Page 2 of
2 COMMENT Israel's nukes missing from
the table By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
against the (Shi'ite) Iranian
menace. Henceforth, in light of Iran's defiance of
the UN's demands to halt its controversial nuclear
work, we should expect an increasingly unambiguous
Israeli nuclear posture that compensates for
Israel's policy shortcomings with regard to the
Palestinians by the added value of anti-Iran
deterrence, supposedly cherished by the
conservative Arab states, especially in the
Persian Gulf region.
Much of this amounts
to wishful thinking, a recipe for disaster,
both
for Israel and the US superpower underwriting its
security for so many decades, particularly since
the famed Richard Nixon-Golda Meir meeting of 1969
when Nixon reportedly conceded Israel's nuclear
status as long as it remained "unadvertised".
That was then, and what Israel has
increasingly learnt is the prestige-enhancing
value of discretely advertising its nuclear
weapons, on a par with France and Great Britain,
and thus it acquires global status. This for an
otherwise tiny state, lacking geographic depth and
suffering from "cruelty of nature", to paraphrase
David Ben Gurion, Israel's first premier.
But, what price liberating itself from the
confines of nature by relying on the ultimate
weapons of mass destruction? And is it not a case
of self-bondage in other ways, by permanently
marking Israel the target of
would-be-proliferators in the region, who are
unwilling to sacrifice their national-security
interests imperiled by Israel's nuclear monopoly?
Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear
issues, Israel is a hermetical, closed society,
except in the context of debating other countries'
nuclear policies and potentials. In other words,
the "nuclear insurance policy" in Israel is also
an insurance policy against full-fledged
democracy. It is a nuclear elitism in which only a
select group of civil and military leaders enjoy
the total monopoly of nuclear decision-making,
outside the purview of their legislature, formal
budgetary processes or public discourse. The
latter is absent because of the article of faith
concerning the wholly beneficial role and function
of nuclear weapons, as the ultimate weapons of the
nation's survival. This, again, reflecting a naive
nuclearism that, ironically, self-promotes as
clever strategem. That is, falsely believing that,
to quote a well-known pro-Israeli US pundit, Louis
Rene Beres, that with nuclear weapons, "Israel
could deter unconventional attacks and most large
conventional aggression."
Beres also
mentions Israel's ability to launch pre-emptive
strikes at its adversaries as yet another
advantage, presumably since the ones attacked
would hold back from retaliating due to fears of
Israel's nuclear prowess, which sustains Israel's
peace "rejectionism", to paraphrase US political
activist and author Noam Chomsky, by giving it a
false sense of invincibility.
Clearly, the
need for an Israeli nuclear house-cleaning is long
overdue and the avalanche of seemingly pro-Israel
rationalizations such as Beres's do not help.
Rather, they help only in perpetuating Israel's
self-imprisonment in a pre-modern, 19th-century
military calculus that informed the Zionist
leaders' worldview - through an unreconstructed
ethos of kdushat habitachon (the sacredness
of security).
In light of the above,
Israel cannot have its cake and eat it too, on the
one hand giving lip service to the connectivity of
genuine peace with its nuclear proliferation and,
on the other, pretending to be serious about
peace, as it has just done in Annapolis. And this
without showing any initiative on what the rest of
the Middle East considers to be a highly
contentious issue, namely, its nuclear monopoly.
In fact, wily-nily the Israeli debates on
Iran's nuclear proliferation have had the
beginning effect of breaking an old taboo on
Israel's own arsenal, and which needs to be
articulated more forcefully into a national
discourse. The old bombs-in-the-basement attitude
has had as its complement a debased mentality that
glosses over the fact that in today's Middle East,
national-security issues are interlinked and the
manifest or latent threats posed by Israel's
nuclear proliferation have built up the momentum
for wider proliferation.
What Israel lacks
today is, in a word, a counter-proliferation
momentum that is not solely other-focused and that
does not adhere to a defunct view of things as
inherently discrete and separate. They are not,
and the liabilities of the homogenous nuclear
thinking in Israel, in inadvertently fomenting the
region's proliferation impulse, are now beginning
to show themselves.
Thus the paradoxical,
contradictory influence of the "Iran threat" on
Israel's nuclear posture, doctrine and public
embrace of that doctrine, hitherto taken for
granted, in entrenching many Israelis into even
more hardcore nuclearists, just as their old taboo
of openly discussing their nuclear policies is
breaking down.
The side-effects of the
Iran nuclear crisis, in pushing the issue of
Israel's arsenal more to the foreground and, as in
the case of feeble attempts at the UN to link the
two through emphasis on a nuclear-free zone in the
region, only mean that sooner of later the Israeli
public will have to reckon with the international
community's demand for the end of Israeli
exceptionalism and Israel's playing by the rules
of the non-proliferation regime. This, in turn,
points at the other side of the post-opacity coin,
namely, the end of the taboo on Israel's
non-disarmament.
Concerning the latter,
the recent US-India nuclear deal, justified by US
officials in the name of bringing India within the
bounds of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
has a distinct potential to extend to Israel - as
with India - the prospect that aspects of its
nuclear program could be subject to international
monitoring.
The Atomic Energy Agency's
toolboxes of inspection and verification cannot be
effective in the region as long as Israel
continues to evade them. thus raising the
consistent complaints of double standards and
hypocrisy. This particularly on the part of
Western nations that demand the disarmament of
Iran from even the "knowledge to produce nuclear
weapons" while turning a blind eye on Israel's
relentless nuclear weaponization.
Inevitably, Israel's path to durable peace
must be paved with good nuclear intentions, yet
this is completely missing today.
Note 1. Mordechai Vanunu
is an Israeli former nuclear technician who
revealed details of Israel's nuclear weapons
program to the British press in 1986. He was
subsequently abducted in Rome by Israeli agents
and smuggled to Israel, where he was tried and
convicted of treason. He spent 18 years in prison
before being released in 2004.
Kaveh
L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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