President Obama announced today that six major powers and Iran have agreed to a deal to delay and curb Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for sanction relief.  Republicans in the U.S. Congress have criticized this approach, favoring war over peaceful negotiations, as famously illustrated by Senator McCain’s “bomb bomb Iran“s chant.

Prime minister Netanyahu has criticized this deal long before it was even drafted, saying that any deal would be a bad deal.  Netanyahu has worked hand-in-hand with Republicans in the U.S. to try to prevent this deal, coming to the U.S. just before the elections to try to turn public opinion against Obama, or did he?  I suspect that Netanyahu’s love of Republicans has a lot more to do with financing his own re-election.

Republicans in the U.S. paint the World in broad brushes: the good (money, competition), the bad (Government, anyone outside the U.S.), but seldom offer concrete solutions besides “bombing Iran”.   By aligning himself and his coalition with the Republicans, Prime Minister Netanyahu is placing Israel in the same bag as the hopeless Republicans in Congress.  In one stroke, he has isolated Israel from the six large powers (U.S., China, Russia, France, Germany and the U.K.) who signed the Iran deal, encouraged Israeli boycotts around the World and put Israel on the wrong side of peace in the Middle East.

The deal with Iran and its timeline have been crafted with the idea of breaking Iran’s isolation with the rest of the World, encouraging democracy and reducing the risk of war from within.  Netanyahu is doing just the opposite, and, in so doing, is endangering Israel as a whole.