The struggle around the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal gave place to heated debates in the United States in 2015. Tremendous amounts of resources were mobilized by pro-Israeli actors to “securitize” (Buzan, 1994) Iran towards two audiences: American lawmakers specifically and the American public more broadly. However, despite the magnitude of the attempt, the securitizing actors have not managed to derail the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA). This paper is interested in understanding this outcome. It analyzes it as the result of a strong movement of counter- and de-securitization, led by the Obama administration and J Street, to impose a different narrative. Counter- and de-securitization concepts have only recently gained attention (Christou & Adamides 2013; Stritzel & Chang 2015; Han 2020) and have not been fully developed, let alone applied to empirical cases. Building on these authors, this paper examines how counter- and de-securitization processes can occur concurrently with the securitization move in an attempt to resist this latter. Moreover, it argues that the counter-move actors are not necessarily the ones targeted by the securitization attempt – i.e. the referent subjects – but can also be distinct actors with appropriate capital able to assert themselves in the same field. In our case, the Obama administration, J Street and other organizations advocating for the JCPoA were not the referent subjects of the securitization move. Still, they initiated a counter-move. This proved to be decisive in preventing the original securitization from succeeding. This allows us to (re-)conceptualize security as a contested construct and to broaden the analysis of its production to a wider set of actors involved. Methodologically, the paper builds on a lexicometry and content analysis of 1) the texts published between January 2013 and September 2015 by three main pro-Israeli organizations (Commentary Magazine, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy), 2) Obama’s most important speeches on the deal and 3) J Street publications during the period running up to the vote in Congress. It starts by examining the ins and outs of the securitization process carried by the pro-Israeli organizations, most of them revolving around AIPAC. Secondly, it studies how newer pro- Israeli organizations holding opposite views have, along with the Obama administration, successfully challenged the mainstream ones through a counter- and de-securitization move by distinguishing between a threatening potentially-nuclear Iran without a deal and a peaceful non-(too-)threatening Iran with a deal.