In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, writes that equating Israel's nuclear capability with Iran's is an attempt to divert attention from the real threat that a nuclear Iran represents to the world.
While western attention remains substantially focused on Iran’s nuclear program as the major threat to instability in the Middle East, several Arab states are trying to divert attention to Israel and its undeclared nuclear weapons. They're using the current United Nations conference on nuclear non-proliferation as their forum.
Some media, including CBC Radio’s The Current, have latched onto this story. In a segment titled “Israel’s Nukes” (May 11), substitute host Gillian Findlay interviewed three experts: Wael Al-Assad, the Arab League’s director of disarmament; Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar Ilan University, and Peter Galbraith, senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in the United States.
When Findlay mentioned to the first guest, Al-Assad, that Israel has said it favours a nuclear-free Middle East provided there’s first regional peace, he replied that this is only “an invitation to proliferation,” that the Arab states all signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) even though the Mideast conflict has not been resolved, and that a nuclear-free Middle East (even in the absence of full peace) would actually “help Israel be part of the region.”
Steinberg countered Al-Assad’s claims, explaining that despite Arab League rhetoric, it’s Iran’s nuclear program, not Israel’s, that has triggered alarm in the region about proliferation. Steinberg also explained that Israel’s long-standing policy of ambiguity (neither confirming nor denying that it possesses nuclear weapons) is “the least bad option” for a tiny country whose very survival is threatened. Israel’s undeclared nuclear deterrence has been designed to deal precisely with this “vulnerability” – something western countries like Canada don’t have to contend with.
As to the Arabs having signed the NPT, Steinberg reminded Findlay that several of them (Syria, Lybia, Iraq) simply violated its terms (as non-Arab Iran is currently doing). On the other hand, Israel has violated none of its international obligations and, unlike Pakitsan and India which have also not signed the NPT, has not tested a device.
Steinberg challenged Findlay’s assertion that a “double standard” has been applied by pressuring Iran and not Israel on the nuclear issue. Talk of a “double standard,” he said, is just a diversion, especially for media consumption, from the real problem – the menace Iran’s nuclear program presents to the world.
Nonetheless, Findlay’s final guest, Peter Galbraith, downplayed Iran’s threat to the point of appearing an apologist for the regime. Even though Galbraith acknowledged that Israel’s nuclear program began as a “meaningful deterrent,” he believes that the significant Arab threat has now “largely disappeared.” In response to Findlay’s question about the regional effect Israel’s “opening up” on the nuclear issue might have, Galbraith said it would have “some impact” on Iran’s program. And he immediately added: “But in the end, I think you also need to find some accommodation with Iran in which Iran has what it’s entitled to under the NPT [which allows civilian nuclear power]… But also that there’s some recognition of Iran’s role as a pre-eminent power in the region. I think what the Iranians are really after is respect.”
To say that this view would strike nearly all Israelis, and a great many others, as naïve is to put it mildly.
In his May 11 Toronto Star column, "York Mideast debate a debacle," Martin Regg Cohn cut to the heart of a report prepared for York University following the intense controversy over its conference last year, "Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and paths to Peace."
This conference (a mix of academics and pro-Palestinian activists) had more to do with "contributing to the conflict" than with looking for solutions. While Israel and the PA are talking about a two-state solution, Canadian academics were promoting a one-state (bi-national) "solution" that would mean Israel's disappearance.
Regg Cohn lucidly contextualized the matter: "Convoking such a conference delegitimizes the State of Israel, however much you try to sugar-coat it. Why not a conference proposing to dissolve Croatia and Bosnia into a reunited Yugoslavia? Or reconstituting the Soviet Union?
"If York academics are keen to rewrite history and unravel the UN's 1947 vote to partition British Mandate Palestine, why not undo the partition of British India? After all, if you're opposed to a Zionist Israel, why not oppose the homeland for Muslims in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan?"
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