The organization “Stand with Us” is making a HUGE error that will drive Jews away from support for Israel. Sadly, it has come out against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. SWU is foolish.
SWU was created to counter the boycott movement BDS. BDS is a pro Hamas organization that hides antisemitism under a thin veneer of concern for the Palestinian people. The effort by Kshama Sawant to get the Seattle City Council to condemn Israel is a typical action of BDS and one of many reasons I am so opposed to Sawant as a candidate for reelection. BUT my opposition to BDS is not the same as support for The Tea Party here or Likhud in Israel.
Iran is a sovereign nation. It has shown that it has the ability and the intent of developing nuclear technology however it wishes to do so. That ability, without actually building a bomb, is widely shared by many nations … Japan, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Germany, Canada, Brazil, South Korea and many, many others. That cat is out of the bag.
The real issue is convincing all of these states not to build and deploy bombs. THAT is what the agreement is about. If it works Iran will figure out that its interests lie not in 20th century warfare, but in 21st century commercial competition. Look at it this way .. Iran has the lesson of North vs South Korea.
In contrast, the Stand With Us editorial on the Iran deal is the antithesis of what SWU is supposed to be about. It reads like typical right wing anti Obama agitprop from the GOP .Let me be very clear .. I want Israel to survive. I have been a committed Zionist since growing up in the home of my father, the American medic who provided the first medical care to the inmates of Buchenwald. I have encouraged my children to do Aliyah. My wife and I are learning Ivrit with the idea of maybe retiring there.
BUT, as Yitzak Rabin said, the Jewish state we want can not survive as modern Sparta. The settler movement and the Likhud doctrine will drive people like me away from Israel. Editorials like this are the opposite of why we NEED SWU.
What Israel needs is to dump Bibi and find a leader like Obama who can build 21st century alliances … trade alliances. An Israel that can trade with Turkey, Egypt, India and Saudi Arabia is a lot more likely to survive than one based on the image of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.