While the world turns its eyes again to the Middle East and watches a buildup to a war created by the U.S. over a mythical atomic bomb, there is one country in the neighborhood that actually has hundreds of atomic weapons; "poor beleaguered Israel," as many writers (conservative and liberal alike) refer to the only atomic power in the Middle East.

Even mentioning Israel’s stock of weapons is a no-no in polite western societies. The U.S. has destroyed Iraq under the pretense of it attempting to make a nuclear weapon and it is on the verge of creating the same calamity in Iran. Ask a question about Israel’s nukes and the response is mute. In fact, most U.S. journalists won’t even entertain the thought of asking such a question.

In 1996, The Alternative, a magazine I published at the time, ran the following in-depth article about Israel’s nukes. It was written by investigative journalist Husayn Al-Kurdi is one of the most comprehensive works on the subject. It’s all here: the ties between apartheid South Africa and Israel in developing nuclear weapons; the imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower of Israel’s nuclear program; and the utter deceit by the U.S. to keep the subject under wraps. Even today, few U.S. citizens have any clue that Israel possesses hundreds of atomic weapons. With Iran currently in the U.S. crosshairs, this piece is even more relevant today than it was a decade ago.

THE JEWISH BOMB

by Husayn Al-Kurdi

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely on May 11, 1995. The 178-nation agreement basically reaffirmed the official monopoly on nuclear weapons to be enjoyed by the "Big Five" nuclear powers — The United States, Russia, Britain, France and China — who also happen to be the same states that hold veto power in the United Nations Security Council. The extension was pushed through at the behest of the United States, which was the first to build, develop and actually use the atomic bomb on civilian populations. "Off the books" of the NPT, with a U.S.-sponsored exemption from having to submit to the treaty or its terms, is the state that is regarded as the Sixth Nuclear power in the world today — Israel.

The Jewish state has been developing its nuclear capabilities since the mid-1950s. At first in collaboration with France, and subsequently with the cooperation of the white regime in South Africa and others, the Jewish state has built what has been referred to by Israel officials proudly as the "Third Temple," testing its nukes in New Caledonia in the Pacific, in Algeria when it was a French colony, off the coast of South Africa, and in underground tunnels in the Sinai Desert.

Sensationalistic media accounts of "Islamic," "Arab," and "Third World" nuclear bombs are bruited about as a matter of course, usually with reference to nations which do not actually possess nuclear weapons (Libya, Iran, North Korea) while Israel’s substantial nuclear reservoir receives scant and sporadic attention at best. Were it not for the efforts of two Jews, one a nuclear technician and the other a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, the world would be much more ignorant about Israel’s nuclear capabilities.

Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on Israel’s nukes and facilitated subsequent investigations by others, was a technician at Dimona. In late 1985, after working for over nine years at the facility, he had had enough. He moved to Australia, taking two rolls of photographs with him. The pictures provided incontrovertible evidence that Israel was producing nuclear weapons.

Vanunu approached the London Sunday Times with detailed pictures of the nuclear bomb factory several levels below ground, where plutonium was being reprocessed. The world had been shut out of the tightly-controlled facility since it first came into existence in 1957. Israel has always refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, keeping its plants closed to outside inspections of any kind. U.S. congress people have been denied access to Dimona, and an Israeli plane was shot down when it happened to accidentally strayed over the plant. A false control room was even installed at Dimona to fool U.S. inspectors who were let in before 1969.

It is widely believed that the CIA turned a blind eye to the development of the Israeli bomb from the very beginning. In 1973, when alarmed Israeli scientists brought the CIA photographs of nuclear warheads stacked underground, there were no signs of interest. In 1979, when Israel and South Africa conducted one of their joint nuclear tests in the South Atlantic, some brief notice was taken in a few newspapers. The Carter administration tried to cover up by ascribing the nuclear "double flashes" picked up on the radar of orbiting satellites to quirky atmospheric phenomena of some kind. Israel and South Africa had long cooperated in developing nuclear and other weapons. The two apartheid states got closer as they became increasingly regarded as international pariahs before their recent U.S.-sponsored rehabilitations. Israel helped South Africa develop nuclear-capable artillery pieces. The militaries of the two states had a mutual wartime agreement to assist each other in times of armed conflict. South Africa gave Israel carte blanche to conduct nuclear tests in the Indian Ocean, with or without South African supervision. South Africa provided Israel with uranium, and even allegedly conducted the first Indian Ocean atomic bomb test "on Israel’s behalf" in 1968.

Vanunu, the "Citizen Spy," has paid a typically harsh price for his efforts at revealing Israel’s nuclear arsenal to the world: he was lured to Rome from London by a female Mossad operative who used the promise of sexual favors to entice him, pounced upon on his arrival at a Rome apartment, drugged, kidnapped and taken to Israel, where he landed in chains, crated up under diplomatic immunity and delivered to the Israeli courts for their pronouncements. He got 18 years in prison for treason. According to Sam Day of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu, "Mordechai Vanunu continues to deteriorate physically and mentally in the six by nine foot cell he has occupied since the fall of 1986 in Ashkelon Prison."

Day went on to remark about the lack of interest in the Vanunu case shown by "peace" and "progressive" circles in the United States. "Mainline peace and justice, human rights and science policy groups have chosen not to become involved" in the effort to obtain Vanunu’s release. This comes as no surprise to defenders of Palestinian rights or to anyone critical of Israel. The "progressive community" has often been ready to excuse numerable atrocities which they would hardly condone if the perpetrator did not happen to be the Jewish state.

This hostility toward Arabs and Muslims, combined with a reverence for "heroic" Israel, was brought out in bold relief on June 12, 1982, date of the largest anti-nuclear demonstration ever. Israel had just invaded Lebanon and was in the process of tearing that country apart, destroying all and everything in its way. Cluster bombs, napalm, phosphorus shells, all manner of heavy and light artillery and thousands of tons of bombs were unleashed on Arabs.

At the massive "peace" demonstration in front of the United Nations, the predominantly Caucasian and Jewish revellers hooted at a Lebanese speaker who was expressing anguish over the fate of his country, making it clear that "peace" should not necessarily extend to Israel’s victims, just as the recent feverish concern over nuclear proliferation seems to overlook the world’s sixth-rated nuclear power. At a large demonstration in San Diego on the very day that Desert Storm was being unleashed on Iraq in January 1991, a Jewish peace official with ties to "Left" organizations, including both the Communist Party of the United States of America and the Democratic Socialists of America, announced that there was a report that "chemical missiles" had been launched against Israel. The "peace" crowd she relayed this false report to were hushed into a stunned silence. Concern for "poor beleaguered Israel" remains a preoccupation with many of the "progressive" milieu. Many in the "peace" crowd joined in breathing a sigh of relief that there were so few AMERICAN casualties with the war ended. A couple of hundred thousand Iraqi Arabs who lost their lives did not count, as the more-than-a-million who have perished since as a result of the U.S.-driven U.N. sanctions similarly do not figure in the hearts and minds of policy makers and even many who profess an interest in achieving justice and peace.

The other Jew who played a prominent role in exposing the Jewish Bomb to public attention was Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who wrote The Samson Option, published by Random House in 1991. Hersh put the pieces together and came up with a portrait of Israel as an unstable, dangerous player in the nuclear game, a state with both the capacity and the propensity to resort to methods of extreme and indiscriminate terrorism.

Since its activities were, and are, largely tied in to attacking and invading Palestinians and other Arabs in whose midst it has implanted itself as a colonizing entity, the danger of accidental (or purposeful) nuclear detonation is obvious. Until and unless Israel changes its course of evermore paranoid confrontationism, something it shows no real sign of doing at the present time, the Jewish people will be in peril, in Israel and elsewhere.

People who demand that other countries sign the NPT or open their nuclear facilities to international inspection are seldom, if ever, heard making the same demands when it comes to Nuclear Power #6. The obsession in both the establishment "policy" circles and in much of what remains of the moribund "peace" movement is with what establishment policy player Paul Warnke described as "the drive to enter the nuclear club by countries like North Korea, Iraq and Iran, or the growing number of terrorist groups gaining access to nuclear materials." Liberals like actor Robert (The Great Peace March) Blake and "Ecology" guru David Browder were raising the spectre of Libyans crossing the borders into America with nuclear bombs in their backpacks in the mid-1980s when Libya was declared U.S. Enemy Number One. There was barely a peep from the "Left" when Libya was repeatedly attacked by U.S. military forces. If it is Arab or Muslim, it already has three strikes against it to many of the self-appointed custodians of international social progress.

The "Samson" or "Madusa" complex involves a willingness to unleash any horror in maniacal pursuit of strategic goals, or even obtain a tactical advantage in a crisis situation. It is an element hardwired into Israeli strategic plans. Israel has often threatened to use the bombs at its disposal. During the 1937 Arab-Israeli war, the Jewish state had 13 nukes all loaded up and ready to go on B-52s. Noam Chomsky, in his masterful post-Lebanon invasion study, The Fateful Triangle (South End Press 1983), describes the threatened use of the nukes at that time as a ploy to speed up massive U.S. shipments of conventional weaponry to Israel.

Chomsky’s ongoing attempts at stirring the "peace" crowd to an awareness of the dangers inherent in such a force possessing the nuclear option have gone virtually unheeded. An article he wrote for Worldview, an organ of the Council on Religion and International Affairs, was edited to specifically exclude Israel from mention as one of five examples Chomsky offered of conflicts posing possible nuclear catastrophe.

Another voice in the "progressive" wilderness has been the veteran peace and social justice activist David Dellinger. He received a wake-up call when he heard an Israeli Colonel Hamuzrahi bluntly state, "We are not going to yield an inch to the Arabs even if it means atomic flashes in New York." The fact that nearly two million Jews live in the New York area would presumably not deter the execution of such an unspeakable act.

Israel currently possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads which may be launched on missiles which have a range to Tripoli, Tehran, Turkey and Sudan. The very existence of this arsenal remains unmentioned or obscured. The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (Oxford University Press, 1993) makes no mention of Israel under the heading "Nuclear Nonproliferation." Although it does state that military expenditures amount to "about 30% of GNP," in the main article on "Israel," it does not mention the nukes. The sole reference to the Israeli bomb occurs under the heading "Nuclear Weapons" and confirms that "Israel has built as many as several hundred nuclear weapons as weapons of last resort in the ongoing Middle East conflict." Israel is almost inevitably portrayed as beleaguered and defensive, getting an exemption from norms applied to others on that basis.

The liberal-leftist 4 Walls 8 Windows Press published a book, Deadly Business by Herbert Krosney, which justifies the Israeli nukes by claiming, "The specter of an Israeli Bomb (has) provided a measure of deterrence," dovetailing neatly with the Israeli view expressed in a volume on Arms Control and the New Middle East Security Environment released by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University in 1994, that the priority is on "preventing a multi-nuclear Middle East" and that "Israel should not be expected to give up its nuclear capacity." According to The Other Israel, a newsletter put out by the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian peace, "All mainstream politicians (government and opposition alike) support the continuation of the nuclear option" although "The government did issue the very unobliging undertaking to ‘open negotiations on a nuclear-free Middle East two years after full peace agreements with all members of the Arab League, as well as with Iran, are signed.’" An opinion poll by a major Israeli daily newspaper found 71% of Israelis against the NPT.

The widely cited Jane’s Review of London confirmed in its November 1994 issue that Israel has seven nuclear installations and over 200 fully-armed nuclear weapons, any one of which could destroy a major city. Hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, Cruise missiles and nuclear cannon are only a few among the weapons that have been perfected and added to Israel’s arsenal in recent years. Chomsky rates Israel as the world’s fourth greatest military power in The Fateful Triangle. Only the "Big Five" (USA, Britain, Russia, France and China) can claim to surpass Israel in terms of nuclear war capability. People throughout the Middle East and even citizens of New York may be legitimately disturbed by the knowledge of the prospects this may entail.