It seemed so close. So tantalizingly, maddeningly close.

The end of the Iranian regime will, however, have to wait for another day and perhaps another president in the distant future.

Over the last year, the United States and Israel inflicted more damage on the Tehran regime’s military and nuclear capabilities than was ever dreamed of during the Islamic Republic’s near half-century of existence. When Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was eliminated on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, it seemed more likely than not that the regime would no longer be around to celebrate its 50th birthday in 2029.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran’s leaders comes to fruition, the clock will have decidedly been reversed.

By some estimates, it jumps backwards by 10 years, restoring many of the provisions of the fatally flawed 2015 nuclear deal engineered by the Obama administration, which Trump withdrew from three years later. That deal also allowed Iran to declare that it would never pursue a nuclear weapon, while ultimately providing it with the means to do exactly that.

Given the amount of bandwidth that will be doubtlessly expended on criticizing the Iran MoU’s provisions, my purpose here is not to reinvent the wheel but to point to a deeper, more sustained threat that the MoU does not—indeed, cannot—address.

It’s obvious that by enabling the regime to survive and potentially rebuild, the agreement is a blow foremost to the Iranian people, who rose up yet again against the vile regime ruling them in January, as well as to the people of Israel, who continue to face Iran’s terrorist proxies, along with the regime itself.

But it also needs to be said that the MoU is a blow to the Jewish people as a whole.

Much of the violence, abuse, discrimination and insecurity piled upon Jews worldwide since Hamas, Iran’s proxy, carried out its Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in southern Israel can be sourced to Tehran.

On nearly every continent—in Europe, North America, Australia and other territories—Iran has sponsored terror attacks against Jewish targets. This is part of a long-established pattern, the most notorious example being the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed and more than 300 wounded. No Iranian or Hezbollah operative has ever stood trial for this atrocity, while the regime has sponsored further attacks against Jews on foreign soil in the intervening decades, including a 2012 bombing targeting Israeli tourists in the Bulgarian resort of Burgas and several attempts to carry out similar outrages from Georgia to Peru, and from India to Cyprus.

There is an important political dimension to this violence and terror. Like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before it, the Islamic Republic’s propaganda operations have grasped the value of antisemitism—always “a light sleeper,” in the inimitable words of the late intellectual Conor Cruise O’ Brien—in reaching foreign audiences in those countries (and that’s most of them) where the history of anti-Jewish agitation remains deeply embedded in the national culture.

Moreover, as with both the Nazis and the Soviets, antisemitism has always been a central plank of the regime’s ideology, focused upon Israel but drawing in older themes, especially the notion that Jews are inherently disloyal to the countries in which they live because of their Zionist affiliations. The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, stated in his 1943 book Kashf al-Asrar (“Unveiling of Secrets”) that Jews were agents of foreign domination who poisoned the moral values of the societies where they lived, writing, “Jews and other enemies of Islam had worked over centuries to weaken Islam and corrupt Muslim societies.”

This wretched legacy has resulted in openly genocidal rhetoric on Iranian media channels. Just this week, the unctuous Scottish neo-Nazi David Miller, a fixture on the regime’s Press TV mouthpiece, declared that even if Israel was eliminated, the struggle would nevertheless continue “because Jewish supremacism is not only in Occupied Palestine. The Jewish Empire exists everywhere that the Zionists exist, because they cannot exist without infiltrating, expanding, extracting and ultimately genociding (sic).”

In other words, it’s us or the Jews.

Given the fondness of Miller and his cohorts for slogans such as “dismantle Zionism,” it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to figure out where they want this foul rhetoric to end up.

Projecting forwards, it is sadly far easier to envisage the worst-case scenarios than the more benign ones. For all the enormous blows that Israel’s armed forces have inflicted upon Hezbollah and Hamas, including eliminating most of the rapists and murderers who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre, both Lebanon and Gaza continue to present a grave threat—and, just as was the case with former President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump in his present state of mind will take a dim view of any military initiatives undertaken by the Israel Defense Forces to squash the terrorists in these territories.

It is more than conceivable, therefore, that Israel could once again—and soon—find itself fighting these deadly enemies without the support of the United States, and with Jewish communities around the world facing a deluge of propaganda that will inevitably result in more incidents of the venomous violence that has accelerated over the last two-and-a-half years.

Added to that, it’s hard to see where this might end.

Trump’s second spell in the White House could be followed by a president drawn from the insurgent left of the Democratic Party or from the antisemitic isolationist faction of the Republican Party. At every level of government—federal, state and municipal—anti-Israel, anti-Jewish candidates are growing in both numbers and confidence. The same is true for other countries, like Canada and those in Western Europe, where Jews reside in relatively large numbers.

The Iran war may be over for Trump, at least for now. But for Israel and for Diaspora Jewry, its next phase is only just beginning.