By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel B. Shapiro spoke Jan. 20, 2026 at the Trager Family JCC
It was getting on in the early evening of Tuesday, Jan. 20, as Daniel B. Shapiro – U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration – was speaking to a capacity audience at the Trager Family JCC’s Shapira Foundation Auditorium.
Prompted by moderator Kevin Trager, Shapiro had already recounted how he grew up in Champaign, Illinois, earned degrees from Brandeis and Harvard, lived for 12 years with his family in Israel, felt the call to public service, was shocked by the events of October 7, and so on.
Then came a jump to the sobering reality of the here and now.
“I wanted to ask you about Iran,” Trager said to Shapiro, whose talk was presented by the Jewish Federation of Louisville in partnership with Jewish Federations of North America, American Jewish Committee, and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and titled, The Future of the Middle East: The Secret Sauce of Regional Integration.
“Since we’re seeing something there right now that we haven’t seen in a very, very long time since the regime came to power in 1979,” queried Trager, “what is your perspective on the current protests, and is this regime going to fall? And then, what happens?”
“The first thing to say is that I’m overwhelmingly inspired by the courage of the Iranian people,” Shapiro answered. “They know that when they go out into the streets, they’re taking their lives (in their hands). They know they’re dealing with a brutal, repressive regime that has not hesitated to kill, in cold blood, thousands of their own citizens.”
Make no mistake about Iran’s guiding imperative, Shapiro warned.
“This is a regime that is deeply, deeply committed to its ideology and its cause. And what is that ideology? It is first and foremost to destroy the State of Israel. It is also to kick the United States out of the Middle East, to dominate the region and impose their will on their Arab neighbors, and seed within those Arab societies like-minded terrorist organizations.”
Confronted with unrelenting economic stress, many Iranians have reached their breaking point. “They’ve said, ‘We want freedom. We want to breathe. We don’t want to sacrifice our lives and our economy and our livelihoods to this ideological crusade we’re not part of.’”
America should take steps to help unify Iran’s disparate opposition, Shapiro said. “We’re going to have to provide their ability to communicate with each other over the internet,” and for us to facilitate, from outside Iran, “Persian-language broadcasts so they have access to information,” while we “continue to sanction those who are the authors of the slaughter of the Iranian people.”
Shapiro certainly is well-equipped to appreciate the stakes involved.
Following his five years as ambassador (and President Trump’s first term), he joined the Biden administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East – a position that made him the point-person for coordinating America’s response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Shapiro also served as the State Department’s Senior Advisor on Middle East Regional Integration and was a key figure in working to advance the Abraham Accords, which in 2020 established diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab nations of Bahrain, Sudan, Morrocco and the United Arab Emirates. Currently he is Distinguished Fellow for the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.
“You talk about the importance of America and Israel having a strong partnership,” Trager said to Shapiro, “and so many people in this room feel like they have to convince their neighbors why it’s so important. What do you say to people to convince them?”
“I say a couple of things,” Shapiro replied. “Look, the original source of the U.S.-Israel partnership is really based on two pillars. One is the moral dimension – that there’s justice in the existence of a Jewish state.” And in the decades since Israel’s founding in 1948, “nothing’s changed about that – we exist in a context in which there are enemies that surround the Jewish state and want to destroy it.”
At the same time, “we have a very, very important strategic dimension to that relationship,” Shapiro emphasized. “There are so many threats that emerge from the Middle East: terrorism, (nuclear) proliferation, (plus) retrograde governments that try to dominate their neighbors, that threaten our interests. We’ve seen it when terrorism has come out of the region and attacked us, as it did on 9/11, and as it did when ISIS was going forward. We’ve seen it when we’ve had threats of Iran trying to get a nuclear weapon that would set off a nuclear arms race in the region.”
Going it alone is a potentially dangerous strategy, Shapiro believes. “We need partners who can help us manage those threats,” he said. “And we have no better partner, no more capable partner – military technology, intelligence – than Israel.”
Consider what would happen, Shapiro posited, if we disagree so strongly with Israel’s domestic politics that we severely curtail our support.
“Three things happen very quickly,” he told his listeners. “One is that all those bad guys in the region – Iran, all those axis-of-terror groups that they sponsor will feel emboldened. They will see the United States pulling back, and they’ll say, ‘We’ve been hit hard over the last two years by U.S. and Israeli military power, but we now have a space and room to reconstitute.’”
“The second thing that will happen is the progress we have made on building a coalition of integrated partners…will really lose momentum.”
All this raises a third, perhaps most critical question: “Who will replace us as the main security partner and provider in those countries,” Shapiro asked. The answer: “Russia and China. We’ll open the door wide for our main competitors to plant their flag in the region.”
Meanwhile, what about that “Secret Sauce of Regional Integration” mentioned in the title?
To answer that query, Shapiro told of his earlier years with the Atlantic Council during President Biden’s term, when Shapiro led what was dubbed the “N7 Initiative.” This was a program – still among the Council’s core projects – involving a group of Arab nations (among them Egypt, Bahrain and Morocco) that would demonstrate the positive aspects of normalizing relations with Israel.
The idea was “to break some big taboos in their politics,” Shapiro said. “There would be a huge amount of technology in water, clean energy and of course, tourism. You could really do things that would bring business and educational opportunities to Arabs in those countries, and it would make it a club others would want to join.”
What’s next? Ideally, bringing Saudi Arabia into the fold of nations that have normalized relations with Israel. “You need to get Gaza settled. We need to feel that we’re not always on the verge of going back to full fighting.”
And though he’s no great Trump admirer, Shapiro gives the president credit for his role in implementing Phase One of the Gaza ceasefire, gaining the return of all the remaining living hostages, and all but one of those who had died in captivity.
An overarching question remains: Will there ever be a day when Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side as peaceful, cooperative nations?
“Listen – I got into this line of work primarily to achieve that goal: a two-state solution,” Shapiro said. “Of course, we have Israeli governments, increasingly in the last decade, that have been more and more right-wing based, with some extremist members who openly oppose a two-state solution and want to add more settlements that would make it impossible.
“You also have Palestinian leadership that has, unfortunately, not made an adequate commitment to educate their own public on Israel’s legitimacy…So there needs to be a rethink on the Palestinian leadership side. In the aftermath of October 7, for all the obvious reasons, Israelis are deeply skeptical – even some who’ve been longtime supporters of a two-state solution – that it can be done safely.”
Trump “has put in his 20-point plan, a credible passage to a Palestinian state, and that’s the right thing to say,” Shapiro said. “But anybody who has spoken to any Israeli who experienced October 7 knows they’re not ready. It will take some satisfactory resolution of the Hamas disarmament problem, and the installation of a different Palestinian leadership, before we really know that’s possible.”