While the U.S. corporate media has falsely accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons, it’s been largely silent about Israel’s nuke arsenal. This cover-up has continued despite widespread acknowledgement elsewhere of the Zionist state’s H-bomb stash.
Back in 1986, London’s Sunday Times published the front page story “Revealed: Israel’s Nuclear Secrets.” The article estimated that Israel had between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons.
It was based on information from the former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu. In retaliation, Vanunu was kidnapped from Britain by Israeli agents and sentenced to 18 years in prison after a secret trial.
The U.S. State Department — which claims to defend human rights — said nothing about the abduction of this courageous whistleblower, who spent 11 years in solitary confinement for telling the truth.
The media even ignored U.S. organizations like the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, which estimates that Israel has 90 nuclear weapons. Or the Federation of American Scientists, which quotes “U.S. Intelligence Community” estimates that the apartheid state occupying Palestine had between 75 and 130 nukes.
So it was surprising that the New York Times on Aug. 11 ran an essay by Peter Beinart discussing Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
Beinart is no radical. As editor of the Atlantic magazine he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More recently he’s become critical of U.S. foreign policy and was detained briefly in Israel.
It’s a sign of how much more isolated Israel and its U.S. backers have become that Beinart wrote the piece and the New York Times published it.
A much bigger question is why the military-industrial-complex has tolerated Israel’s nuclear arsenal that’s over a third the size of either the British or French inventory.
Nuclear bonding over colonial wars
Doesn’t the Pentagon demand a monopoly of violence? That was the theme of its 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance,” parts of which were leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post.
Written after the Soviet Union’s overthrow, it sought to prevent the rise of any other military power, even among its supposed capitalist allies.
U.S. capitalists wouldn’t let Germany — the strongest European economic power — start building nuclear weapons. The German working class, which includes millions of immigrants, would rise up to stop it.
British scientists played an important role in the Manhattan Project which built the atom bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The British mission was led by the Nobel Prize winning physicist James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed to this sharing of information with the understanding that Britain would get atom bombs too. The Pentagon double-crossed Britain, which had to develop its own nuclear program. It wasn’t until 1952 that Britain became the third nuclear power, after the United States and the Soviet Union.
Wall Street didn’t want France to have nukes, either. France detonated its first bomb in 1960 in southern Algeria, then a French colony.
The French nuclear program was carried out in collaboration with Israel, which played somewhat the same role that British scientists did in the U.S. Manhattan Project.
France was then the Zionist State’s closest ally. In its 1967 blitzkrieg invasion of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israeli pilots flew French Mirage jets, not U.S. Phantoms, which were then bombing Vietnam and Laos.
Israel joined the British and French colonial slave masters invading Egypt in 1956. They did so after Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been built in the 1860s by French colonialists with slave labor. Taking over the canal was one of great victories against colonialism.
The Zionist state supported France’s war of extermination against the Algerian people who were fighting for independence. At least a million Algerians were killed with 40,000 tortured to death.
One of the torturers was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s fascist National Front, now renamed the National Rally. This war criminal is just as anti-Jewish as he is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.
Targeting the Soviet Union
France’s explosion of its atomic bomb in the Sahara was a war crime against all Africans. Hundreds of Africans must have died from the fallout.
The French capitalists’ dirty war against Algeria was the political reason for Israel getting help to build the bomb. But France was defeated by the Algerian people. Afterwards French banksters had less use for the Zionist state.
The U.S. government wasn’t initially in favor of Israel making nukes. President John F. Kennedy sent inspectors to Israel’s Dimona reactor. But the Zionist regime was able to continue with its nuclear program.
It was President Richard Nixon who started the big cash pipeline to Israel. At least $140 billion has been spent to prop up apartheid rule over Palestine. Every cent of it was stolen from poor and working people.
Nixon did this even though he can be heard on tape repeatedly attacking Black and Jewish people. This included a conversation with the late Rev. Billy Graham, who also made bigoted remarks against Jews. The evangelist’s son Rev. Franklin Graham is a leading hate monger against Muslims.
Big Oil doesn’t allow Israel to have dozens of atom bombs so it can bomb Rockefeller’s oil wells in the Arab/Persian Gulf. Israel’s nukes were to be launched at the Soviet Union.
This is something that’s often overlooked in discussing the Zionist state. Israel’s nukes can be used against Iran and are a threat to many other countries.
The most sinister example is the Zionists helping its fellow apartheid regime in South Africa to develop nuclear weapons. This was revealed in the 1979 “Vela Incident,” which was the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the southern Indian Ocean.
At the time, South Africa was fighting a war with newly independent Angola and its Cuban allies. Sections of the South African apartheid military wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on Luanda, Angola’s capital.
For the Pentagon brass, the first phase of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a proxy war against the Warsaw Pact. The Pact was the response of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries to NATO.
By having Israel shoot down more than 80 Syrian planes using U.S. technology, the Pentagon was saying that they could do the same over East Germany.
Supreme cynicism
Israel’s nukes were viewed as a replacement for the U.S. Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey that were removed in 1963 by President Kennedy following the Cuban missile crisis. However, there are also 50 nuclear weapons currently stored in Turkey at the U.S. Air Force base in Incirlik.
The Pentagon’s green light for Israel’s nukes came as the Soviet Union was able to match the United Stated in developing multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. Several of these MIRV nuclear weapons are fitted on a single missile and can be aimed at different targets.
MIRV missiles greatly sped up the arm race. The Pentagon hoped it would be the knockout threat that would force the Soviet Union to surrender. They were astounded that the socialist state could make them as well.
To military planners in U.S. think tanks, Israel’s nukes could be used to launch a “limited” nuclear war against the Soviets. Such an attack would kill millions of people, including many Jewish Soviet citizens, and devastate the Soviet Union.
Yet it would be suicidal for the Soviets to respond with an all-out attack on Israel’s master, the United States. Instead the Soviet military would be forced to attack Israel.
It’s hard to equal this cynicism. Six million people were killed by Hitler during the Jewish and Roma holocaust. A few decades later more than six million Arab and Jewish people in occupied Palestine could be killed in a nuclear exchange.
This scenario isn’t far-fetched. The whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed Pentagon plans in 1961 to launch a nuclear first strike. It would kill 600 million people in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and other socialist countries.
This writer helped organize a 1969 demonstration in Milwaukee against the visit of then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir who grew up there. She denied that the Palestinian people even existed.
The protest was called by Youth Against War and Fascism at the newly opened Performing Arts Center. It’s now named after the late Zionist fundraiser Ben Marcus who refused to hire Black waitresses at his local Big Boy restaurant chain.
Communist leader and union organizer Al Stergar called upon Meir “to come home to Milwaukee and leave Arab people in peace.” Israel’s current prime minister was born in San Francisco. Stergar called Israel a deathtrap for Arab and Jewish people.
All of occupied Palestine is still a deathtrap. Israel’s nukes must be destroyed. Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!
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