One sentence uttered by US President Joe Biden to a protester generated great excitement in Israel this week. According to a newly surfaced video of the brief Nov. 3 encounter, the demonstrator urged Biden to declare the Iran nuclear deal dead. “It is dead, but we are not going to announce it,” he answered, essentially burying the lengthy, convoluted negotiations between Iran and world powers on reconstituting the agreement, which have troubled Israel greatly since the Democrats came to power almost two years ago.

Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was quick to take credit for the demise of the deal. “Quietly and wisely, through a series of diplomatic and other actions, we managed to stop the return to the nuclear agreement without creating a rift with the US,” Bennett tweeted.

Bennett, who served in office during the Biden administration’s initial months, said that his government’s policy had not only thwarted the nuclear agreement but also undermined Iranian-sponsored terrorism by striking at its architects on Iranian soil. “I hope the new government persists on this course,” he continued, in an acerbic reference to the confrontations by his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu with the Obama administration over the original 2015 Iran agreement, clashes that damaged US-Israel relations but failed to achieve their objective.

Biden’s comment runs counter to the assessments by Israel’s intelligence agencies, which informed decision-makers in no uncertain terms just a few months ago that the completion of an agreement with Iran was only a matter of time because both sides were determined to see it through. Mossad Director David Barnea, who led a highly unusual public campaign against such an outcome — earning a reprimand by Bennet’s successor, Yair Lapid — even embarked on a series of high-level meetings in Washington in September, in what was described as a last-minute bid to reverse a seemingly imminent deal.