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EDITOR: Nuclear Apartheid!
Two states were born illegally in 1948. First cam the South African Apartheid state, then cam the Israeli state built of the forced exiling of 80% of the Palestinians from their homes. Ever since their inception, the two states had obvious mutual appreciation, and have exchanged many commodities, especially military hardware and knowhow – both had similar problems, and used similar ‘solutions’. For many years it was known that Israel has supplied SA with nuclear knowledge, and some have argued that the great unexplained explosion in the early 1980s off the coast of Africa was indeed a nuclear test carried out by Israel and South Africa, but until today proof was lacking.
The opening of the archives in SA, despite Israel’s pressure on the SA government, has finally provided this proof. Israel and South Africa, two renegade, pariah regimes based on racism and oppression, have collaborated on nuclear arms which could have brought an untold destruction in Africa and elsewhere. It is clear that the secret services of the leading countries in the west were aware of this illicit and immoral relationship, which places such governments in the dock, together with the two main culprits. And what do those countries do right now? They try to stop Iran, which does not have a bomb, from producing nuclear fuel for peaceful uses, to satisfy the demands made by Israel, a country with over 300 nuclear devices, more than France and the UK put together, more than China! It seems that this time, the issue of Israeli nuclear weapons will not go away!
Some of you may well be wondering – why so little from the Israeli and US press? Well, you may well ask. They mostly pretend this is not happening, avoiding the topic altogether. Also, do not ask me about the BBC – they never heard about it – apparently nobody there reads the Guardian. Do not help them to bury bad news – spread it far and wide!
Israel’s nuclear capability and policy of strategic ambiguity: The guardian
Formally, Israel says it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East
Israel is an undeclared nuclear power: it has a nuclear plant in the southern city of Dimona, in the Negev desert, and is believed to have a formidable nuclear arsenal, but the government has always maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity”. Israel – like India, Pakistan and North Korea – is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The main atomic reactor in Dimona, officially for civilian use, was built with French help and became operational in the early 1960s.
Within a few years the CIA concluded Israel was producing nuclear weapons at the plant, but it was not until 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, spoke to the Sunday Times that the extent of Israel’s nuclear arsenal became clear.
Four years ago Israel’s then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, accidentally acknowledged Israel’s nuclear capability when he told German television: “Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly, threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel and Russia?” Formally, Israel says it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East and has led calls for a hardline policy to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has said a nuclear-armed Iran is the greatest security threat facing his country.
Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons: The Guardian
Exclusive: Secret apartheid-era papers give first official evidence of Israeli nuclear weapons
Chris McGreal in Washington
Monday 24 May 2010
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.
The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.
The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.
They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.
A spokeswoman for Peres today said the report was baseless and there were “never any negotiations” between the two countries. She did not comment on the authenticity of the documents.
South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states.
The documents show both sides met on 31 March 1975. Polakow-Suransky writes in his book published in the US this week, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret alliance with apartheid South Africa. At the talks Israeli officials “formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal”.
Among those attending the meeting was the South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong. He immediately drew up a memo in which he laid out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Jericho missiles but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
The memo, marked “top secret” and dated the same day as the meeting with the Israelis, has previously been revealed but its context was not fully understood because it was not known to be directly linked to the Israeli offer on the same day and that it was the basis for a direct request to Israel. In it, Armstrong writes: “In considering the merits of a weapon system such as the one being offered, certain assumptions have been made: a) That the missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA (Republic of South Africa) or acquired elsewhere.”
But South Africa was years from being able to build atomic weapons. A little more than two months later, on 4 June, Peres and Botha met in Zurich. By then the Jericho project had the codename Chalet.
The top secret minutes of the meeting record that: “Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available.” The document then records: “Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes. Minister Botha expressed his appreciation and said that he would ask for advice.” The “three sizes” are believed to refer to the conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The use of a euphemism, the “correct payload”, reflects Israeli sensitivity over the nuclear issue and would not have been used had it been referring to conventional weapons. It can also only have meant nuclear warheads as Armstrong’s memorandum makes clear South Africa was interested in the Jericho missiles solely as a means of delivering nuclear weapons.
In addition, the only payload the South Africans would have needed to obtain from Israel was nuclear. The South Africans were capable of putting together other warheads.
Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost. In addition, any deal would have to have had final approval by Israel’s prime minister and it is uncertain it would have been forthcoming.
South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance. But the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.
The documents confirm accounts by a former South African naval commander, Dieter Gerhardt – jailed in 1983 for spying for the Soviet Union. After his release with the collapse of apartheid, Gerhardt said there was an agreement between Israel and South Africa called Chalet which involved an offer by the Jewish state to arm eight Jericho missiles with “special warheads”. Gerhardt said these were atomic bombs. But until now there has been no documentary evidence of the offer.
Some weeks before Peres made his offer of nuclear warheads to Botha, the two defence ministers signed a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment. It was so secret that it included a denial of its own existence: “It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement… shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party”.
The agreement also said that neither party could unilaterally renounce it.
The existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme was revealed by Mordechai Vanunu to the Sunday Times in 1986. He provided photographs taken inside the Dimona nuclear site and gave detailed descriptions of the processes involved in producing part of the nuclear material but provided no written documentation.
Documents seized by Iranian students from the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution revealed the Shah expressed an interest to Israel in developing nuclear arms. But the South African documents offer confirmation Israel was in a position to arm Jericho missiles with nuclear warheads.
Israel pressured the present South African government not to declassify documents obtained by Polakow-Suransky. “The Israeli defence ministry tried to block my access to the Secment agreement on the grounds it was sensitive material, especially the signature and the date,” he said. “The South Africans didn’t seem to care; they blacked out a few lines and handed it over to me. The ANC government is not so worried about protecting the dirty laundry of the apartheid regime’s old allies.”
Israel denies offering nuclear weapons to Apartheid South Africa: Haaretz
British daily The Guardian publishes documents it says prove that then-defense minister Shimon Peres tried to sell nuclear weapons to P.W. Botha in the 1970s.
Tags: Israel news Israel nuclear South Africa Shimon Peres
Israel on Monday vehemently rejected claims in a British newspaper that it offered to sell nuclear warheads to Apartheid-era South Africa in 1975.
“There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian that in 1975 Israel negotiated with South Africa the exchange of nuclear weapons,” the president’s office said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, The Guardian elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts,” said the statement. “Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. “There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place.”
The Guardian newspaper said Sunday that documents uncovered by a U.S. academic during research for a book on Israel’s ties with South Africa provided the first hard proof that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel maintains an official policy of “nuclear ambiguity” over whether it is an atomic power.
The Guardian said documents declassified by South Africa’s post-apartheid government at the request of author Sasha Polakow-Suransky included top-secret minutes of meetings between senior officials of the two countries in 1975.
Those papers, the newspaper said, showed that South Africa’s defense minister at the time, P.W. Botha, asked warheads and his counterpart Shimon Peres, now Israel’s president, offered them in “three sizes”. The Guardian claimed that this referred to conventional, chemical and atomic weapons.
Asked about the report, Peres spokeswoman Ayelet Frisch said: “There is no truth to the Guardian report.”
“We regret that the newspaper did not seek a comment from the president’s office. If it had done so, it would have discovered that the story is wrong and baseless,” she added.
According to the Guardian report, the alleged nuclear deal did not go ahead, partly because of the cost.
Speculation about Israeli-South African nuclear cooperation was raised in 1990 when a U.S. satellite detected a mysterious flash over the Indian Ocean. The U.S. television network CBS reported it was a nuclear test carried out by the two countries.
A responsible nuclear power?: The Guardian
The revelations of Israel’s nuclear flirtation with South Africa will add weight to claims of double standards
Amnesty International considers Mordechai Vanunu a ‘prisoner of conscience’. Photograph: Oded Balilty/AP
Today’s revelations about Shimon Peres’ meetings with PW Botha to discuss missiles and warheads come at an extremely delicate moment at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York. As the conference, aimed at repairing and updating the global arms control regime, the vexed issue of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
At its heart, this is a matter of double standards. Egypt is leading a chorus of Arab and other non-nuclear states who want Israel to feel some of the pressure that Iran is undergoing, for its lack of transparency over its nuclear arsenal, and its efforts to maintain that nuclear monopoly in the region. As Chris points out in his piece, Israel’s tacit defence, pursued on its behalf by its allies, has been that it – unlike Iran – is a ‘responsible’ nuclear power. Yet here you have Shimon Peres talking nukes with a nutcase white supremacist government.
Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb, and the forthcoming The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb, has taken issue with the headline of the piece.
While there is no doubt (as the documents point out) that there was a SA probe to Israel for nuclear weapons, which stimulates a certain opaque Israeli response made by the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shimon Peres, there is no proof whatsoever that Israel ultimately officially OFFERED those weapons to SA. In fact, I know that Israel did not: Israel neither offered and passed along nuclear weapons (and materials) nor weapons designs to the South Africans. Whatever the SA discussed among themselves in memos, and regardless of what Minister Peres told them, Prime Minister Rabin and the people in charge of the Israeli nuclear program (Mr. Shaleheveth Freier) were never willing to pass along weapons components and/or designs to the SA. Nothing like that ever formally offered to SA, regardless of Peres’ reference to the “correct warhead.” At the end of the day South Africa did not ask and Israel did not offer the “correct payloads.”. Israel did behave as a responsible nuclear state.
Chris points out in his piece that it was not clear whether Rabin would have signed off the deal, but it seems to me if you have the defence minister telling PW Botha that “the correct payload was available in three sizes” that amounts to an informal offer, a preliminary offer, whether or not it was finally consummated as “an official offer’. We are talking about a defence minister here, not some deniable intermediary. If I walked to buy a car from a company salesman and was told it was “available in three sizes”, I would take it that it was for sale.
Meanwhile, back at the NPT, Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute reports on the state of play at the NPT conference. Here is her section on the draft resolution on the Middle East zone.
This draft recognises the critical importance of the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East, notes the P-5 statement’s commitment to its full implementation, and regrets there has been so little progress. The following practical steps are endorsed: an “initial conference” in 2012 convened by the UN Secretary-General and involving all states in the Middle East, and a Special Coordinator with a mandate to facilitate implementation of the 1995 Resolution, conduct consultations and undertake preparations for the Conference and, importantly, “follow-on steps”, with reports to be provided to NPT states parties at the 2012, 2013 and 2014 PrepComs. The draft seeks a middle way between the Arab states’ desire for a negotiating conference and the US view that this would be premature, by describing the purpose of the Conference as “leading to the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction, on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at by the States of the region…” In addition to recognising the importance of the draft proposed “complementary steps” such as an EU-hosted event and background documentation regarding verification. It also emphasises the importance of “parallel progress, in substance and timing” relating to achieving total and complete elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons from the region.
Israel’s complicity in apartheid crimes undermines its attack on Goldstone: The Guardian
To rubbish the former judge’s report on Gaza, Israel has dredged up his record in South Africa – while forgetting its own
Gary Younge
Monday 24 May 2010
On 5 January 2009 the Israeli army rounded up around 65 Palestinians (including 11 women and 11 children under the age of 14) in Gaza, several of whom were waving white flags. After handcuffing the men and stripping them to their underwear, the soldiers marched their captives 2km north to al-Atatra and ordered them to climb into three pits, each three metres high and surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners were forced to sit in stress positions, leaning forward with their heads down, and prohibited from talking to one another. On their first day they were denied food and water. On the second and third, each was given a sip of water and a single olive. On the fourth day the women and children were released and the men were transferred to military barracks.
It was just one of the stories to emerge from the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict conducted by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes and “possibly” crimes against humanity. But in a conflict that saw 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians killed compared with about 1,400 Gazans, Goldstone was particularly scathing about Israel’s “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” – which he said amounted to “collective punishment”.
The Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobbies concentrated their displeasure not on the substance of Goldstone’s report but the essence of his identity. Branded a “self-hating Jew”, he was effectively barred from his grandson’s bar mitzvah after the South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket it. The prominent US constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz has described Goldstone as a “despicable human being”, “an evil, evil man”, “a traitor to the Jewish people” and the UN’s “token court Jew”.
Then this month came “revelations” from an Israeli newspaper that, as a judge under the apartheid regime, Goldstone sentenced black people to death. This, according to Israel’s government, discredits not only Goldstone but everything he discovered about Gaza and, by association, international criticism of the occupation. “Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists, who are not subject to the criteria of international moral norms,” argued the Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin.
“Although he was involved in clear racist activity, he had no problem writing such a report,” said the chairman of the Knesset’s state control committee, Yoel Hasson, who called Goldstone a hypocrite. Not to be outdone, Dershowitz (a strident advocate of torture) has now likened Goldstone to the Nazi geneticist Josef Mengele.
This crude one-downmanship in identity politics has no winners and many losers. Facts about racism in the past cannot excuse realities about racism in the present. Playing off the legacy of South Africa’s townships against the plight of the captives of al-Atatra seeks not to alleviate the suffering of either group but in effect to dismiss them. But for all the hyperbole and absurdity, there are important principles at stake about who can claim moral authority, on what basis, and to what end.
Let’s start with the most obvious. This is a cynical ploy by the Israeli government to divert attention from the findings of the UN report. Government officials have almost said as much. A foreign ministry official described the investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth as “explosive PR material”. Hasson claims: “Had [the Israeli foreign ministry discovered this earlier], it would have greatly helped us in our activity against the report.” But the report is about Gaza, not Goldstone. Having lost control of the message, Israel is now trying to shoot the messenger.
That Israel would try to do so on the backs of black South Africans is a laughable indication of its desperation. For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid’s crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa’s principal and most dependable arms dealer. As we learn elsewhere in the Guardian today, it even offered to sell the South African regime nuclear weapons.
“Throughout the 70s and 80s Israel had a deep, intimate and lucrative relationship with South Africa,” explains Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa. “Israel’s arms supplies helped to prolong the apartheid regime’s rule and to survive international sanctions.” No criticism of Goldstone’s complicity from representatives of the Israeli state can be taken seriously that does not acknowledge and condemn Israel’s even greater support of the self-same system.
But just because the Israeli government wants to change the subject doesn’t mean that we have to. Goldstone’s apartheid record matters. For the left to claim it doesn’t, simply because he came up with a conclusion about Gaza that they agree with, would also be cynical. Appointed senior counsel in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, Goldstone rose through the South African judiciary during one of apartheid’s most vicious periods. While in power he ordered the execution of two black South Africans and turned down the appeals of many others.
“A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times or by omission or by silence,” wrote the late Trinidadian intellectual CLR James in The Black Jacobins, “shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.”
Goldstone’s claim that faced with a “moral dilemma” he thought “it was better to fight from inside than not at all”, is inadequate. Not only did he uphold apartheid laws, he enforced them. This is not a question of 20:20 hindsight: many in a similar position at that time chose a more principled stand. Both morally and professionally he had other options, and he is compromised by not having taken them.
But his record did not end with apartheid. While he may not have led the drive to a non-racial democracy, he followed it eagerly. When the system started to collapse, he fully embraced change. Nelson Mandela asked him to chair the commission into public violence primarily because he was trusted by both sides. As such, he was an archetypical transitional figure. After that he went on to produce respected reports into the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. So while his credibility as a human rights advocate might be diminished, it is by no means destroyed.
Finally, there is the insidious role that Israel has attempted to play as ideological gatekeeper for acceptable political behaviour among Jews. The attempt to tarnish any criticism of Israel, regardless of its merits, as unjust is untenable; to castigate them as un-Jewish is deplorable. “What saddens me today is that any Jew who speaks out with an independent voice, especially with the conduct of the state of Israel, is regarded as a self-hating Jew,” says retired South African constitutional court justice Albie Sachs, who is also Jewish. “Why should someone be made to choose between being a Jew and having a conscience?”
Gary Younge’s book Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? is published on 3 June
Inside Story – Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon: AlJazeeraEnglish
Chomsky visits villages in South Lebanon: IOA
Posted by admin on May 24th, 2010 and filed under FEATURED NEWS STORIES, Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
24 May 2010
Beirut: Gulf News accompanied Noam Chomsky, famed Jewish-American political commentator and world-renowned linguist, in South Lebanon on Friday during an accompanied tour with Hezbollah official Nabeel Kaouk.
Chomsky recently made headlines after Israel refused him entry to speak at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank last week.
“They didn’t like that I wasn’t going to speak at any Israeli university. I’ve lectured before in the Palestinian territories many times, but this time they didn’t want to hear a critical point,” he explained to Gulf News.
Regardless of Israeli efforts to bar him from entry, the lecture was delivered via a satellite link from Amman. Chomsky will be speaking in Beirut on Tuesday coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the liberation of the South from Israel.
Second visit
At 81 years of age, this was his second visit to Lebanon in four years. Chomsky visited several villages in the south that were devastated after Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006. Among the locations he visited were Bint Jbeil, Maroun Al Ras, Fatima’s Gate, the Khiam Prison, Kfarkila, Nabatiyeh and Mleeta.
He inquired about the conditions of the people, reconstruction projects and the presence of Unifil forces.
Kaouk explained that Israel’s military manoeuvres on its northern borders that began on Sunday coincided with south Lebanon municipal elections.”It’s an intimidation and we are prepared for all the possibilities,” he said.
The exercises would span the course of five days featuring a series of alerts as part of field training exercises in different areas as well as a 90-second siren throughout the country on Wednesday. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the drill was an annual event aimed at learning lessons from the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
“We have no intention of starting a war in the north,” Barak told reporters ahead of a weekly cabinet meeting, echoing earlier statements by senior officials insisting that the drill was not related to any specific threat. His remarks came after Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri said the exercises “ran counter to peace efforts” and the Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon mobilised thousands of fighters in response to the drill.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called in Damascus and Beirut yesterday for an easing of tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours, urging all sides to respect a 2006 ceasefire in Lebanon.
“We cannot be resigned to a constant state of tension, even if it is decreasing,” Kouchner told journalists after a meeting in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
In Damascus, Kouchner expressed France’s concern over Hezbollah’s weaponry, to which Al Assad gave assurances it was not in the interests of Damascus, Tehran or Hezbollah to trigger a new conflict, a French diplomatic source said.
The source said that France as a peace broker also wanted to encourage Syria to ease tensions in the region. After Damascus, the foreign minister travelled on to Beirut from where he was to head for Egypt to wind up his regional tour in Cairo.
Tension mounts as Israel tests its defences: The Independent
By Catrina Stewart in Jerusalem
Monday, 24 May 2010
Israel yesterday kicked off a massive five-day civil defence exercise aimed at testing the Jewish state’s preparedness for rocket and chemical attacks. Israeli officials sought to reassure Syria and Lebanon that it has no plans to launch an attack.
The nationwide operation is likely to raise tensions between Israel and its neighbours at a time when tempers are already frayed over Iranian-backed Hizbollah’s efforts to rearm along Israel’s northern border.
The exercise, code-named “Turning Point Four”, is Israel’s largest civil defence operation since it first launched the annual drill four years ago in the wake of the Lebanon war, during which Hizbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel. “This is an exercise which has been scheduled for a long time and is not the result of any unusual security development,” the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said yesterday. “Israel seeks calm, stability and peace, but it is no secret that we live in a region where there is a threat from missiles and rockets.”
The exercise will test responses of the municipal authorities to simulated rocket and missile attacks from the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Palestinian group Hamas, and Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, Israeli officials said. The drill will also test the reactions of the civilian population with a 90-second air raid siren scheduled for Wednesday morning – a signal for Israelis to head for the nearest secure shelter.
In December 2008, Israel launched a crushing 22-day military offensive on Gaza to curb rocket attacks. 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the incursion, and 13 Israelis. A UN agency reported on Saturday that three-quarters of the damage inflicted on Gaza by Israel’s war against Hamas more than a year ago has not been repaired or rebuilt.
Arab leaders are angry about the drill. The Lebanese Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, warned that the exercise runs counter to newly-launched Middle East peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians, while the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, urged the West to “contain Israel and put an end to its extremist policies,” according to Syria’s Sana news agency.
Hizbollah reportedly said that it had mobilised thousands of additional fighters and raised its alert level ahead of the exercise.
Israel has relayed messages to Arab states that it has no plans to launch an attack on its neighbours. “We have no intention of starting a war in the north,” Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, said at yesterday’s cabinet meeting.
The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said yesterday that he was “reassured” that tensions had eased in recent days between Israel and its Arab neighbours. He was visiting Damascus and Beirut to ensure all sides hold to a UN resolution that bans the supply of arms to Hizbollah. President Assad told Mr Kouchner that it was not in the interests of Syria, Hizbollah or Iran to start a new conflict, AFP quoted a French diplomat as saying.
Israeli officials have publicly expressed concerns over Hizbollah’s efforts to rearm, and claim that it has built up an arsenal of over 40,000 rockets, some of them long-range.
The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, last month accused Syria of providing Hizbollah with a shipment of Scud missiles, a powerful weapon capable of reaching Israeli cities and inflicting mass casualties. Syria has vehemently rejected the claims, alleging that Israel is seeking a pretext for war.
Analysts say that Hizbollah is unlikely to launch an attack on Israel in the near future, but warn that rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions could precipitate a more serious stand-off with Hizbollah, Iran’s proxy in the region.
Israel has pressured the international community to impose crippling sanctions on Iran, which is widely suspected of trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and has hinted that it could launch a unilateral strike if patience runs thin.
“The prospect should remain on the table,” said Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former chief negotiator with Syria. “Without a credible threat, diplomacy will have no edge.”
EDITOR: Another criminal hits the dust, or does he?
Even the Israeli police cannot hide this pile of corruption, so the minister seems in trouble. But worry not, dear reader, as he is quite safe, as is Olmert, and Sharon before him. None of them have gone to prison yet, and neither is Lieberman likely to…
Police recommend indicting Lieberman for breach of trust: Haaretz
Police believe that Lieberman was shown classified material from an ongoing police investigation against him over allegations of fraud and embezzlement.
By Tomer Zarchin
Tags: Israel news Avigdor Lieberman
Police recommended indicting Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for breach of trust due to suspicions he received classified information from an ongoing investigation against him, Haaretz has learned on Monday.
Police also recommended indicting former ambassador Zeev Ben Aryeh for breach of trust and obstruction of justice, since he is suspected of providing the information for Lieberman.
Police believe that Lieberman was shown classified material from an ongoing police investigation against him over allegations of fraud and embezzlement. Ben Aryeh, Israel’s former ambassador to Belarus, is suspected of giving Lieberman the documents – which he received from the Justice Ministry for transfer to the Belarus authorities – as early as October 2008.
At that point, none of Lieberman’s associates had been questioned or arrested.
Ben Aryeh received the documents via the Foreign Ministry in the summer of 2008. They contained a request for information from the Belarus authorities regarding the original investigation against Lieberman.
Yoav Segalovitch, who heads the police investigations and intelligence department, recommended indicting the two men, and decided to transfer the case to the economic department in the attorney’s office, before the matter will be decided upon by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein.
EDITOR: Buy from us, or we may bomb you again…
Netanyahu is doing a good job of persuading himself, and some Israelis, the the BDS harms the Palestinians only… Actually, reports in the Israeli press are quite clear about the harm this does, as intended, to the economy of the settlements, sepecially to Maale Edomim. MaybeNetanyahu will also find out, by reading the press reports…
Remember how the South African Apartheid regime was telling the world: “Your boycott only hurts the Blacks? “. When say that, you csan be sure they are strarting to feel the hurt themselves. If that was the case, and the boycott only hurts Palestinians, what do the care? After all, they have done all they could to hurt the Palestinians themselves…
Netanyahu to PA: Israel boycott is only hurting yourselves: Haaretz
PM: Israel aspires to economic peace. The Palestinians must now decide if they are aiming for peace or not.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the Palestinian Authority on Monday to stop opposing economic peace with Israel.
“Israel aspires to economic peace,” Netanyahu said at the start of a Likud faction meeting on Monday. “We have removed checkpoints, eased the lives of Palestinians and are working all the time to advance the Palestinian economy. Despite this, the Palestinians are opposing economic peace and are taking steps that in the end hurt themselves.”
Netanyahu cited Palestinian opposition to Israel’s recent entrance to the OECD and the Palestinian boycott of Israeli products made in the West Bank as examples of counter-productive Palestinian actions.
“Israel is aiming for peace and economic prosperity,” Netanyahu said. “The Palestinians must decide if they are aiming for peace or not.”
The prime minister’s declarations come following a decision by the Palestinian Authority to promote the boycott against goods produced in the Israeli settlements.
Israel sold NIS 15 billion worth of goods to the Palestinians in 2009, while Palestinian sales to Israel were about NIS 1.5 billion, though only about half of each amount was actually manufactured in the two places and the rest was imported. The settlements employ around 25,000 Palestinians.
EDITOR: It never Rains, But it Pours…
Now Israel has already tried to forget about the Booboo in the Gulf, when 31 agents (last count) manged to murder one Palestinian, and now it all flares up again, of all places, in Australia… Can’t we have a break, they ask. No, they can’t, and they won’t.
Israeli envoy to Australia shortens Israel visit due to escalating crisis: Haaretz
Australia expels Israeli diplomat over Dubai passport row; FM Stephen Smith: Probe leaves ‘no doubt’ Israel is behind misuse of Australian passports linked to assassination of Hamas operative Mabhouh.
The Israeli ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem, who has been in Israel on business for the last few days, cut his stay short and left for Canberra in alarm on Monday, in hopes of pacifying the escalated crisis between Israel and Australia.
Israeli-Australian relations tensed following the announcement by Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith that Australia has expelled Israel’s Mossad representative in the Israeli embassy in Canberra.
Smith said that Australia has asked Israel to withdraw a diplomat after an investigation found “no doubt” of its role in forging four Australian passports implicated in the slaying of a Hamas operative in Dubai earlier this year.
According to officials in Jerusalem, Rotem was supposed to spend two weeks in Israel and only return to Australia on June 8, though following deliberations in the Foreign Ministry on Monday morning, it was decided that Rotem must return to Australia straight away.
Britain took similar action in March, also expelling the Mossad attache to the Israeli embassy in the country, after concluding there was compelling evidence that Israel was responsible for the use of doctored British passports in the plot to kill Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on January 20.
Australia’s foreign minister said Mondat a police investigation had left no doubt Israeli intelligence services had been behind the forgery of four Australian passports used by suspects in the assassination Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room.
“These investigations and advice have left the government in no doubt that Israel was responsible for the abuse and counterfeiting of these passports,” Smith told Australia’s parliament. “These are not the actions of a friend.”
The Australian government ordered an inquiry into the fake passports by police and intelligence services that visited Israel and found the four citizens involved had been innocent of any involvement.
“No government can tolerate the abuse of its passports, especially by a foreign government,” Smith said. “This is not what we expect from a nation with whom we have had such a close, friendly and supportive relationship.”
The government, he said, had asked that a member of Israel’s Australian embassy in Canberra be withdrawn within a week. Australia and Israel are traditionally close allies and an embassy spokesman said he “regretted” the decision.
“We feel it is not reflective of the extensive relationship between the two nations,” the spokesman said.
Dubai authorities have given names of alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian, and said they used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports to enter and leave Dubai.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in February, however, there was no evidence to link Israel to the killing, which also prompted Britain to expel an Israeli in March.
But Britain’s then-government said an investigation by the country’s Serious Organised Crime Agency had found 12 forged British passports were used in the hit, copied from genuine passports.
Four Australians – Nicole McCabe, Joshua Bruce, Adam Korman and Joshua Krycer — had their identities stolen and used in fake passports held by suspects believed to be involved in the assassination, Smith said.
Mabhouh, born in the Gaza Strip, had lived in Syria since 1989 and Israeli and Palestinian sources have said he played a key role in smuggling Iranian-funded arms to militants in Gaza.
Smith said the passport cloning operation used in his killing was of high quality and had obviously been state-backed.
“The decision was made much more in sorrow than in anger,” he said. “The decision was made in our national security interests, made in support of the integrity of our passport system, made in efforts to protect Australians who travel overseas.”
Authorities in Dubai had already been briefed on Australia’s findings, he said, along with the other countries involved and close Australian and Israeli ally the United States.
A Special Place in Hell / My generation ruined Israel. Yours could save it: Haaretz
Mine is, after all, the generation that gave Israel the settlements.
By Bradley Burston
To the young people I have come across recently, who care about Israel, who care about human rights, and who are pained but also challenged to bear witness to the direction this country is bound:
Perhaps you have to live in the psychic dungeon of 2010 Israel to emerge from Peter Beinart’s watershed New York Review of Books essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” with hope for the future.
Especially because it was my generation which put us here. My generation ruined Israel. And, in doing so, my generation is in the process of ruining Judaism.
Mine is, after all, the generation that gave Israel the settlements. Mine is the generation of occupation, from the grunts on the ground to the bureaucracy in the wings. Mine, from prevaricating Labor to real estate-crazed Likud, stole from the poor to give to the settlers, enshrined occupation and walled it off from view, all in order to serve what became the one true lord of Zionism and Orthodox Judaism combined: settlement.
Mine is the generation which gave us wars which were designed, and failed, to end all wars, separated by botched withdrawals aimed at ending all withdrawals. We were the ones who made sure that peace was given no chance, and later, came to give peace itself a bad name. Mine is the generation which is today desperate to sell peace as the fount of terrorism. Peace as the enemy.
Mine is, after all, the generation which killed Yitzhak Rabin. Mine is the generation unable to accept responsibility, the right unwilling to acknowledge that it created a climate of murderous hatred, the left unwilling to realize that when the chips were down, it abandoned Rabin and failed to do what was necessary to protect him.
My generation, skin verging on baggy and mind let off its leash, is now the generation unable to look at itself. For all our bluster and ideology and self-satisfaction and volume, we are cowards. Mine is the generation frightened by what we might find in a frank, naked, unfettered investigation of the war we made in Gaza. Instead, we blame Richard Goldstone for our use of phosphorus. We trash the New Israel Fund (“the New Ishmael Fund,” West Bank Professor Ron Breiman called it on Army Radio on Monday, in an exemplar of the smugly sophisticated neo-racism in which we’re all sinking), for the artillery and aerial barrages which accounted for the civilian death toll.
Mine is the generation which decreed that not talking honestly about settlement and its many-faceted shield, occupation, was apolitical and therefore correct.
In America, as well, the fear of admitting any wrongdoing on Israel’s part, has made it impossible to see Israel at all. No wonder young American Jews are disengaged from Israel as it is presented to them. That country simply does not exist.
It’s often a revelation, therefore, when young people come to Israel to find it a place both hugely more impressive and hugely more cocked up than their wildest dreams could ever have suggested.
Maybe that explains where hope has been hiding out, all these years. Perhaps you have to meet some of the young people who even now stumble onto this place from abroad, even from that North America Beinart so deftly renders, young people who even today are finding this place getting firmly and permanently under their skins, and who have set to work trying to salvage an Israel of social justice and human decency.
Or the young people born here who, despite everything, despite the prevailing ill winds and the centrifugal pressures for extremism, segregation, and applied hatred, live against the grain, practicing coexistence, concern for the shunned, optimism without just cause.
God knows why you people love this place. God knows you do.
You are not like us. You are not dewy-eyed jingoists stuck in some 19th century need for rapacious nationalism. Neither are they sauté-for-brains flotsam for whom the Holy Land as a whole – and let’s for once be honest, some parts of Hebron in particular – function as an immensely welcoming outpatient care facility.
You don’t have the baggage that we had. And that is why you may do right where we went so profoundly wrong. You are not the freighted heirs to Holocaust, not the generation of the grand illusion, desperate to build a kibbutz or a settlement in a well-meaning but vain effort to give some meaning to your parents’ bottomless, wretched childhoods or their grandparents’ unimaginable deaths.
The Americans among you have even less baggage. Your lack of automatic, programmed identification with a trumpeted and ultimately unreal Israel may be a distinct advantage. Nothing to live up to, is a whole lot better opening position, than much too much.
We had our chance. We knew, deep down, that the right generation, coming of age at the right time with the right common purpose, could save a country. But it wasn’t us.
It might well be you. I, for one, hope it is. Whatever you choose, be brave. If you choose to try to save this place, God be with you. Go ahead. Show us up.
Israel’s Peres denies offering South Africa nukes: The Washington Post
May 24, 2010; 9:44 AM
JERUSALEM — Israeli President Shimon Peres on Monday categorically denied a report that he offered nuclear warheads to South Africa in 1975, when he was defense minister.
The report published Sunday in the British newspaper The Guardian is based on an American academic’s research and claims to cite secret minutes of a meeting Peres held with senior South African officials.
Peres said Israel never negotiated the transfer of nuclear weapons to South Africa.
“There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian that in 1975 Israel negotiated with South Africa the exchange of nuclear weapons,” the president said in an English-language statement. “Unfortunately, The Guardian elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts.”
The article is based on a series of documents the South African government declassified in response to a request from American academic Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who is writing a book called “The Unspoken Alliance” about the close relationship between the Israel and South Africa.
Appearing alongside the article, the partially censored documents show a formal request from the South Africans for nuclear-capable warheads, and minutes of meetings in which then-Defense Minister Peres listed weapons available for sale.
But they do not appear to confirm any transfer of weapons, or any explicit offer from the Israelis to sell nuclear materials or nuclear-capable weapons to the South Africans.
The documents accompanying the story do show Peres’ signature on minutes from a meeting where the then-defense minister discussed payloads available in “three sizes,” one of several phrases that Peres said The Guardian misconstrued.
The British paper did not call the Israeli government for a response to the article, Peres said, adding that his office “intends to send a harsh letter to the editor of The Guardian and demands the publication of the true facts.”
The Guardian claims the documents offer the first documentary evidence of Israel’s nuclear program.
In 1986, another British newspaper, the Sunday Times, published pictures and descriptions from a former technician at Israel’s main nuclear reactor, leading experts to estimate that Israel had the world’s sixth-largest nuclear arsenal.
According to its policy, Israel has never acknowledged or denied possessing nuclear weapons, though it is widely assumed to have them.
Amira Hass: Otherwise Occupied – The irrational stage: Haaretz
By Amira Hass, Haaretz – 24 May 2010
www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/otherwise-occupied-the-irrational-stage-1.291839
Speaking by video conference from Amman, Noam Chomsky explained to a Bir Zeit University audience last week the link between the Israeli occupation and U.S. global ambitions
“Denying my entry to the West Bank was a minor event, but significant because it indicates irrational behavior on the part of Israel,” the linguist Noam Chomsky said at the start of his lecture last Tuesday to a few dozen students and faculty members of Bir Zeit University. He delivered his lecture, “Americans and the World,” by video conference, of course: He in Amman, his audience in one of the university’s lecture halls. With all due respect to technology, the sound system did not allow for a real dialogue, much less an opportunity to pause for clarification. Thus it was impossible to interrupt Chomsky and ask him to define “irrational” and to say whether he considers this to be a new stage in of Israeli policy.
Chomsky spent time discussing a political decision taken by Israel in 1971, but he did not explicitly define it as irrational. Then, he said, Israel turned down a proposal from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for a peace treaty in return for withdrawal. The same principle has guided Israel ever since, Chomsky said: It favors territorial expansion over security. He did not say “peace,” but rather “security,” repeating this at least twice. Many of his examples fell victim to technology, but not these nuances. He criticizes policy, but he cares about people – and he makes a distinction between governments, which are the object of his criticism, and nations, sometimes excessively so, to the point of exempting societies, particularly ones with internal democracy, of responsibility for the policies of their governments.
Chomsky went on to say that the 1978 Camp David Accord (between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat ) was “a diplomatic disaster” – and not the achievement it is generally hailed as being, because it came after a major war with many casualties. These casualties could have been avoided, it was implied, were Israel genuinely interested in security and were the United States motivated by concern for the fate of nations and not only by its interests as a superpower.
Without the full support of America, Israel would have acted differently – then as now, he said. That was the underlying theme of his lecture, disappointing those who believe that U.S. policy is dictated by a Zionist lobby. The Israeli occupation and its continuation, he said, must be seen in the context of the imperialist policy of the United States, which is guided by considerations of profit for the few and the control of global oil resources.
It can be inferred from Chomsky’s second example of Israel’s irrational behavior – the recent incident involving the humiliation of the Turkish ambassador – that in his opinion a policy can be defined as irrational when it harms itself and its agents (rather than “merely” nations and the principles of justice ).
Irrational should not be confused with thoughtless. On the contrary, Chomsky’s reception at the Allenby Bridge border crossing last Sunday indicates intent and aforethought. He emphasized that the border inspector was following clear directives from shadowy superiors in the Interior Ministry. There was even something touching in the inspector’s lack of sophistication, as evidenced by the official’s preliminary questioning of the two friends who accompanied Chomsky and his daughter on their aborted journey. Both are U.S. citizens, he an Arab-American math professor, she a professor of international relations.
Here is the former’s description of the encounter, relayed by e-mail.
“Our interview was about 40 or 45 minutes. For the first half hour or so the inspector asked a series of inane questions, apparently in order to get us to talk. Then, without any preamble, he said: ‘We in Israel have a problem with Noam Chomsky.’ I: ‘What do you mean?’. He: ‘Do you know about anarchism?’. I: ‘Do you mean Prof. Chomsky is an anarchist?’. He: ‘Yes.’ I: What is wrong with anarchism?’ No answer from him. I wanted to hear his definition of anarchism but he wouldn’t oblige. It was at this point that he indicated that they would deny Noam entry and wanted to know if we would consider entering without him,” an offer they vehemently refused. “On the way to the waiting room,” the math professor continued, “the inspector instructed me not to say anything to Noam and Avi [Chomsky’s daughter Aviva] about our interview.”
Interior Ministry officials insisted that the denial of entry was a technical slip-up. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories is responsible for the entry of foreigners to the West Bank, they said, and due to an error the matter did not reach the unit. But further inquiries ascertained that the Interior Ministry has the final say, particularly when it fears that this is a case of settling down, even in the West Bank. Moreover, the official stamps used at the border crossing (permitting or denying entry ) belong to the Interior Ministry.
Perhaps to avoid further embarrassment, the Interior Ministry said in a statement that the matter was transferred to the coordinator as soon as the error became apparent. But it was not passed up to the highest levels, as one might expect in a case of denied entry with such international reverberations, and there were no official expressions of regret over the denial itself. Perhaps that is why the coordinator of government activities, who is subordinate to the Defense Ministry, did not pick up the gauntlet and publicly declare: “Please, Prof. Chomsky, come back to the Allenby Bridge and we shall let you in. We shall undo this scandal.” Just imagine: Then it could have been claimed that Defense Minister Ehud Barak was interfering in the authority of Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Who needs that kind of coalition trouble?
‘Freedom Flotilla’ en route to Gaza: YNet
Naval convoy to arrive in Strip next weekend with hundreds of activists, over 10,000 tons of products for residents in effort to break blockade
Published: 05.22.10
Three ships carrying pro-Palestinian activists left Turkey on Saturday en route to Gaza’s shore, as part of a flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement – meant to draw supporters from all over the world to the Strip.
The nine-ship convoy will attempt to dock in Gaza. The project is partly funded by IHH –a Turkish pro-Palestinian organization that had one of its members arrested in Israel recently.
The last of three vessels left Istanbul Saturday and was making its way to Greece, where the organizers said a few hundred activists were waiting to board it. The participants will bring with them some 10,000 tons of various products for the residents of the Strip.
One of the ships slated to arrive from Ireland is named after Rachel Corrie, a left-wing activist who was trampled to death by an IDF bulldozer in Rafah. Recently, a Ramallah street was also named after the late activist.
The ship, currently docked in Portugal, is carrying cement – a product that was banned from entering Gaza according to a decision made by Israel
as part of its blockade on the Hamas-ruled territory.
In a conversation with Ynet, Free Gaza Movement Chairperson Greta Berlin said that several European parliament members are expected to join the flotilla to Gaza.
Berlin explained that the movement began its activities four years ago, in an effort to draw international attention to what was taking place in the Gaza Strip – so that people will “wake up” and stop the siege.
Berlin added that although the IDF thwarted the last three attempts to reach Gaza by sea, the Israeli authorities were aware of the negative image they were creating, and that this time it would lead to far-reaching diplomatic consequences.