Morderchai Vanunu demands to apply a recently passed law and revoke his Israeli citizenship. “I have no interest in Israeli citienship, I don’t want to go on living here.”
Nuclear Threat
Australian intelligence agencies fear that Israel may launch military strikes against Iran and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities could draw the US and Australia into a potential nuclear war in the Middle East.
Israel is the only Middle East power believed to possess nuclear weapons, but it has never officially confirmed or denied this, opting instead for a policy of ambiguity.
“In the long term, the more Israel appears to reject peace and to be the one that opposes a two-state solution, the more it will be perceived as a regional bully that possesses nuclear weapons. So the world will be a lot less forgiving on the nuclear issue. The situation of ambiguity, in which you don’t have real legitimacy, is not a good place to be.”
Avner Cohen: “International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the policies that support it, such as settlement construction, house demolitions, and restrictions on the movement of Palestinians.” Cohen fears Israel’s insistence on ambiguity will leave Israel increasingly vulnerable to the charge that it is a nuclear-armed pariah state.
IOA Editor: It already is.
Netanyahu’s decision to cancel his meeting with Amano raised eyebrows on Monday, particularly given the premier’s fixation on Iran’s nuclear program. The prime minister and his aides have also been working feverishly to minimize the effects of last May’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference, which adopted a resolution calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
Two of the US closest allies in the ME, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of signing large arms deals with the US in a move designed to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, according to defence analysts. [T]he joint strengthening of the Saudi Arabian and Israeli militaries was seen as a key regional interest for the US.
According to the reports, the talks conducted in Saudi Arabia with the head of Israel’s espionage agency dealt with Iran and its nuclear program. The account follows a series of recent reports on increasing secret cooperation between Israel and the Saudis, including defense coordination on matters related to possible military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
According to the investigation … the goods could have been used to manufacture nuclear weapons and missile programs… It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s … Israeli companies and individuals have been involved in all sorts of technological espionage, steeling US secrets, technology and equipment.
The secrecy surrounding the attack on the nuclear plant in eastern Syria in September 2007 was justified only for the period immediately after the operation, according to the CIA head at the time, Gen. Michael Hayden. That secrecy had been meant to save President Bashar Assad from embarrassment that could have provoked him to retaliate.
Berlusconi: “Iran is not guaranteeing a peaceful production of nuclear power [so] the members of the G-8 are worried and believe absolutely that Israel will probably react preemptively.”
Both [South Africa and Israel] certainly needed friends. Settler colonies – which both these were, Israel no less than South Africa – invariably do. Usually their biggest friends are the colonial powers that planted them in the first place, on whom they depend… especially in places overwhelmingly populated by ‘others’, and even more especially when those ‘others’ have been crudely dispossessed. Left to their own resources, such colonies are bound to be terribly vulnerable, with most historical examples… being destroyed as a result.
Amnesty International has accused the Israeli authorities of subjecting jailed nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by holding him in solitary confinement.
Two renowned South African journalists have revealed that Eschel Rhoodie, the apartheid government’s information minister who played a central role in establishing military ties to Israel, privately described in 1979 how he had transported “the trigger” as hand luggage on a flight from Tel Aviv. But they say they were unable to publish the account at the time because of censorship and the former minister’s concerns for his safety.
IOA Editor: This latest story, following an earlier Guardian report, was filed from Washington but received no mainstream media attention in the US. None. The Leading Newspaper didn’t find it “Fit to Print,” and neither did the others.
A recently declassified federal report bolsters a long-simmering Cold War theory that uranium was illegally shipped from an Armstrong County plant in 1965 to Israel to support its nuclear arms efforts… The FBI and CIA blocked efforts to release the GAO report in 1978, the report states. Even today, portions were blacked out for security reasons.
Israelis are engaged in a Kafkaesque conversation in which the military attack on the civilian ships is characterised as a legitimate “act of self-defence”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it, and the killing of nine aid activists is transformed into an attempted “lynching of our soldiers” by terrorists.
The revelations in my book, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Alliance with Apartheid South Africa,” have angered Israelis across the political spectrum… President Shimon Peres has said “there exists no basis in reality for the claims” put forward in my book. Beilin… has decided to stand by his former boss… as he told The New York Times: “The president’s denial puts an end to the subject.” It does not.
The submarines of Flotilla 7… have visited the Gulf before. But the decision has now been taken to ensure a permanent presence of at least one of the vessels. The flotilla’s commander, identified only as “Colonel O”, told an Israeli newspaper: “We are an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders.” Each of the submarines has a crew of 35 to 50, commanded by a colonel capable of launching a nuclear cruise missile.
Israel faces unprecedented pressure to abandon its official policy of “ambiguity” on its possession of nuclear weapons as the international community meets at the UN in New York this week to consider banning such arsenals from the Middle East. Israel’s equivocal stance on its atomic status was shattered by reports that it offered to sell nuclear-armed Jericho missiles to S. Africa’s apartheid regime in 1975.
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.
