Having promised to drive out the six nations, God gave Moses a warning about the mistake that would undo everything.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, renders it with the sharpness of a prophet's rebuke. "Take heed to you, lest you strike covenants with the inhabitants of that land into which you are to enter; that it may not be a taqlata, a stumbling-block, unto you" (Exodus 34:12).
The danger, the Targum warns, is not primarily military. Israel will not lose the land to superior armies. Israel will lose it to treaties. To handshakes. To political accommodations that seem sensible in the moment and become idolatry in the following generation.
The Aramaic word taqlata means literally a trap, something you fall over. The Targum is painting a picture of the future. Israel enters the land, strikes a convenient arrangement with a local king, lets his daughters marry Israelite sons, tolerates a shrine on the hill "just for them," and a century later the whole camp is sacrificing to Baal.
History would prove the warning precise. The book of Judges is one long demonstration of what happens when Israel forgets this verse. Every national collapse begins with a treaty that seemed reasonable at the time.
Takeaway: The compromise that looks diplomatic in the present becomes the stumbling-block of the future. Jewish survival depends on knowing which accommodations are simply forbidden.