The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal | World news | The Guardian

Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.

When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason. Read More

UN Calls for Israel to 'Renounce Nuclear Weapons

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday demanding that Israel "renounce possession of nuclear weapons" and open its arms to global regulation.

The measure, which is non-binding, was approved 161 to 5, with the United States, Canada, Palau, Micronesia, and Israel voting "no" and 18 countries abstaining.

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that refuses to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, with India, Pakistan, and North Korea also declining.

While Israel does not publicly acknowledge its nuclear arsenal, its existence is widely known. A reportreleased by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute this summer found that Israel unlawfully owns 80 nuclear warheads, making it the only Middle Eastern nuclear power.

Introduced by Egypt, the resolution calls for Israel to "accede to [the non-proliferation treaty] without further delay, not to develop, produce test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, to renounce possession of nuclear weapons." It also urges the state to subject itself to regulation by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN. More

 

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I'd Dump the Israelis Tomorrow -Ex-CIA Michael Scheuer Tells Congress

I'd Dump the Israelis Tomorrow -Ex-CIA Michael Scheuer Tells Congress House Homeland Security Committee on October 9, 2013

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Five Myths About Hamas

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about Israel’s ground offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he says that “without action, the price that we would pay would be much greater.”

But predicting how Hamas is likely to act and react requires probing what the organization can do, what it wants and how it sees itself. From Hamas’s angle, the current fighting offers just as many opportunities as threats. Let’s examine five myths about the militant Islamist organization.

1. Hamas poses no meaningful threat to Israel.

As a movement, Hamas offers resistance — attacking civilians, launching rockets and ransoming captives — but it cannot field a military force that could face Israel on the battlefield. Indeed, all the ground combat is happening in Gaza; Israeli territory remains relatively unscathed. As of Saturday, at least four Israelis had been killed in the latest round of fighting, while Israel’s actions had led to more than 330 Palestinian deaths. So it is absolutely true that Hamas does not pose an existential threat to Israel.

However, more than Israel’s existence is being threatened. The abduction and murder of three Israeli teens last month may or may not have been a Hamas operation — but the event captured the attention of the Israeli public, and the Israeli government reacted as if Hamas were responsible. While the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system is debated — officials boast that itintercepts 90 percent of Hamas’s missiles — large parts of the Israeli population now feel within Hamas’s reach as the range of its rockets creeps higher. Some have relocated farther away from Gaza, and those who remain show signs of stress. Israel’s political, military and security leaders are focused on deterring the rocket attacks.

Hamas may never come close to vanquishing Israel on the battlefield, but changes in its capabilities — tunnels, abductions, missiles and even a drone — continue to make Israelis nervous and force them to react.

2. Hamas’s popularity stems from the social services it provides.

Outsiders sometimes see Hamas as something like an American big-city machine that trades jobs and welfare benefits in return for political loyalty and votes — though a machine with an armed wing.

Hamas does have an armed wing, and other parts of the organization attempt to provide some social services, but the number of Palestinians who benefit from those services is small. And it’s dwarfed by those who get assistance from the Palestinian government, international aid bodies and nongovernmental organizations. This fact is missed by outsiders who often mistake anything Islamic for Hamas.

Hamas’s support from Palestinian civilians, when it comes, stems from other things. For example, the movement poses as uncompromising on Palestinian rights and uncorrupted by money and power. The political and diplomatic solutions, such as the Oslo peace process, offered by other factions such as Fatah seem meaningless to most Palestinians, who have grown cynical about their leaders’ ability to deliver.

The image of Hamas as an uncorrupt movement unconcerned with the trappings of power grew outdated once the group stepped into power after its 2006 election victory. But earlier this year, Hamas resigned all its cabinet positions and agreed to surrender political leadership of the Gaza Strip. With the decision to stop being a government as well as a movement, Hamas’s reputation may begin to recover. And some of its leaders may be saying now: What better way to start the effort than to return to the movement’s roots in armed resistance?

3. Hamas has lost popularity.

In all kinds of ways, recent opinion polling shows that the majority of Palestinians back positions that Hamas rejects regarding diplomacy and resistance. Hamas remains more hard-line than the public it seeks to lead, and surveys also show that the group would have tremendous trouble repeating its 2006 election win.

But right now, Hamas’s leaders aren’t concerned about whether they could obtain a majority of the vote. Elections are unlikely any time soon. And the despair among Palestinians is so deep, the numbers do not look much better for any leader or faction; at this point Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seen as isolated, aloof and having spent all his political capital on a failed peace process.

What concerns Hamas’s leaders is their relevance, their ability to articulate the deep senses of frustration and injustice that most Palestinians feel — and whether their rhetoric will resonate with the public. The current path of the conflict, and its fiery rhetoric, offer Hamas opportunities to present itself as more in line with the times.

Yes, Hamas surrendered its cabinet positions to people appointed by Abbas. And yes, Hamas is taking a beating and its activists are being driven underground. But its credentials as the movement that does not bend and dares to take on Israel are being burnished among much of the audience it cares about.

4. Hamas’s loss of regional allies has tied its hands.

Hamas’s base in Syria was shut down two years ago. Its Iranian allies have greatly reduced their support. Its big brothers in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, can do little for the movement now that they are out of power. In the last round of fighting, in 2012, Egypt helped broker a cease-fire; now its position seems as hard-line on Hamas as Israel’s. Internationally isolated and strapped for cash, Hamas is in crisis. More

 

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Israel and the dangers of ethnic nationalism

An interview with Jonathan Cook, by Joseph Cotto

Jonathan Cook

Counterpunch – 4 November 2013

Cotto: What sort of general impact would you say Zionism has had on the Middle East?

Cook: Zionism was a reaction to the extreme ethnic nationalisms that dominated – and nearly destroyed – Europe last century. It is therefore hardly surprising that it mirrors their faults. In exporting to the Middle East this kind of nationalism, Zionism was always bound to play a negative role in the region.

Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, developing the concept of a Jewish state in response to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. One notorious incident that appears to have shaped his views was France’s Dreyfus affair, when a very assimilated Jewish army officer was unjustly accused of treason and then his innocence covered up by French elites.

The lesson drawn by Herzl was that assimilation was futile. To survive, Jews needed to hold firmly on to their ethnic identity and create an exclusivist state based on ethnic principles.

There is a huge historical irony to this, because Europe’s ethnic nationalisms would soon end up tearing apart much of the world, culminating in the expansionary German war machine, the Second World War and the Nazi death camps. International institutions such as the United Nations and international humanitarian law were developed precisely to stop the repeat of such a cataclysmic event.

Once in the Middle East, Zionism shifted the locus of its struggle, from finding a solution to European anti-semitism to building an exclusive Jewish homeland on someone else’s land, that of the Palestinians. If one wants to understand the impact of Zionism in the Middle East, then one needs to see how destabilising such a European ideological implant was.

The idea of ethnic-religious supremacism, which history suggests is latent in many ethnic nationalisms, quickly came to the fore in Zionism. Today, the dominant features of Zionist ideology in Israel are:

• a commitment to segregation at all levels – made concrete in the separation wall across the West Bank;
• a belief in ethnic exclusivism – Palestinian citizens inside Israel are even denied an Israeli nationality;
• a kind of national paranoia – walls are built to protect every border;
• an aversion, paradoxically given the above, to defining its borders – and with it a craving for expansion and greater “living room”.

All of this was predictable if one looked at the trajectory of ethnic nationalisms in Europe. Instead, we in the West see all this as a reaction to Islamism. The reality is we have everything back to front: Zionism, an aggressive ethnic nationalism, fed reactionary forces in the region like political Islam.

Cotto: If Israel adopted its pre-1967 borders, would this, in your opinion, contribute to the peace process?

Cook: Of course, it would. If nothing else, it would show for the first time two things: one, that Israel is prepared to exhibit good faith towards the Palestinians and respect international law; and two, that it has finally decided to define and fix its borders. Those are also two good reasons why I don’t think we will see Israel adopt such a position.

There is a further, implicit question underlying this one. Can a Palestinian state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine, separated into two prison-cantons with limited access to the sea, be a viable state?

No, I don’t think it can – at least not without remaining economically dependent on Israel and militarily vulnerable to it too. That, we should remember, also appears to have been the view of the international community when it tried to solve this problem more than 60 years ago. The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 gave the Jewish minority 55 per cent of historic Palestine to create a Jewish state, while the Palestinians, the majority of the population, received 45 per cent for an Arab state.

One doesn’t have to believe the partition plan was fair – as most Palestinians do not – to understand that even the Western-centric UN of that time did not imagine that a viable state could be created on 22 per cent of Palestine, or half of the “Arab state” it envisioned.

That is why I have long maintained that ultimately a solution to the conflict will only be found when the international community helps the two sides to find common ground and shared interests and to create joint institutions. That might be vaguely termed the one-state solution, but in practice it could take many forms.

Cotto: It is often noted that Palestinians live in far more impoverished socioeconomic conditions than Israelis do. From your standpoint, can this be attributed to Israeli aggression?

Cook: In essence, it is difficult to imagine it could be attributed to much else, unless one makes the racist assumption that Palestinians or Arabs are naturally lazy or incompetent.

In terms of Israel’s greater economic success, there are several factors to take into account. It receives massive subsidies from the US taxpayer – billions of dollars in military aid and other benefits. It has developed very lucrative hi-tech and homeland security industries, often using the occupied territories as laboratories for it to test and showcase its weapons and surveillance systems. It also benefits from the financial connections it enjoys with worldwide Jewry. Just think of the property market in Israel, which is artificially boosted by wealthy US and European Jews who inject money into the economy by buying an Israeli condo.

But equally importantly – as a just-published report from the World Bank concludes – it has prospered by plundering and exploiting Palestinian resources. The World Bank argues that Israel’s de facto annexation of 62 per cent of the West Bank, known as Area C in the Oslo Accords, has stripped any nascent Palestinian state of almost all its resources: land for development, water for agriculture, quarries for stone, the Dead Sea for minerals and tourism, etc. Instead these resources are being stolen by more than 200 settlements Israel has been sowing over the West Bank.

Israel also exploits a captive, and therefore cheap, Palestinian labour force. That both benefits the Israeli economy and crushes the Palestinian economy.

Cotto: Some say that Israel’s settlement policies directly encourage violence from Palestinian militants. Do you believe this to be the case?

Cook: Yes, of course. If you came armed with a gun to my house and took it from me, and then forced me and my family to live in the shed at the end of the garden, you could hardly be surprised if I started making trouble for you. If I called the police and they said they couldn’t help, you could hardly be surprised if I eventually decided to get a gun myself to threaten you back. If, when you saw I had a gun too, you then built a wall around the shed to imprison me, you could hardly be surprised if I used the tools I had to make primitive grenades and started lobbing them towards the house. None of this would prove how unreasonable I was, or how inherently violent.

Cotto: Many claim that, if Israel were to shed its Jewish ethnocentrism, Muslims and others nearby would adopt a more favorable opinion of it. Do you agree with this idea?

Cook: Ethnocentrism for Israel means that the protection of its Jewishness is synonymous with the protection of its national security. That entails all sorts of things that would be considered very problematic if they were better understood.

Israel needed to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in 1948 to create a Jewish state. It needs separate citizenship and nationality laws, which distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, to sustain a Jewish state. It needs its own version of the “endless war on terror” – an aggressive policy of oppression and divide and rule faced by Palestinians under its rule – to prevent any future internal challenge to the legitimacy of its Jewishness. It needs to keep Palestinian refugees festering in camps in neighbouring Arab states to stop a reversal of its Jewishness. And it has had to become an armed and fortified garrison state, largely paid for by the US, to intimidate and bully its neighbours in case they dare to threaten its Jewishness.

Ending that ethnocentrism would therefore alter relations with its neighbours dramatically.

It was possible to end similar historic enmities in Northern Ireland and in South Africa. There is no reason to believe the same cannot happen in the Middle East.

Cotto: If Israel were to cease being an ethnocentrically Jewish state, do you think it would be able to survive?

Cook: Yes. Israel’s actions have produced an ocean of anger towards it in the region – and a great deal of resentment towards the US too. And that would not evaporate overnight. At a minimum there would be lingering distrust, and for good reason. But for Israel to stop being an ethnocratic state, it would require a serious international solution to the conflict. The international community would have to put into place mechanisms and institutions to resolve historic grievances and build trust, as it did in South Africa. Over time, the wounds would heal.

Cotto: In the event that Israel were to end its ethnocentrically Jewish policies, do you believe that Islamist militants would hold less of a grudge against the Western world?

Cook: The question looks at the problem in the wrong way in at least two respects. First, Israel’s ethnocentrism – its exclusivity and its aggressiveness, for example – is one of the reasons it is useful to Western, meaning US, imperialism. Reforming Israel would indicate a change in Western priorities in the region, but that does not necessarily mean the West would stop interfering negatively in the region. Reforming Israel is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for a change in attitudes that dominate in the region.

Second, many Islamists, certainly of the fanatical variety, are not suddenly going to have a Damascene conversion about the West because Israel is reformed. But that should not be the goal. Good intentions towards the region will be repaid in a change in attitude among the wider society – and that is what is really important. When George Bush and his ilk talk about “draining the swamps”, they are speaking only in military terms. But actually what we should be doing is draining the ideological swamp in which Islamic extremism flourishes. If the Islamists have no real support, if they do not address real issues faced by Arab societies, then they will wither away.

Cotto: What do you think the future of Israel holds insofar as Middle Eastern geopolitics are concerned?

Cook: That is crystal ball stuff. There are too many variables. What can be said with some certainty is that we are in a time of transition: at the moment, chiefly economic for the West and chiefly political for the Middle East. That means the global power systems we have known for decades are starting to break down. Where that will ultimately lead is very difficult to decipher.

Joseph Cotto writes for the Washington Times.

Tagged as: peace process, Zionism

- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-11-04/israel-and-the-dangers-of-ethnic-nationalism/#sthash.hUVchNfo.dpuf

 

Is Capitalism to Blame For the Syrian War Drive?

Obama’s push for war in Syria seemed so deeply irrational, so crazed, that many people naturally asked, “Why is this happening?” And “who” wants it to happen?

Few Americans actually believed that Nobel Peace Prizing winning Obama suddenly wanted to bomb Syria because “Assad gassed his own people” (especially when zero evidence was given to prove this).

Many commentators have correctly stated that geopolitics is a main motivation for Obama wanting to bomb Syria, acting as a gateway to Iran. Other commentators have also correctly discussed the specific economic (capitalistic) interests as a war motive. And others still have, again correctly, focused on the importance of Israel as a factor towards pushing for war in Syria and eventually Iran. All three answers are correct, and have an inter-dependence that is complicated and difficult to quantify, since much of the truth is hidden from public view.

Problems arise in analysis, however, when one of these issues is separated from the broader context, as was done in a recent article by Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone. Their article, “The People Against the 800 Pound Gorilla,” focuses on the importance of the U.S. Israeli lobby — “the 800 Pound Gorilla” — and its push for war, while minimizing or dismissing other crucial economic and political motives.

The article makes many excellent points, especially how the Israeli lobby in the U.S., American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is fanatically pushing for war against Syria. Congress is also trying to be politically immune from ANY discussion about AIPAC activities, lest accusations of “anti-Semite” are indiscriminately flung at them.

The problem with the article, however, is that the authors elevate the Israeli gorilla to a weight class it doesn’t belong in; and in so doing the authors are forced to minimize the size of several other giant gorillas, whose combined weight overshadows the Israeli chimp.

One of the giant gorillas that the authors seek to shrink is the U.S. capitalist class. The following passage summarizes the author’s main point:

“People who think that capitalists want wars to make profits should spend time observing the board of directors of any big corporation: capitalists need stability, not chaos, and the recent wars only bring more chaos.”

This is, of course, true for many if not most U.S. corporations. The authors are also correct when they argue that the average writer who uses a capitalist-centered analysis to explain war wrongly “…sees capitalism as a unified actor issuing orders to obedient politicians on the basis of careful calculations.” The authors are correct that this type of clunky analysis lacks nuance and should be rejected.

But the authors also fail to give capitalism the nuance it deserves; they construct a capitalistic strawman so arid it spontaneously combusts. For example, the authors limit the definition of capitalism to a sector-specific basis, mentioning specific types of capitalists that are blamed for pushing war and dismissing them as lesser gorillas than the Israeli lobby.

In naming corporate names the authors make some good points, but somehow skip over the 1,600 pound gorilla in the room — the big banks, the motor force of capitalism in the U.S. The authors might respond to this criticism by saying the banks were purposely omitted because they do not “directly benefit” from war and are, therefore, not at the forefront of advocating it.

This would be false. As the dominant corporate sector in U.S. capitalism, the banks are also the most internationalist in scope; the recent second quarter profits of U.S. banks were $42.2 billion (!), most of this money was made in overseas investing using cheap Federal Reserve printed dollars. More

 

Iran vote: Rouhani vows transparency on nuclear issue

Iran's president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, has thanked Iranians for "choosing moderation".

Hassan Rouhani

In his first press conference since the vote, Mr Rouhani said his government would work towards "constructive interaction with the world".

He saluted what he called "passionate young Iranians" and said he would not forget his election promises.

Mr Rouhani, a long-standing political figure in Iran, won just more than 50% of the vote in Friday's election.

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Of course, the real question is; does the world [read the US and Israel] want constructive interaction with Iran? Editor

 

How Cell Phone Tech Resulted In The Spookiest Surveillance Camera On Earth

Everyone marveled when the iPhone 4S came equipped with a full high definition video camera. Little did they know that the race to miniaturize cell phone cameras led to quite possibly the spookiest surveillance camera on earth.

Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, or ARGUS-IS, which we recently covered, is the result of a low budget and 368 cannibalized cell phone cameras, slammed together to create the largest, finest surveillance camera in the world.

Attached to a predator drone, the camera records approximately 1 trillion gigabytes of information in a single day. More

 

 

The ARGUS-IS, or the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project contracted to BAE Systems. According to DARPA:^[1]

The mission of the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program is to provide military users a flexible and responsive capability to find, track and monitor events and activities of interest on a continuous basis in areas of interest. The overall objective is to increase situational awareness and understanding enabling an ability to find and fix critical events in a large area in enough time to influence events. ARGUS - IS provides military users an "eyes-on" persistent wide area surveillance capability to support tactical users in a dynamic battlespace or urban environment. More

Israeli bombing of Syria and moral relativism

On Sunday, Israel dropped massive bombs near Damascus, ones which the New York Times, quoting residents, originally reported(then evidently deleted) resulted in explosions "more massive than anything the residents of the city. . . have witnessed during more than two years of war."

The Jerusalem Post this morning quoted "a senior Syrian military source" as claiming that "Israel used depleted uranium shells", though that is not confirmed. The NYT cited a "high-ranking Syrian military official" who said the bombs "struck several critical military facilities in some of the country's most tightly secured and strategic areas" and killed "dozens of elite troops stationed near the presidential palace", while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that "at least 42 soldiers were killed in the strikes, and another 100 who would usually be at the targeted sites remain unaccounted for."

Israeli defenders claim that its air attack targeted weapons provided by Iran that would have ended up in the hands of Hezbollah. Obama officials quickly told media outlets that "the administration is fully supportive of Israel's airstrikes". Indeed, Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy noted: "Keep in mind the Israelis are using weapons supplied by us." There is, needless to say, virtually no condemnation of the Israeli assault in US media or political circles. At this point, the only question is how many minutes will elapse before Congress reflexively adopts a near-unanimous or unanimous resolution effusively praising Israel for the attack and unqualifiedly endorsing all past and future attacks as well.

Because people who cheer for military action by their side like to pretend that they're something more than primitive "might-makes-right" tribalists, the claim is being hauled out that Israel's actions are justified by the "principle" that it has the right to defend itself from foreign weapons in the hands of hostile forces. But is that really a "principle" that anyone would apply consistently, as opposed to a typically concocted ad hoc claim to justify whatever the US and Israel do? Let's apply this "principle" to other cases, as several commentators on Twitter have done over the last 24 hours, beginning with this:

Here's a similar question:

Or, for that matter, if Syria this week attacks a US military base on US soil and incidentally kills some American civilians (as Nidal Hasan did), and then cites as justification the fact that the US has been aiding Syrian rebels, would any establishment US journalist or political official argue that this was remotely justified? Or what if Syria bombed Qatar or Saudi Arabia on the same ground: would any US national figure defend the bombing as well within Syria's rights given those nation's arming of its rebels?

Few things are more ludicrous than the attempt by advocates of US and Israeli militarism to pretend that they're applying anything remotely resembling "principles". Their only cognizable "principle" is rank tribalism: My Side is superior, and therefore we are entitled to do things that Our Enemies are not. In more honest moments, they admit this. As soon as Hasan tweeted his question, he was instantly attacked by a writer for the Times of Israel and the Atlantic, dutifully re-tweeted by Jeffrey Goldberg, on this ground:

One could say quite reasonably that this is the pure expression of the crux of US political discourse on such matters: they must abide by rules from which we're immune, because we're superior. So much of the pseudo-high-minded theorizing emanating from DC think thanks and US media outlets boils down to this adolescent, self-praising, tribalistic license: we have the right to do X, but they do not. Indeed, the entire debate over whether there should be a war with Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities, as Israel sits on a massive pile of nuclear weapons while refusing UN demands to permit any international inspection of it, is also a perfect expression of this mentality.

The ultimate irony is that those who advocate for the universal application of principles to all nations are usually tarred with the trite accusatory slogan of "moral relativism". But the real moral relativists are those who believe that the morality of an act is determined not by its content by the identity of those who commit them: namely, whether it's themselves or someone else doing it. As Rudy Giuliani put it when asked if waterboarding is torture: "It depends on who does it." Today's version of that is: Israel and the US (and its dictatorial allies in Riyadh and Doha) have the absolute right to bomb other countries or arm rebels in those countries if they perceive doing so is necessary to stop a threat but Iran and Syria (and other countries disobedient to US dictates) do not. This whole debate would be much more tolerable if it were at least honestly acknowledged that what is driving the discussion are tribalistic notions of entitlement and nothing more noble. More

 

Killing Syrians - A game anyone can play by Craig Murray

Israel’s massive air strikes against Syria are, beyond argument, illegal. There is no provision in international law that enables you to bomb another country because that country is in internal chaos.

Yet the reporting on the BBC, and indeed throughout the mainstream media, makes no mention of their illegality, and makes no mention of the people killed. Contrast this to the condemnatory tone of BBC reporting of North Korean ballistic missile tests, or of Iran’s civil uranium enrichment programme, both of which I view as neither wise nor desirable, but both of which are undoubtedly quite legal.

I have previously noted that Israel does not want the Syrian regime to fall. Tel Aviv has looked long and hard at the likely result, and decided that the risks are too great; an Israel-friendly Sunni strongman could yet be engineered, but a jihadist influenced government is a very real danger for them. This Israeli coolness is the major reason that the Obama government have stepped back from stoking directly the flames of war, although they continue to do so through their Saudi, Qatar and other allies.

But a Syria tearing itself to pieces is, so long as it lasts, pretty acceptable to Netanyahu. He can step in when he wants and destroy Syria’s military infrastructure, such as the defensive installations just wiped out in massive strikes around Damascus. This is very helpful to Israel’s long term military domination. Normally the scale of this devastating Israeli attack on Syria’s ability to defend itself against Israel air strikes would have brought the most profound world condemnation, but suddenly it is “humanitarian intervention” – and nobody in the western media has even felt the need to justify the narrative that Damascus’ air defences were a humanitarian threat to rebel populations.

In the meantime, a clear statement from the United Nations that the evidence points to rebels, not the government, using the chemical weapon Sarin in Syria, does appear on the BBC website but I have not heard it broadcast, and it does not figure in western media with a hundredth of the prominence given to the unsubstantiated claims of Assad forces using Sarin. More

This latest illegal Israeli move may well have a motivation that has not been mentioned here by Craig Murray or anywhere else online that I have seen. The motivation may possibly be to goad Iran, as a supporter of the regime in Damascus, to strike against Israel and thereby giving them the excuse to attack Iran. Editor

 

Obama's Risky Middle East Fantasy by Ira Chernus

Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon” (CNN), “Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive” (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), “US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran’s plutonium-producing reactor” (Associated Press), “Obama says ‘there is still time’ to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience” (NBC), “Iran’s leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks” (Fox).

By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines -- about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel -- that we simply don’t see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces -- and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called “regime change.” (Who can forget theneocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran”?)

And all of this is due, so we're told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn’t exist, and most observers don’t think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it -- if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject -- is a nuclear will-o'-the-wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal. And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama’s recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel’s. On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it’s spoken of as if it might or might not exist. Israel, Fox News typically reports, “is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast.” It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. But the arsenal itself isn’t just “believed” to exist, it is known to exist -- 100-300 nuclear weapons' worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region. If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like “paranoia” and “fantasy” would quickly creep into any discussion.

With that in mind, let Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and an expert on separating fantasy from reality, take on the tough task of putting aside the media hosannas about the president’s recent Middle Eastern travels and making sense of what actually happened. Tom

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed

When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down

By Ira Chernus

Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.

Like most myths, this one has elements of truth. Obama did say some important things. In a speech to young Israelis, he insisted that their nation’s occupation of the West Bank is not merely bad for their country, it is downright immoral, “not fair... not just ... not right.”

I’ve been decrying the immorality of the occupation for four decades, yet I must admit I never dreamed I would hear an American president, standing in Jerusalem, do the same.

Despite those words, however, Obama is no idealist. He’s a strategist. His Jerusalem speech was clearly meant to widen the gap between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the substantial center-left portion of Israeli Jews, who are open to a deal with the Palestinians and showed unexpected strength in recent elections. The growing political tensions in Israel and a weakened prime minister give the American president a potential opening to maneuver, manipulate, and perhaps even control the outcome of events.

How to do so, though? Obama himself probably has no clear idea. Whatever Washington’s Middle Eastern script, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, it will require an extraordinary balancing act.

The president will have to satisfy (or mollify) both the center-left and the right in Israel, strike an equally perfect balance between divergent Israeli and Palestinian demands, march with Netanyahu up to the edge of war with Iran yet keep Israel from plunging over that particular cliff, calibrate the ratcheting up of punishing sanctions and other acts in relation to Iran so finely that the Iranians will, in the end, yield to U.S. demands without triggering a war, and prevent the Syrian civil war from spilling into Israel, which means controlling Lebanese politics, too. Don’t forget that he will have do it all while maintaining his liberal base at home and fending off the inevitable assault from the right.

Oh, yes. Then there are all the as-yet-unforeseeable variables that will also have to be managed. To call it a tall order is an understatement.

The Fantasy of Perfect Control

In American political culture, we expect no less from any president. After all, he is “the most powerful man in the world” -- so he should be able to walk such a high wire adroitly, without fretting too much about the consequences, should he fall. More

 

UN's Falk draws heat for saying US had Boston attack coming

GENEVA (AP) — A UN special investigator has linked the Boston marathon bombings to the United States’ superpower status and Washington’s policy on Israel, drawing the ire Wednesday of top U.N. and government officials.

Richard Falk

Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote about the attacks in an April 21 commentary in Foreign Policy Journal that “the American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

Falk also said “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.” He said President Barack Obama hasn’t adopted a “more balanced approach to the Palestine/Israel impasse.” Instead, Falk accused Obama of “succumbing to the Beltway ethos of Israel first.”

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said in response to reporters’ questions Wednesday that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejects Falk’s comments, which could undermine the U.N.’s credibility and work. “The secretary-general immediately condemned the Boston marathon bombing and he strongly believes that nothing can justify such an attack,” Nesirky said.

The British and U.S. missions to the UN in New York and the advocacy groups Anti-Defamation League and UN Watch all questioned Falk’s capabilities for the UN job.

In a statement, the British mission said this is “the third time we have had cause to express our concerns about Mr. Falk’s anti-Semitic remarks. It is important to the U.K. that special rapporteurs uphold the highest standards in their work and we have twice previously made clear that remarks by Mr. Falk were unacceptable.”

Israel has barred Falk, who reports to the 47-nation UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, from visiting the Palestinian territories because he has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with the horrors of Nazi Germany. He also is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University. More

 

Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed By Ira Chernus

When It Comes to Israel, Palestine, and Iran, It Could All Come Crashing Down

Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.

Like most myths, this one has elements of truth. Obama did say someimportant things. In a speech to young Israelis, he insisted that their nation’s occupation of the West Bank is not merely bad for their country, it is downright immoral, “not fair... not just ... not right.”

I’ve been decrying the immorality of the occupation for four decades, yet I must admit I never dreamed I would hear an American president, standing in Jerusalem, do the same.

Despite those words, however, Obama is no idealist. He’s a strategist. His Jerusalem speech was clearly meant to widen the gap between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the substantial center-left portion of Israeli Jews, who are open to a deal with the Palestinians and showed unexpected strength in recent elections. The growing political tensions in Israel and a weakened prime minister give the American president a potential opening to maneuver, manipulate, and perhaps even control the outcome of events.

How to do so, though? Obama himself probably has no clear idea. Whatever Washington’s Middle Eastern script, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, it will require an extraordinary balancing act.

The president will have to satisfy (or mollify) both the center-left and the right in Israel, strike an equally perfect balance between divergent Israeli and Palestinian demands, march with Netanyahu up to the edge of war with Iran yet keep Israel from plunging over that particular cliff, calibrate the ratcheting up of punishing sanctions and other acts in relation to Iran so finely that the Iranians will, in the end, yield to U.S. demands without triggering a war, and prevent the Syrian civil war from spilling into Israel, which means controlling Lebanese politics, too. Don’t forget that he will have do it all while maintaining his liberal base at home and fending off the inevitable assault from the right.

Oh, yes. Then there are all the as-yet-unforeseeable variables that will also have to be managed. To call it a tall order is an understatement.

The Fantasy of Perfect Control

In American political culture, we expect no less from any president. After all, he is “the most powerful man in the world” -- so he should be able to walk such a high wire adroitly, without fretting too much about the consequences, should he fall.

Whatever else he may be doing, whenever an American president travels abroad, his overriding goal is to act out on the world stage a singular and deeply felt, if not always articulated, fantasy so many Americans love: that their leader and the nation he embodies have, like Superman, unlimited powers to control people and events around the globe.

In this scenario, the president of the United States is a man above every fray, who understands the true needs of both sides in any conflict, as befits his uniquely exceptional nation. That’s why he can go anywhere -- even Jerusalem or Ramallah -- and tell the locals what is true and right and how they should behave. More

 

 

 

Yesterday: Iraq. Tomorrow: Iran?

It was 10 years ago this week that George Bush launched his ill-fated war of choice in Iraq. The anniversary comes as politicians in Washington and Israel continue to discuss the option of military action against Iran.

The parallels with a decade ago are striking.

Once again, we hear claims of a grave threat from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and the possibility of military action. Vice President Joe Biden recently told the convention of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) that “all options, including military force, are on the table.”

Then as now we are warned of the need to take action before it’s too late. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sent a video message to the AIPAC convention claiming that Iran will soon cross a nuclear “red line.”

We’ve heard this story before.

Who can forget Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s infamous line “we can’t wait for the smoking gun to be a nuclear mushroom cloud”? Or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ludicrous attempt to explain the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD: “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

Some of us reported at the time that no evidence existed of Iraqi WMD, and that UN inspections during the 1990s had dismantled Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, ballistic missile and chemical weapons threat, but our voices were ignored in the march to war. Official investigations during the occupation confirmed the complete absence of any WMD threat.

Some politicians apparently never learn.

Today, prominent Democratic and Republican senators are lining up behind Senate Resolution 65, which declares that “if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support.” The resolution is in effect a backdoor authorization for war. It sets the stage for the United States being dragged into a future Israeli attack on Iran.

One of the authors of the resolution is Democratic New York Senator Charles Schumer. The senator was sharply critical of George Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, but now he is resorting to Bush-style misrepresentation to justify a potential attack on Iran. According to Jamal Abdi of the National Iranian American Council, Schumer is telling constituents that Iran “continues to enrich uranium into weapons-grade nuclear materials” and that the resulting fuel is “sufficient to arm a nuclear warhead.”

Not true.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reports regularly on Iran and has no evidence of uranium enrichment to weapons-grade level. This past week the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was on Capitol Hill to repeat what U.S. intelligence agencies have reported consistently for years: Iran is not enriching uranium to weapons grade and has not made a decision to build a bomb. Of course, real concerns exist about Tehran’s nuclear program, but there is no imminent nuclear threat from Iran or justification for threatening military attack. More