WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama has assured America’s Jewish community that his nuclear accord with Iran is in the security interest of both the United States and Israel.

“This deal blocks every way — every pathway that Iran might take in order to obtain a nuclear weapon,” he told a meeting of American Jewish leaders at the White House on Friday evening.

The deal also answers the concerns of those who worry about “how best to protect the United States, Israel, and the world community from a potentially destabilizing Iranian nuclear weapon,” he added.

Mr Obama has launched a major campaign to bring public pressure on the US Congress, which returns to Washington next week to debate and vote on the deal.

Republicans, who are the opponents of the current Democratic government, control both chambers of the congress and have pledged to reject the deal.

The Republicans have an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives but only a simple majority in the 100-member Senate.

They now need support from four Democratic senators to reach 60, the number required to force President Obama to invoke his veto powers to keep the deal alive.

The use of veto so close to the 2016 presidential elections may hurt the Democrats, so they want Mr Obama to avoid it. To do so Mr Obama needs support from all Senate Democrats but as many as 14 of them have declared that they are still undecided. And many among them are Jewish.

Jewish groups that traditionally lean Democratic are divided, with some supporting the Democratic leader in the White House while others siding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a strong opponent of the deal.

The need for Jewish support forced President Obama to invite Jewish community leaders to the White House and urge them to use their influence to prevent the Republicans from undoing the deal.

He argued that rejecting the deal would bring about a crumbling of international sanctions and resumption of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

“A president 15 years from now will not be in a worse position to respond” if Iran tries to quickly obtain a nuclear weapon after much of the accord expires, Mr Obama said.

“He will be in a better position, or she will be in a better position to respond.”

He promised that Mr Netanyahu’s fierce opposition to the deal would not impede American-Israeli cooperation in countering Iran’s support for terrorism and its efforts to destabilise the Middle East.

President Obama insisted that he and other supporters of the deal have received more rhetorical abuse than they’ve dished out in the divisive debate over the agreement.

He noted that Congressman Jerrold Nadler was labelled a “traitor” and other slurs last week after he became the lone Jewish Democrat from New York to endorse the deal, which would lift economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on nuclear enrichment.

Mr Nadler has been “attacked in ways that are appalling,” Mr Obama said.

It was “the kind of stuff that people have to be deeply concerned about.”

The US president said he sought to ignore the angry denunciations of America by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“He’s a politician and I guess that’s the way politicians operate, even in Iran,” he said.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2015

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