Showing posts with label nuclear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuclear. Show all posts

Friday, May 4, 2012

Why Can't We Live Together


I have not written about Middle East affairs for several months.  I have been tending to the needs of my brother Munther who has since succumbed to the cancer that invaded his body.  His death certificate came in today and the place of birth that was inscribed therein stated “Israel.”  I was offended as I am sure my brother would also have been.  Even in death, the Palestinian identity is being eliminated. I'm having the death certificate changed.

When asked by the Funeral Director where my brother was born, I informed her that Munther, known as Mike, was born in Jerusalem.  That information was translated to being Israel.  Jerusalem is not part of Israel under international law and is subject to final status negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis.  Negotiations have been unfruitful and the circumstances indicates that one day soon, all of the land now known as Israel and Palestinian Territories will be one state encompassing all Palestinians and Israelis.   Perception however has been painted in public opinion that Jerusalem is Israeli.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  Palestinians have not and will not give up its claim to Jerusalem. 

Israelis are doing everything they can to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem by not only excluding Palestinians from returning to the place of their birth but also by making it difficult for Palestinian residence in ethe Holy City to remain.   This brings me back to my brother Mike and his perceptive insight on this matter.

My brother Mike did not discuss politics much.  In fact he had a convoluted logic and unreasonable thinking when it came to the Middle East.  Mike was a jokester and when he offered a solution to the Middle East conflict which was unreasonable and contained convoluted logic, it at first made me laugh. However, when I thought about it while preparing his eulogy, I realized his point.  First let me tell explain his solution.

He stated, several months before his passing, that an Arab man and woman and a Jewish man and woman should be selected and placed on an island.  Then he said, America should “nuke” the entire Middle East.  After the nuclear dust settles, he stated, “ Take the Arab man and Jewish woman and have them mate; likewise for the Jewish man and the Arab woman. And then start all over!”

Unreasonable?  Yes.   Convoluted logic? Yes.  But if you really think about it, I think my brother Mike was trying to tell us that we should all just live together.

            By the year 2016, it is predicated that Palestinians will outnumber Israelis in Israel and the Palestinian territories, i.e. West Bank and Gaza.  Israel cannot continue to govern as a minority entity for regardless of the Israeli position that the Palestinian Authority governs Areas  A & B in the West Bank and Hamas governs Gaza, the fact is Israel controls all the territory west of the Jordan River.   The apartheid practices of Israel will catch up with reality.  And then we will be faced with the reality that my brother Mike was trying to convey: Why can’t we all live together.  

(© Copyright 2012, Fadi Zanayed.  Publication or distribution of this material is allowed provided its content is not altered and the source and its author are cited.) 


Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Pressure Upon Israel Could Resolve Iranian Nuclear Issue



             The crisis over the Iranian nuclear aspirations is really quite simple to resolve if there is political will to resolve it. The issue is not the threat of whether Iran will use a nuclear bomb against Israel but rather whether Israel will continue its hegemony over the Middle East, especially over the Palestinians.   Additionally, the hypocrisy that the West adopts visa via Israel and every other Middle Eastern country is overwhelming to the people of the region.  Putting a little pressure upon Apartheid Israel can solve many of the Middle East problems.

           
The belief that Iran will use a nuclear weapon against Israel as an offensive strategy is foolish.  It is inconceivable that any country will use a nuclear bomb against another in an offensive manner. President Harry S. Truman used the nuclear bomb against Japan because he perceived that an invasion of Japan will result in an excessive amount of US casualties. Additionally, President Truman used the atomic bomb knowing full well that there would be no retaliation as no other country had the capability to retaliate with nuclear power. This is not the case today.

            It is highly unlikely that Iran would strike Israel for several reasons.  First, Iran would be committing suicide as Israel has an enormous nuclear capability to strike Iran back with much more devastation. Thus it would be suicidal for Iran to strike the first blow.  Second, the proximity of millions of Muslims around Israel, including Iran, would cause such devastation from the atomic burst that Iran will not benefit strategically within the Muslim world.  Third, the proximity of Jerusalem, a holy site for Muslims, to any potential target within Israel makes striking Israel with nuclear weapons theologically impractical. 

            The hyperbole rhetoric emitting from Apartheid Israeli leaders against Iran is aimed to deflect news coverage about its apartheid practices against the Palestinians.  To seek the sympathies of the West, Apartheid Israel falsely portrays itself as a goldfish in a sea of piranhas. The real fact is that Apartheid Israel is the great white shark in a small pound of fat cat fishes.   As the only nuclear power in the Middle East, Israel continues its hegemony over the Middle East with unchecked arrogance.  In 1981 and 2007, Apartheid Israel attacked Iraq and Syria, respectively, in an unprovoked attempt to prevent them from developing nuclear capabilities.  Additionally, while the US and the West demand inspections of North Korea and Iran’s nuclear facilities, nothing is said about Israel’s nuclear power plants which, according to exports, have produced hundreds of nuclear weapon warheads.

            Apartheid Israel would like the West and Russia and China, as they are UN Security Council permanent members, to believe that Iran will use nuclear weapon to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”  In fact, Iranian President Ahmadinejad never said this statement and this translation is completely wrong.  But Israel knows that perception is reality and putting this perception into minds makes it the “perceived truth”—but this is not always the “truth”.

            President Ahmadinejad, during the speech in which he is accused of wanting to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth,” used the words words “rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods” which mean “regime occupying Jerusalem.”[1] Ahmadinejad was advocating a regime change in Israel.  But Apartheid Israel does not want the world to know this and the American press does not want to investigate Israel in fear of retaliation from the powerful Israeli lobby.  To be fair, this wrong interpretation came not from Israel but from Iran itself.  However, when Iran tried to correct the wrong terminology, the quote spiraled out of control.  Of course, Apartheid Israel made this wrongly translated term the center of its propaganda campaign to deflect coverage of its apartheid practices.

            The West’s domination over the Middle East through its proxy Apartheid Israel and the support of Arab dictators and kings who repress the people’s human spirit to be free and democratic continues to make the region unstable.  Further, the discrepancy in policy towards Arab countries and Apartheid Israel leads many in the region to wonder how America and the West could be so hypocritical.  Apartheid Israel can occupy Palestine for over 40 years and no military force is sent to remove the occupier.  Yet, Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait could not be tolerated for one day as the US and Britain rallied the world around Operation Desert Storm in 1990. Apartheid Israel has imprisoned over 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza and bombed the population relentlessly in the 2008-2009 onslaught without a whisper from the US and the West.  Yet, the world comes to the aid of the Libyans during their Arab Spring revolution to oust Muammar Gaddafi.  The 1.5 billion Muslims cannot understand why they are treated different than the 15 million Jews.

            What further perplexes many Arabs is that Israel is a nuclear power that has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). While Pakistan and India have also not signed the Treaty, they have both publicly stated that they do have nuclear warheads.  Israel, on the other hand, has been purposely deceptive as to its nuclear capability.

India has pledged a no first use policy unless it is attacked by an adversary using nuclear weapons.  Additionally, India has expressed its commitment to non-proliferation but stated that it considers the “NPT as a flawed treaty and it did not recognise [sic] the need for universal, non-discriminatory verification and treatment."[2]  India has cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by entering into agreements to inspect its facilities.

Israel will not cooperate with the IAEA. When called upon to open its nuclear facilities in September, 2009, Israel’s chief delegate to the IAEA conference responded “Israel will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution."[3]  Why haven’t Western countries called upon the UN to impose sanctions against Israel for its refusal to have its nuclear facilities inspected?  Why is this double standard for Israel tolerated?

Striking a balance between Iran and Israel can be one way to make Iran more cooperative and to abandon any military component with its nuclear ambitions. Having Israel submit to inspections of its nuclear capabilities and to make it pledge a no first use policy similar to India will give assurance to Iran and all Middle East countries that the West is willing to deal fairly with the people of the region. Additionally, the West needs to exert pressure on Israel to resolve Palestinian statehood aspirations by ending decades of occupation. Failing diplomatic pressure, sanctions upon Israel should be on the table.

Fair dealing in the Middle East is the only thing Arabs want to see. They do not want the West to adopt a pro-Arab policy.  Arabs want a fair policy in the Middle East that treats every country and every religion equally and with dignity.  If this was the policy, the issue with the Iranian nuclear ambitions would not be an issue.  The lack of fairness in Western Middle East policy, however, is driving the region into another major war.  Pressuring Israel to act the way the West demands Iran to act would solve the Middle East problems.

            The question is whether there  is a political will to pressure Israel?


2/25/2012 update:  I just read this article by Allan Hart, author, and found this statement quite interesting to this article: 


"From recently de-classified documents we now know that in a memorandum dated 19 July 1969, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser, warned President Nixon that the Israelis “are probably more likely than any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons.” And as I mentioned in my post of 30 January with the headline Is Israel on the road to “self-destruction”?, Golda Meir said in an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme when she was prime minster that in a doomsday situation Israel “would be prepared to take the region and the world down with it.”"


(© Copyright, Fadi Zanayed.  Publication or distribution of this material is allowed provided its content is not altered and the source and its author are cited.)

[1][1] ‘Wiped Off The Face of the Earth’ The Rumor of the Century, Arash Norouzi, May 26, 2007 http://antiwar.com/orig/norouzi.php?articleid=11025
[2] India seeks Japan's support, calls NPT 'flawed' By IANS, Sat, Mar 24, 2007
[3] Israel pressured on nuclear sites, Aljazeera, September 18, 2009, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/09/2009918173136830771.html