A minor Israeli goodwill gesture or a new small step in a big glitch?

...Unlike any country, Israel is required to fight – if at all – according to asymmetrical pacifist rules. Israel may not resort to tactics tolerated or overlooked in the case of other states. All hell breaks loose if “collateral damage” is incurred in any Israeli action, although Israel faces enemies given to hiding behind their women’s skirts and tots’ T-shirts. Schools, hospitals and the like are used as rocket launching pads against Israeli civilians.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
08 November '13..
Posted before Shabbat

History-altering events don’t always burst dramatically onto our scene. Sometimes they sneak in surreptitiously and we barely detect that something significant has been kick-started.

Thus most of us hardly noticed the renewed buzz about convening a conference on creating a Middle East Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (MENWFZ). Yet again – the bloodshed of the misnamed Arab Spring notwithstanding – Arab regimes, with Egypt at the lead, are pushing hard for an international focus on Israel’s purported nuclear power.

This was amplified by reports that that representatives of several Arab states met with Israeli officials last month in Glion, Switzerland, to set the groundwork for a conference on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Official Israel hadn’t confirmed that the Glion get-together indeed took place but, more notably, it hasn’t denied it either. If true, this overlooked event is a milestone one – the first time that Israeli and Arab delegates have consented to discuss WMDs. Is this a positive development?


It might be just a minor Israeli goodwill gesture or a new small step in a big glitch – the first Israeli retreat from decades of refusal to accede to Arab demands that the Jewish State, rather than its would-be annihilators, be denied nonconventional munitions.

In any case, the story is that American, Russian and British representatives oversaw a meeting between top Israeli diplomats and a number of Arab ambassadors to Switzerland, as well as representatives of Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, far from glorious Glion, the Syrian slaughter continues and Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions with unabated ardor (never mind Tehran’s self-serving softer PR style). So it’s almost natural that Israel be singled out as the villain of the piece. MENWFZ, after all, is a UN brainchild.

Australian Blindsides Israel on Nukes

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
15 December '10

Reports about the alleged success of the Stuxnet virus setting back the Iranian nuclear program by two years have heartened friends of Israel who have had little reason to be encouraged by international diplomatic efforts to remove this serious threat to world peace. Despite votes for sanctions in the United Nations, there is not much hope that more serious measures that might actually hurt the Islamist regime will ever be passed.

Further evidence of the problems Israel has had in making even Western democracies understand the nature of the problem was provided by Australia this week when its foreign minister spoke out in favor of subjecting Israel’s nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Kevin Rudd told the Australian newspaper in an interview that the Jewish state, which is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that the IAEA monitors, should get the same sort of scrutiny that Iran, which has signed the treaty, receives. The statement, made during the course of a tour of the region by Rudd, shocked the Israelis, who were not consulted about this by the Australian government in advance of the foreign minister’s visit.

The problem with Rudd’s shot fired across Israel’s bow is not so much the request itself but the fact that it represents a tacit acceptance of the main talking point of apologists for Iran’s nuclear ambitions: the positing of a moral equivalence between Israel’s nuclear deterrent and Iran’s desire for the ultimate weapon. The difference between the two is clear. Iran’s nukes would pose a threat both to the Jewish state, whose existence the Islamist regime has said it wishes to extinguish, and to neighboring Arab states that also have good reason to fear Tehran.

(Read full "Australian Blindsides Israel on Nukes")

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We Do Not Live in Normal Times: Britain's Best and Brightest Stage a Pogrom

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
25 May '10

Although two stories—the first regarding the U.S. policy handling of Turkey and Brazil’s relationship with Iran; the second, this one, on anti-Israel hysteria in the United Kingdom—are totally different, they reflect the two parts of our current crisis.

These are the ideological and policy derailment of Western governments, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the collapse of the fail-safe systems for key public institutions, especially academia and media. To understand the crisis in both sectors—the greatest perhaps since the end of World War Two—these two halves of the puzzle must be assembled.

Regarding anti-Israel hysteria, it can only be called—in spirit and worldview—Medieval in the worst sense of that world. Two British newspapers, the Guardian and Independent, are accusing Israel—on the basis of a new book—of offering to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa.

When you get through all the passionate hatred, distortion, and incited hysteria what is the basis for this accusation? There is a South African document saying that the government would like to buy missiles from Israel. There is a discussion between the South African Defense Minister P.W. Botha and Israel’s then Defense Minister Shimon Peres on the topic. Peres says that Israel has large, medium, and small warheads.

That’s it. There’s no mention of nuclear weapons. No evidence that Israel ever even sold missiles to South Africa. No evidence even that the South African government ever began negotiations to buy missiles.

(Read full article)

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Liberal Left UK newspapers launch new “apartheid” agenda against Israeli nuclear status

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
24 May '10

When the two leading voices in Britain’s liberal-left newspaper media, the Guardian and the Independent, strike out on the same subject at the same time, you are usually being given a signal that something is afoot. The BBC, in thrall to the thinking and worldview of both papers, will soon follow suit and before you know it a new item has been placed at the top of the mainstream political agenda.

With an editorial on the subject today in the Guardian and an op-ed today by leading commentator Donald Macintyre in the Independent, that item is Israel’s nuclear programme. The quest to disarm Israel has been given a new lease of life by a new book from Sasha Polakow-Suransky entitled “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa”.

The Guardian claimed an exclusive in revealing key details from the book, principally Israel’s alleged willingness to give South Africa nuclear weapons, in a report yesterday which has been comprehensively demolished in a piece on Cif Watch (which readers can see by clicking here) and in a piece by Jonathan Hoffman in the Jewish Chronicle (which readers can see by clicking here).

So what’s this all about? Well talk about killing two birds with one stone: you get to lash out at Israeli “hypocrisy” for having nuclear weapons of its own while simultaneously calling for Iran not to be allowed to acquire them, and you get another opportunity to besmirch the Jewish state’s reputation via a linkage with apartheid South Africa. They died and went to heaven! Except it’s all bunkum. Here’s why:

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