NEW YORK (JTA) — Former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus said that any nuclear deal with Iran should not include a significant decrease in sanctions on the country.
“No deal is better than a bad deal,” Petraeus told a crowd of over 1,700 Wall Street insiders on Monday night at the UJA-Federation of New York’s annual Wall Street Dinner, a fundraiser that broke last year’s record by raising more than $26 million. “And turning the screw on the sanctions is better in the end.”
At the dinner presentation, Marc Lipschultz, the global head of energy and infrastructure at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, asked Petraeus, also the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, about the Islamic State jihadist group and other global threats to Israel.
Petraeus responded that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in Europe is potentially more dangerous to Israel than threats in the Middle East and “might keep more people awake at night than anything else.”
He also said that Hezbollah’s threat to Israel has largely been neutralized by the Iron Dome defense system.
In 2012, Petraeus resigned from the CIA after he admitted to having an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
Monday night’s fundraiser at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan also featured the awarding of the inaugural Alan C. Greenberg Youth Leadership award to Brett Barth, a founder of BBR Partners. The award was named for the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who donated millions of dollars to the UJA-Federation.
Jacques “Jack” Brand, the CEO of Deutsche Bank North America and the son of Holocaust survivor parents, received the Gustave L. Levy Award for professional achievement and commitment to the UJA-Federation. Brand was born in Ghana to a German father and a Belgian mother.
