Israel Has Nukes - World Should Focus on This Global Nightmare

Rasa - It is Israel’s nuclear weapons that pose the greatest threat to Middle Peace, not Iran’s nuclear deal with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

News ID: 437515

Date: 05 May 2018 - 22:26

RNA - It gets particularly worse when you realize that the United States and other nuclear powers are also hypocritically ignoring their own disarmament commitments in between.

However, it has been well understood by US and European officials since the 1960s that Israel has the capacity to build its own nuclear weapons. Publicly, Israel has a policy of not confirming or denying its nuclear stockpile, even though by now it is a well-established fact. Since 1968, Israel has amassed a secretive arsenal thought to amount to 200-400 nuclear warheads. In a hacked 2015 email, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote that Israel has “200 nuclear bombs, all targeted on Tehran.” The latter figure might be an underestimation, but there’s no doubt that Israel has the bomb, in significant numbers, and it is willing to use them against any nation that happens to be at loggerheads with its Apartheid policies in occupied Palestine.

Moreover, there seems to have been a deliberate policy of successive US Presidents turning a blind eye to what is going on in Israel, ignoring their own intelligence briefs. Instead, some like Donald Trump even try to derail the current nuclear agreement Iran signed with the P5+1 in 2015, which is a shame. There is no doubt about which side Britain is also on. Britain First, whose deputy leader’s messages Trump re-tweeted recently, is extremely pro-Israel, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is very pro-Trump. Within this sort of context, Israel’s nuclear weapons today are far more likely to create a new nuclear nightmare than to stop one like Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

It is indeed time for the international community, particularly those in power in Europe and the United States, to call out Israel for its nuclear weapons. That’s because the only regime in Middle East with a proven, clandestine nuclear weapons stockpile is Israel – the same rogue state that refuses to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This hypocrisy cannot be allowed to continue, with Israel having hundreds of nuclear weapons, no inspections and no adherence to any nuclear treaty calling out Iran on nuclear weapons!

Lest anyone forgets, a striking example of Israel's hypocrisy and refusal to confirm what virtually the entire international community has known for decades came when Netanyahu was asked recently about Israel’s nukes by CNN's Chris Cuomo. "Does Israel have nuclear capabilities and nuclear weapons, yes or no?" Cuomo asked. Netanyahu offered an evasive response, claiming "we've always been the first to say we wouldn't introduce it so we haven't introduced it." After Cuomo continued to press for a "yes or no answer," Netanyahu said, "That's as good an answer as you're going to get."

According to Fars News Agancy, this should be a wake-up call for the international civil society to realize that it is not Iran they should focus their attention on; rather, the inconvenient fact that Israel continues to shroud its own nuclear stockpile in secrecy as it levels accusations against Iran - which, unlike Israel, allows inspectors to examine its nuclear facilities to prove they are being used for peaceful purposes.

The international civil society, chiefly UN member states, should also speak publicly about the policy of opacity in both Israel and Washington, and ask some tough questions as to why at the political level, no one wants to deal with it, why the skewed nuclear status quo has in many ways become a burden for people in Washington not to touch it, and why they keep trying instead to compromise the very basis of the nuclear deal Iran signed with the world powers.

Last of all, the world body should realize that there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo in the Middle East. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia also wants to have its own nukes and has even threatened to build them. And that's why the UN is required to take immediate action to stage a conference on denuclearization at the earliest, exert pressure on Israel the menace to attend, declare its nuclear arsenal and join the NPT, and get a resolution that creates a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East for global peace and security.

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