In his passionate New Yorker series on the dangers of nuclear war,
Jonathan Schell wrote that "The command 'Never Forget' so often
heard in connection with the Nazis' genocidal attack on the Jews is
important, not only because it may help the world to prevent any
repetition, but because remembering is in itself an act that helps
to defeat the Nazis' attempt to send a whole people into
oblivion.
"Just because genocide, by trying to prevent the future generations
of people from being born, commits a crime against the future, it
lays a special obligation on the people of the future to deal with
the crime, even long after its perpetrators themselves are
dead."
Mr. Schell then went on to argue that a nuclear holocaust cannot
even provide this recourse to justice, because there may be no one
left to do the remembering. (Those articles eventually were
converted into the book The Fate of the Earth, a cornerstone for
anti-nuclear thought and action - Ed.)
We Jews tend to forget sometimes that there were two traumatic
holocausts perpetrated against segments of humanity during World
War II. One was the systematic murder of six million of our fellow
Jews by the Nazis. The other was the opening of the atomic age,
when the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
The command "Never Forget" should apply to both holocausts. And
Jews, who suffered so much from the Nazi-perpetrated holocaust,
should have more than the average empathy and sensitivity towards
the victims of the other holocaust. Thus, we are proud to print the
impassioned plea from the mayor of Hiroshima against future nuclear
dangers. (In 1982, there was no Internet and no Google. Today the
Hiroshima Peace Declarations, which have been published every year
since 1981 on August 6th, Hiroshima Day, are available on-line, at
www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/declaration/English/ history.html.
ed.)
Israelis, who consider themselves the guardians of the memory of
the victims of the Nazi holocaust and the receptacle of the future
preservation of Jewish civilization, still believe that they are
endangered today by threats to their very physical existence. There
is some basis to this fear since there are Arabs, and others, who
deny Israel's right to exist. However, this fear can produce a
perspective which distorts the nature and degree of the dangers
facing the world today.
Gen. (Res.) Shlomo Gazit, former head of intelligence in the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF), and currently president of Ben-Gurion
University (Beersheba), recently declared that "There is only one
state in the world which is faced with a military threat to its
existence as a state, threatening its very right to exist and
endangering the chances of survival of the residents of that state.
Sadly, this is the threat hanging over the State of Israel. Simple
and brutal, it is the only state among all the states of the world
which is faced with this threat." (Excerpted from a commencement
speech delivered to the graduating class from the Faculty of Law at
Tel Aviv University, 25/3/82).
With all due respect to Shlomo Gazit, who takes some very
reasonable and moderate positions concerning the Palestinian
question, Israel is not the only state whose existence is
threatened today. The reason for the growth of the anti-nuclear
movement is the perception people have throughout the world that in
the nuclear age, the existence of all states and peoples is
threatened.
One of the major purposes of this issue is to help raise the
consciousness of the peoples of Israel and of the other Middle
Eastern countries to this danger.
We have tended to immerse ourselves in our own local Arab-Israeli
conflict, which, when it comes to military blows, has been
expressed until now through conventional military means. However,
there is no guarantee that the partners to the conflict will
continue to abide by the "conventional" rules in the future.
On March 31, 1982, I sat through a long, draining day from 10 a.m.
to 11 p.m. at the Van Leer institute in Jerusalem, listening to a
seminar dedicated to the question: "Will There Be Another War?" And
I was in good company. The entire class of the National Security
College, Israel's future military elite, was also sitting in the
audience. The lecturers were the cream of Israel's academic,
military, and political minds (though, ominously, there were no
representatives of the Likud, or its supporters, on the panel) and
they described all of the possible future scenarios, from the
Israeli, the Arab, the American and the Soviet perspectives. Almost
all the lecturers ignored the nuclear dimensions of the
issue.
Until the Final Two
At 9:15 p.m., MK Mordechai (Motta) Gur (Labor) and former chiefof-
staff of the IDF said that in the event of another war, Israel
would win, but he didn't see what Israel could gain from such a
war. He then added that "another war would bring us closer to the
nuclear edge." Already, in 1973 Gur said that there were nuclear
rumors. There were rumors that the Soviet Union had transferred
nuclear material to Egypt. We almost activated our force against
the Russians, and the United States mobilized massive troops to
prepare for the possibility of a confrontation with the Soviet
Union. Gur also said that another war would create an atmosphere of
fear of a general deterioration in the situation towards a
superpower confrontation and the possibility of a regional or
superpower use of nuclear weapons. In Gur's view, this fear "would
be justified." (Clearly, in 1982, no one imagined that the Soviet
Union would collapse and the Cold War would come to an end.).
This would produce an atmosphere conducive to an imposed settlement
of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In his view, this would take the form
of a deeply frustrating settlement, but not a genuine peace. Our
only option, Gur said, is to aspire towards a just peace which will
realistically take into account the needs of both sides, to the
greatest degree possible.
At 10:30 p.m., while summing up the seminar, Prof. Gavriel Ben-Dor
(political science, University of Haifa) said that "in entering the
Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) stage, the Middle East arms race
had entered the last stage before it escalated into the nuclear
dimension." He added that if the Arabs became desperate over the
impasse in the peace process, they might feel that they had no
recourse but to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, and Israel
might then feel that it had no choice but to defend itself with the
threat of nuclear force.
As for Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's claim that Israel would be
able to maintain a denuclearized Middle East through preemptive
strikes against Arab actors nearing the realization of their
nuclear potential, his argument is undercut by the advance of
Pakistan's nuclear program, coupled with the fact (pointed out by
Prof. Kapur's article "Nuclear Proliferation in the Eighties," New
Outlook, May 1982) that Iraq would be able to rebuild its nuclear
facilities underground, so that they would become inaccessible to
Israeli air-power. (Ironically, it is Iran, and not Iraq, which
learned this lesson.)
The normal pressures of Israeli life and of the Arab-Israeli
confrontation have made the nuclear problem appear a secondary,
almost esoteric issue.
It isn't.
Many dedicated Israeli peace activists have said honestly that they
don't understand the problem. Some doves even advocate the idea
that the proclamation of the existence of an Israeli nuclear option
would enable Israel to evacuate the West Bank without endangering
its security. We hope that this issue, which reflects the first
serious attempt by an Israeli magazine to deal with the nuclear
problem, will help to educate Israelis, our Arab neighbors, and our
friends around the world, to the dangers inherent in the
nuclearization of the Middle East conflict. Some of our writers
advocate that Israel join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).We
support this call. Establishment spokesmen claim that Arab
unwillingness to recognize Israel's right to exist, which
constitutes a threat to Israel's very existence, prevents Israel
from signing the NPT. Official Israeli policy calls for the
establishment of a pact of all the states in the Middle East for
the denuclearization of the region. It appears that the Arab states
are not ready to sign such a pact until Israel evacuates all of the
territories occupied in 1967 and participates in a just resolution
of the Palestinian problem. We should add here that the lack of a
comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict clearly
increases the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and escalates the
dangers of nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. Thus, by
process of elimination, the only way left to denuclearize the
Middle East is to arrive at a just and comprehensive resolution of
the Israeli- Arab conflict. All other steps, such as the denial of
critical nuclear material to all of the states in the region and
support for an effective international safeguard system, should be
encouraged, but only a comprehensive peace agreement will provide
the background for a mutual Israeli and Arab agreement to
denuclearize the region.
And time is running out.
Postscript for 2010
Here we are, 28 years later, and time is still running out. And the
urgency of dealing with the potential nuclearization of the region
is greater than ever.
What happened during the past 28 years?
1) In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu revealed details about Israel's
nuclear program in the British press; he was kidnapped and
imprisoned for the next 18 years. I don't doubt the principled
sincerity of Vanunu's motivations; I believe he was unfairly
treated by the Israeli authorities and should today be allowed to
live his life wherever he chooses. However, his story only served
to reinforce the generally held assumption about Israel's nuclear
potential; it did not help develop a significant anti-nuclear
movement in the country. He did violate a security oath he had
signed. His treatment by the authorities served to deter other
potential whistle-blowers, and the fact that he converted to
Christianity, while a legitimate personal choice, did not
demonstrate a caring for the general Israeli collective.
2) Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fired 39 Skud missiles against
Israel during the Gulf War of 1991, raising fears that some of them
might have unconventional warheads attached to them. In my view,
that experience was the major factor in raising general Israeli
awareness about the potential dangers of unconventional
warfare.
3) From 1992 to 1995, the Middle East Arms Control and Regional
Security in the Middle East (ACRS) talks - an outgrowth of the 1991
Madrid Conference - were held. They failed, due to disagreements
between the Egyptian and the Israeli governments over which came
first - a comprehensive peace or a Middle East NWFZ (Nuclear
Weapons-Free Zone).
4) In recent years, Iran's nuclear program has been a major source
of anxiety in Israel. Some might wonder how Israelis, who clearly
have the most powerful army in the region, with its presumed
nuclear potential, can fear the Iranian program. The fact is that
this anxiety is genuine and felt by all sectors of society. While
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fanned the flames of this
fear for his own political reasons, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's expressions of Holocaust denial and his declarations
about the "end of the Zionist regime" have only served to reinforce
the perception that the Iranian nuclear program is an existential
threat to the State of Israel.
So, what can be done today?
1) Any attempt to call upon Israel to unilaterally denuclearize is
doomed to failure, given Israeli and Jewish history of
vulnerability. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's original
motivation for creating a nuclear program was to ensure that the
Jews in Israel would never again have to face the possibility of
another Holocaust. Thus the only way to promote a nuclearfree
Middle East is to do so in the context of the quest for a
comprehensive Middle East peace between Israel and all of its
neighbors.
2) The major challenge facing Israel and the international
community today is the Iranian nuclear program. If Iran crosses the
nuclear weapons threshold, there is well-founded concern that it
will trigger a regional nuclear arms race, and other countries will
want to join in, seriously destabilizing the entire region.
3) Assuming that the lesson of the 1981 bombing of the Osiraq
reactor in Iraq was learned in Tehran, and there is no military
solution to its nuclear program, those of us who want to prevent a
dangerous and destabilizing military attack against Iran must
convincingly explain why there really is no effective military
solution.
4) A paper entitled "The Length and Conditions for Ending a Future
War between Iran and Israel" was recently published by Dr. Moshe
Vered of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan
University (so far only available in Hebrew). The clear conclusion
of the study is the catastrophic consequences of such a war for
Iran and Israel. During the height of the nuclear tensions between
the superpowers during the Cold War, scenarios were created for the
possible consequences of nuclear strikes against New York and
Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, with casualty and damage
predictions, which served as a horrific and very graphic warning
about the dangers of the use of nuclear weapons. Anti-nuclear
activists could create similar scenarios for nuclear strikes
against Tehran and Tel Aviv, as part of a consciousness-raising
campaign against the dangers of nuclear warfare.
5) Track II talks between Israelis and Iranians facilitated by
various international actors could make a significant contribution
to easing the tension between the two countries, and may be able to
produce formulas that could help pave the way towards a "nuclear
understanding" between the two countries.
6) While the original ACRS talks have failed, a new formula can
hopefully be found - given U.S. President Barack Obama's call for a
nuclear-free world and the May 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in New York - for the resumption of
talks among all the regional parties, together with international
facilitators, perhaps in the context of the Arab Peace Initiative
of 2002.
7) While Israel's official position is that it will support a
Middle Eastern Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone as part of a comprehensive
peace treaty, the average Israeli is simply not aware of that. A
campaign should be carried out to emphasize the fact of that
policy.