iran’s other malign activities in the region, including support for terrorist proxies, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told Jewish Insider following a trip earlier this month to meet with Israeli and Arab leaders in the Middle East.

Wasserman Schultz traveled with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to the Middle East for the third time since Oct. 7, 2023, visiting Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan.

“There was a very clear urgency that the leaders we spoke to had to make sure that we … don’t let Iran up from their very weakened state. They’ve been badly pummeled and had significant defeats,” Wasserman Schultz told JI last week. “The consensus across the region, no matter where we went, was that we needed to make sure that continued and that we prevented them from achieving their nuclear weapons goals and that we particularly prevented them from continuing their support for terrorist activity.”

She said that notion was raised by multiple leaders without prompting from the U.S. lawmakers.

She said that “across the board” the leaders shared her view that any deal with Iran must “include defanging them — and that was a term that was used repeatedly, defanging them — and stopping them from continuing to terrorize” the region.

“It was made very clear to us it was not enough to just negotiate over their nuclear ambitions, that in their weakened state, you could not separate Iran’s malignancy when it comes to all of their activity — particularly if they got any relief from sanctions,” she said.

Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the lead negotiator for the U.S. in talks with Iran, suggested in a recent Fox News interview that the U.S. would consider allowing Iran to retain its enrichment capacity as part of a deal — a statement he later walked back — while Wasserman Schultz and Ernst were in the region. The outline Witkoff provided on Fox appeared to many to be equivalent to the original 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which Trump withdrew from in his first term.

Wasserman Schultz called it “incredibly hypocritical” for officials from the new Trump administration, such as Witkoff, to endorse terms of a deal similar to the JCPOA. Wasserman Schultz ultimately voted for the JCPOA in 2015 and calls it “the most difficult vote I’ve cast in all the years I’ve been in Congress.”

She called on Witkoff and the American negotiators to seek a deal stronger than the original JCPOA, making her the latest pro-Israel Democrat to raise concerns about the potential terms of a new deal with Iran. 

She said she’s “frustrated and concerned … and even angry” that the administration seems to be going “from pillar to post. Their discussions seem like they’re happening on quicksand and I have seen nothing that looks different than the agreement that [Trump] pulled out of.”

With Iran significantly weaker and more vulnerable than it was in 2015, Wasserman Schultz said the U.S. must seize the opportunity to push for a more comprehensive deal to prevent Iranian terrorist activity and stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

If the U.S. does return to a deal similar to the JCPOA, Wasserman Schultz said that the ultimate result of Trump’s withdrawal from the original deal would have been allowing Iran to get “perilously close to a nuclear weapon” and removing the option to strengthen the original agreement through further negotiations.

Wasserman Schultz said that she told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aggressively opposed the 2015 deal, that she expected he would offer “the same howling pushback that occurred back during the Obama years when those negotiations were taking place” if Trump moves toward a deal similar to the JCPOA.

Wasserman Schultz and Ernst also discussed the ongoing war with Hamas in their meeting with Netanyahu. Compared to previous meetings, Wasserman Schultz said she believed that the prime minister and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer outlined more comprehensive and specific strategies to achieve the release of the remaining hostages being held in Gaza.

“I probably have met with him five or six times over the course of the last year and a half there in Israel and in the U.S.,” Wasserman Schultz explained. “I was glad to see that they had varying approaches in terms of their negotiations and strategy with the ceasefire and hostage deals that they’re discussing. I was glad to see that and hear for the first time Dermer — and Netanyahu too — talk about the various options that they had, as opposed to it being a more minimalist conversation.”

Wasserman Schultz said she and Ernst had also spoken to Arab leaders about their proposals for post-war Gaza and achieving Saudi-Israeli normalization. She said the Arab leaders had been “very clear-eyed” about the difficulties of finding credible Palestinian leadership able to help move toward an eventual Palestinian state, but said they believed it was possible.

“I came away feeling like there could be some progress made. But it was clear that as a result of the war in Gaza, the signs of progress that we had hoped for when we were in Saudi Arabia on the night of Oct. 6 [2023] [were] further away at the moment than [they were] then,” Wasserman Schultz said. 

But she added that the countries which have normalized relations with Israel are not retreating from those agreements and remain committed to them, highlighting as one example of the progress made that she was able to attend a Seder on the first night of Passover in Abu Dhabi.