- What would it take for Israel to give up the weapons
of mass destruction it has never, in fact, acknowledged, except in knowing
half-smiles?
-
- This week, setting off a debate that proved tempestuous
even by the Knesset's grand-opera standards, a senior ultra-Orthodox deputy
was heard to say "The state of Israel should dismantle its nuclear
weaponry like Libya is doing, and Israel will have to depend on Ha-shem
[literally "the Name," signifying the Almighty]."
-
- The comment set off fireworks for a number of reasons,
among them the circumstance that thousands of the lawmakers' devout constituents
are exempt from Israel's compulsory military service, many of them vocal
in their belief that it is their spiritual study and practice - and not
Israel's military might - that has kept the Jewish state from annihilation.
But the greater roar came from another quarter - the fact that the issue
had been mentioned at all.
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- Just as the United Tora Judaism legislator, Meir Porush,
refrained from using the explicit Hebrew name for God, Israeli officials
have for more than three decades scrupulously avoided using the words "Israel's
nuclear weaponry," instead persuing a policy of what has been called
constructive ambiguity.
-
- The policy stemmed in part from a distinctly uncomfortable
early 1960s conversation in the White House between the architect of Israel's
nuclear program, an ex-kibbutznik named Shimon Peres, and President John
Kennedy, increasingly suspicious of what Peres was up to in building a
reactor in the dust bowl Negev hamlet of Dimona.
-
- Israelis have since learned to rely on the shield of
nuclear rumor, whether its role is to reassure its citizenry, deter its
enemies, or distance arms inspectors.
-
- Porush, attacked both for the thrust of his comments
and the use of the N word, later said he had been misheard and misquoted.
The comment nonetheless made headlines in an Israel for which the nuclear
issue - even when cloaked in the malleable language of deniability - strikes
the most sensitive of national and historical chords.
-
- It came during a week when pressure on Israel to give
up the bomb sprang from the last direction and in the last form that Israeli
officials could have anticipated.
-
- Last Friday, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi shocked the
world by announcing that his nation would give up its nuclear and other
weapons of mass destruction.
-
- Almost immediately, any relief that Israeli officials
might have felt at the mercurial Libyan ruler's decision was replaced by
the realization that a fast-changing Middle East, one in which Iraq has
been taken out of play and Iran's mass-destruction programs compromised,
would inevitably cast a glare on the Jewish state.
-
- "If weapons of mass destruction are a menace in
unstable regions such as the Middle East, if their availability must be
reduced, then logic begins to move us closer to the confrontation we never
seek with the nuclear power we - let alone Messrs Bush and Blair - seldom
mention: Israel," wrote Peter Preston in a column this week in the
Guardian.
-
- In perhaps its longest-running example of a don't-ask,
don't-tell policy, U.S. administrations from Richard Nixon on, have accepted
Israel's official non-declaration stance regarding a nuclear arsenal.
-
- Israel stuck to its policy despite - or, by some accounts,
taking advantage of - worldwide coverage of revelations by former Dimona
nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who in the 1980s suggested that the
Negev reactor had produced as many as 200 atomic bombs of various kinds.
-
- "That makes Israel the world's fifth largest nuclear
power, boasting more bangs from Washington's bucks than Blair's Britain,"
Preston continued. "And over in the other WMD basket, nobody much
dissents when a report by the office of technology assessment for the US
Congress concludes that Israel has 'undeclared offensive chemical warfare
capabilities' and is 'generally reported as having an undeclared offensive
biological warfare programme'. Bombs, missiles, delivery systems, gases,
germs? Tel Aviv has the lot."
-
- Arab and Muslim critics of Israel have long and often
condemned the U.S. policy as flagrantly duplicitous. More recently, the
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei added
pressure of his own. ElBaradei told Haaretz this month that Israel's sense
of safety in a nuclear deterrent was a false one, in that other Middle
East countries felt threatened by it. "We operate under the assumption
that Israel has nuclear arms," ElBaradei said. "Israel has never
denied this."
-
- He urged Israel to begin talks with its neighbors on
halting the spread of non-conventional weapons. "My fear is that,
without such a dialogue, there will be continued incentive for the region's
countries to develop weapons of mass destruction to match the Israeli arsenal."
-
- With Saddam's Iraq a memory, Libya talking about forgoing
the bomb, and Iran tipping its nuclear hand, is there anything on the current
geo-political horizon that could persuade Israel to as much as consider
negotiations on the future of its widely suspected nuclear arsenal?
-
- At this point, the concept is all but inconceivable,
observes Haaretz commentator Yossi Melman. "The fixation of the Israeli
officials involved is so complete, that in what may be called their 'worst
case scenario,' in which all Arab states agree to peace accords and security
arrangements with Israel, even if the Arabs 'play into Israel's hands,'
I still do not see Israel giving up its arsenal or its long-range missiles."
-
- The fixation applies at all levels, both in the political
and military spheres, Melman says. "It is a mental block among Israeli
political and military decision-makers, on the one hand, and, on the other,
of the bureaucracy of Israel's version of [former U.S. president Dwight]Eisenhower's
military-industrial complex."
-
- "The officials are constantly looking for threats
to justify their very existence. 'If there is a threat,' they tell themselves,
'therefore I exist," Melman says.
-
- There is, however, one element that could force Israel
to let loose of its reported non-conventional arsenal - its chief ally.
"If Washington made that decision, that would be it. Israel would
decide to give it up. Israel would never resist a U.S. policy decision.
We'll make the noises of rejection, quarrel, and anger, but basically we
would accept it. "At the same time, however, I don't see Washington
doing so. I don't see the Americans putting that kind of pressure on Israel."
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