Israel’s US Funding Rests on Nuclear Secrecy

TMO 

The United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France and Germany (known as the  P5+1) have a meeting scheduled in Geneva on October 15 and 16 to hear new, concrete proposals from Iran designed to assure the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. In return, Iran would get some relief from economic sanctions, reports Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. He then wonders, “Behind closed doors, do the P5+1 acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons?”

Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski in the New York Times similarly note: “While the world endlessly discusses Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that it will succeed in developing an atomic arsenal, hardly anyone in the United States ever mentions Israel’s nuclear weapons. Obama, like his predecessors, pretends that he doesn’t know anything about them.”

If this October 15 meeting would bring up the subject of Israel’s leaking nuclear reactor and Israel’s stockpile of atomic weapons, it will be a happy birthday for Mordechai Vanunu, who lives under permanent house arrest in Israel. He turns 59 on October 13.

Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, worked from 1977-1985 at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona, an Israeli facility that develops and manufactures nuclear weapons. Just before he was fired (for advocating Palestinian rights), Vanunu secretly took 57 photographs of the Dimona facility in 1985.

On October 5, 1986, the British newspaper The Sunday Times ran the story with photos on its front page under the headline: “Revealed: the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.” In this interview with Peter Hounam, Vanunu gave detailed descriptions of lithium-6 separation required for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission  bombs. Vanunu described the plutonium processing used, giving a production rate of about 30 kg per year, and stated that Israel used about 4 kg per weapon. From this information it was estimated that Israel had sufficient plutonium for about 150 nuclear weapons.

With the help of a female secret agent, the Mossad kidnapped Vanunu, who was subsequently imprisoned for 18 years in Israel, 11 years of which he spent in solitary confinement. But it was too late to stop the press. The world now already knew that Israel possesses nuclear weapons.

Upon his release in 2004, Vanunu immediately began speaking to the media despite being ordered by Shin Bet not to talk to any foreigners. He has been re-arrested several times since then. Vanunu continues to call for Israel’s nuclear disarmament, and for its dismantlement as a Jewish state.

In July 2004 he warned the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat that the Dimona reactor endangers millions with its radioactive pollution. Vanunu advised the Jordanian government to prepare for possible leaks from the reactor, since the reactor operates mainly when “the wind blows toward Jordan.”

But by then, this was already old news. On February 6, 2000 the London Sunday Times had quoted Professor Uzi Even, formerly a senior scientist at the reactor, saying, “The Dimona reactor is old and dangerous; It should be closed.” Another scientist, who was not named, stated that the structure of the reactor has been damaged as the result of radiation and is now “vulnerable and dangerous.”
Furthermore, Dimona’s buried nuclear waste has resulted in skyrocketing cancer rates in Palestinian and Bedouin villages near Southern Hebron and Negev. The leaking reactor in Dimona has now been active without any foreign inspection for 50 years.

However, closing Dimona wouldn’t stop Israeli nukes, said Dr. Daniel Rohrlich, a research physicist at Tel Aviv University.

“In August, 1998, Israel joined an international initiative to cut off production of nuclear materials, i.e., plutonium and enriched uranium… But Israel only pretended to join… One day, a treaty to cut off production of fissionable materials will be ready for signing, and Israel will have to decide whether or not to go along. Signing a cutoff treaty would oblige Israel to demonstrate that it does not produce fissionable materials. If Israel is unwilling to open the Dimona reactor to international inspection, it has another option: to close and dismantle the reactor once and for all.

“It does not need the reactor. Israel already has enough fissionable material for hundreds of nuclear bombs. Over the decades, the reactor has produced hundreds of kilograms of plutonium. A cutoff would not affect this supply. Since the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years, this plutonium would remain at Israel’s disposal for thousands of years,” said Rohrlich.

Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post, “Back in the 1960s, Israel apparently hid the nuclear weapons program being carried on at its Negev Nuclear Research Center (NNRC) at Dimona. It deceived not only the international community but also its close U.S. ally. It repeatedly pledged “it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the area.”

In early 1966, at the time of a U.S. sale of F-4 fighter-bombers to Israel, the Johnson administration insisted that Israel reaffirm that pledge. “Foreign Minister Abba Eban told Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that Israel did not intend to build nuclear weapons, ‘so we will not use your aircraft to carry weapons we haven’t got and hope we will never have,’” according to the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XVIII.

“America is locked into covering up Israeli nuclear bombs because of a 1969 agreement between President Richard M. Nixon and Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir,” write Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski in the New York Times.

“If Washington wants negotiations over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East to work — or even just to avoid making America appear ridiculous — Mr. Obama should begin by being candid. He cannot expect the countries participating in a conference to take America seriously if the White House continues to pretend that we don’t know whether Israel has nuclear weapons, or for that matter whether Egypt and Israel have chemical or biological ones.”

So why is Israel so hesitant to admit its capabilities, which have long been public?

By not acknowledging possession of nuclear weapons, Israel avoids a US legal prohibition on funding countries which proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Open possession of nuclear weapon capabilities would prevent Israel from receiving over $2 billion each year in military and other aid from United States’ taxpayers.

Egypt Sentences Israeli to 2 Years

On Monday, March 4, 2013 an Egyptian court sentenced an Israeli to two years in prison for sneaking into the Sinai in an alleged attempt to enter Gaza. Andre Pshenichnikov, 24, was detained on Dec. 31, Egyptian security sources said.

The family of Andre Pshenichnikov told Israeli website Walla News they were surprised by the verdict, noting the maximum penalty for infiltration is normally six months. Egyptian security officials claim Pshenichnikov was filming security installations in Sinai and asking drivers for information.

The 23-year-old Jewish immigrant from Tajikistan already made headlines last summer when he was detained by Israeli police for residing illegally in the Deheishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. There he told police that he wants to break all ties with Israel, give up his Israeli citizenship and obtain a Palestinian one instead. “I hate Zionism,” he told the Associated Press in June 2012. “I want to be part of the Palestinian resistance.”

According to Pshenichnikov’s girlfriend, when he attempted to enter Egypt, Israeli authorities detained him for three days for no reason. After his release from Israeli detention, he crossed into Egypt and was then arrested by the Egyptian police. Svetlana Pshenichnikov, Andre’s mother, told Army Radio that he’d received a visa to enter Egypt last week, but that he’d encountered “a problem with his documents.”

Pshenichnikov was held in an Egyptian prison for over a month until he was ordered to be released and deported. However, he was back behind bars the very next day, after the Sharm al-Sheikh public prosecutor ordered a retrial of the left-wing activist. An appeal of his two year sentence is planned for later in the week. Meanwhile, his case arouses a great deal of speculation. Is he an Israeli spy? Commentator Israel Shamir believes the young man is rather an innocent idealist:

“Andre did the impossible. He crossed the biggest chasm there is. Imagine a white boy from Philly, picking cotton and living with blacks in a cabin on a Mississippi plantation in the days of Jim Crow. No Freedom Rider went that far. He broke an important taboo: so many Israelis are convinced that the Palestinians would kill them on sight, at first occasion. By his example he refuted this fantasy. He renounced apartheid personally by living with Palestinians… He did not go there to explore Palestinian way of life, or to write for a newspaper; he was not looking for publicity, he did not hide nor emphasize his Israeli identity. He did not act as an activist, marching at demos and enjoying popularity. He just rented a room, worked at a building site or waited tables in a tourist restaurant just like any Palestinian youth of his age in Deheishe, lived with ordinary people on his salary.”

“Though his actions were reckless, his intentions were noble, and we need such people,” Shamir concludes.

Shamir has advocated for a long time in favor of a One State Solution for Israel and Palestine. He does not believe people should wait for governments to decide their fate. Israelis themselves should go make friends with Palestinians and voluntarily dissolve the Jewish State.

“I signed a separate peace treaty with all my neighbors in the Middle East. As for me, Syrian children may come and swim in the Sea of Galilee, and children of Palestine are welcome to amusement parks of Tel Aviv, while I shall sip Lebanese arak at Bardaouni in Ramallah. The refugees of Gaza may come back to the fields they owned before 1948, and deal directly with the few old Polish Jews who “privatized” the lands. Keep me out of it.”

However, this recent incident shows that at this point in time, Arabs are not yet willing to protect a Jew who renounces Zionism and comes to live with them without official invitation or permission. Each time Pshenichnikov was arrested, it was the Palestinians or the Egyptians that handed him over to the authorities. Because of his openness in supporting the Palestinian cause, he was instantly mistrusted and considered to be stirring up trouble.

Former Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon has also received a lot of opposition from Diaspora Palestinians, who have excluded him from the debate about Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel, at the request of Jews in the BDS movement who feel threatened by Atzmon’s views on Jewish identity politics. Many other deep thinkers have been told that they are not welcome to hold hands with the Palestinians. Even this author has at times been alienated by those who fear that my outspoken support could cause them more problems.

Obviously, it’s a control issue. People who renounce their country, or their religion, or their social and political brainwashing, are free radicals, anarchists. If society accepts their right to question the status quo, other people will start questioning the status quo too. But each person will do it in their own unique way, without any organizational goal or structure. Peace is very dangerous in the sense that no one can control it, just like no parent can control a son who fell in love. In medical terms, a “free radical” is an agent that causes cancer. It infects a living organism and if it is not neutralized, it will disrupt the system and eventually cause it to die. If peace were to erupt, existing governments would no longer be needed.

Of course, there is also the very real problem of infiltration and instigation by spies posing as free radicals, who are actually agents of the enemy, as we have seen time and time again with FBI informants trying to set people up for fake terrorist plots.

Pshenichnikov, whose mother is a Christian, will not receive much sympathy from any Palestinians or Egyptians simply because he is an Israeli immigrant and therefore not to be trusted. He will not receive much sympathy from Israelis, since he is an enemy of Zionism. The Russian government has reportedly taken interest in his case. It will be interesting to see if they decide to negotiate his release.