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The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst
for years
When will the US and the UK tell the truth about Israeli
weapons? Iran isn't starting an atomic arms race, it's joining
one
By George Monbiot
11/20/07 "The
Guardian" -- - George Bush and Gordon Brown are
right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than
anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm
diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on
Israel?
Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I
also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of
economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military
response would, of course, be disastrous). I believe that Bush
and Brown - who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of
the non-proliferation treaty - are in no position to lecture
anyone else. But if, as Bush claims, the proliferation of such
weapons "would be a dangerous threat to world peace", why does
neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret
briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, possesses
between 60 and 80 of them?
Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of
"nuclear ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its
possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the
issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to
give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws,
which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised
weapons of mass destruction. The fiction of ambiguity is
fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai
Vanunu handed photographs of Israel's bomb factory to the Sunday
Times, he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped
by Mossad agents, tried in secret, and sentenced to 18 years in
prison. He served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was
banged up again - for six months - soon after he was released.
However, in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud
Olmert, accidentally let slip that Israel, like "America, France
and Russia", had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were
furious. They attacked Olmert for "a lack of caution bordering
on irresponsibility". But US aid continues to flow without
impediment.
As the fascinating papers released last year by the National
Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that
Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn't know is
that the first one had already been built by then). The contrast
to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the
bomb could scarcely be starker.
At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50
F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its
nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near
Eastern Affairs to the secretary of state in October 1968
reveals, the order would make the US "the principal supplier of
Israel's military needs" for the first time. In return, it
should require "commitments that would make it more difficult
for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear". Such
pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had
just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range
missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear
warheads.
Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant
defence secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador
to Washington), Rabin "did not dispute in any way our
information on Israel's nuclear or missile capability". He
simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin
announced that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to us".
On November 27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted
Israel's assurance that "it will not be the first power in the
Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons".
As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had
been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone
conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in
July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was "very leery of cutting
off the Phantoms", despite Israel's blatant disregard of the
agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US
administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to
defend Israel's lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to
"inspect" Israel's Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the
state department reveals that "the US government is not prepared
to support a 'real' inspection effort in which the team members
can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or
insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and
the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to
avoid controversy, 'be gentlemen' and not take issue with the
obvious will of the hosts".
Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he'd had
with the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to the US
ambassador to Israel, Wally Barbour. Meir and Nixon appear to
have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long
as it was kept secret.
The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months,
the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on
technology acquired by foreign states that's "useful for the
development or production of weapons of mass destruction". These
reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea,
Iran and other nations, but not in Israel. Whenever other states
have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation
treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them.
Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical
weapons conventions.
By refusing to sign these treaties, Israel ensures it needs
never be inspected. While the International Atomic Energy
Agency's inspectors crawl round Iran's factories, put seals on
its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to
cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in
Israel. So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last
week, that the head of the IAEA is "sticking his head in the
sand over Iran's nuclear programme", you can only gape at its
chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for
action against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for
action against Israel.
Yes, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and
unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The
president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of
Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran responded to Saddam
Hussein's toxic bombardments with chemical weapons of its own.
But Israel under Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable
state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it
bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed).
Last year, it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It
remains in occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001,
according to the BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180
people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions.
Nuclear weapons in Israel's hands are surely just as dangerous
as nuclear weapons in Iran's.
So when will our governments speak up? When will they
acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle
East, and that it presents an existential threat to its
neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a
nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that
the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?
www.monbiot.com
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