Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons by Chris McGreal (The Guardian - 5/24/10)

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.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel's attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a "responsible" power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.

A spokeswoman for Peres today said the report was baseless and there were "never any negotiations" between the two countries. She did not comment on the authenticity of the documents.

South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states.

The documents show both sides met on 31 March 1975. Polakow-Suransky writes in his book published in the US this week, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's secret alliance with apartheid South Africa. At the talks Israeli officials "formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal".

Among those attending the meeting was the South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong. He immediately drew up a memo in which he laid out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Jericho missiles but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.

The memo, marked "top secret" and dated the same day as the meeting with the Israelis, has previously been revealed but its context was not fully understood because it was not known to be directly linked to the Israeli offer on the same day and that it was the basis for a direct request to Israel. In it, Armstrong writes: "In considering the merits of a weapon system such as the one being offered, certain assumptions have been made: a) That the missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA (Republic of South Africa) or acquired elsewhere."

But South Africa was years from being able to build atomic weapons. A little more than two months later, on 4 June, Peres and Botha met in Zurich. By then the Jericho project had the codename Chalet.

The top secret minutes of the meeting record that: "Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available." The document then records: "Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes. Minister Botha expressed his appreciation and said that he would ask for advice." The "three sizes" are believed to refer to the conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.

The use of a euphemism, the "correct payload", reflects Israeli sensitivity over the nuclear issue and would not have been used had it been referring to conventional weapons. It can also only have meant nuclear warheads as Armstrong's memorandum makes clear South Africa was interested in the Jericho missiles solely as a means of delivering nuclear weapons.

In addition, the only payload the South Africans would have needed to obtain from Israel was nuclear. The South Africans were capable of putting together other warheads.

Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost. In addition, any deal would have to have had final approval by Israel's prime minister and it is uncertain it would have been forthcoming.

South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance. But the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.

The documents confirm accounts by a former South African naval commander, Dieter Gerhardt – jailed in 1983 for spying for the Soviet Union. After his release with the collapse of apartheid, Gerhardt said there was an agreement between Israel and South Africa called Chalet which involved an offer by the Jewish state to arm eight Jericho missiles with "special warheads". Gerhardt said these were atomic bombs. But until now there has been no documentary evidence of the offer.

Some weeks before Peres made his offer of nuclear warheads to Botha, the two defence ministers signed a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment. It was so secret that it included a denial of its own existence: "It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement... shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party".

The agreement also said that neither party could unilaterally renounce it.

The existence of Israel's nuclear weapons programme was revealed by Mordechai Vanunu to the Sunday Times in 1986. He provided photographs taken inside the Dimona nuclear site and gave detailed descriptions of the processes involved in producing part of the nuclear material but provided no written documentation.

Documents seized by Iranian students from the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution revealed the Shah expressed an interest to Israel in developing nuclear arms. But the South African documents offer confirmation Israel was in a position to arm Jericho missiles with nuclear warheads.

Israel pressured the present South African government not to declassify documents obtained by Polakow-Suransky. "The Israeli defence ministry tried to block my access to the Secment agreement on the grounds it was sensitive material, especially the signature and the date," he said. "The South Africans didn't seem to care; they blacked out a few lines and handed it over to me. The ANC government is not so worried about protecting the dirty laundry of the apartheid regime's old allies."

Is it time for the west to engage with Hamas and Hezbollah? by Ian Black (The Guardian - 5/25/10)

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite TV network, rarely shies away from controversy, so it was not surprising that one of the most interesting sessions at its annual forum in Doha this week was entitled: Engaging Resistance: Choice or Necessity?

Anyone who follows the Middle East knows that Resistance, with a capital R in English and the definite article in Arabic (al-Muqawama), is shorthand for two movements that operate at the heart of the region's toughest conflicts: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

To their detractors ‑ first and foremost Israel ‑ these are unreconstructed terrorist organisations. The US, UK and the EU boycott them, though Norway and Switzerland do not. Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, met the Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, this month.

Both enjoy popular legitimacy: Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections and Hezbollah has 14 seats in the Lebanese parliament, as well as an arsenal of thousands of rockets. Iran and Syria support them for reasons of principle and self-interest.

So al-Jazeera did a service by bringing their representatives together with two respected American experts, Rob Malley of the International Crisis Group and Mark Perry, an independent writer with excellent sources in the US military.

Malley argued that both movements needed to clarify their intentions about the final outcome of the conflict with Israel: did Hamas accept a two-state solution? It has signalled de facto acceptance of Israel in its 1967 borders but flatly refuses to recognize it formally; it refuses to abandon violence but is capable of maintaining ceasefires and has offered a long-term hudna, or truce. It is also vague about its charter, which contains unambiguously antisemitic passages.

Osama Hamdan, in charge of Hamas's foreign relations, responded by urging the US to stop treating Israel as a strategic asset, stop relying on "agents" (Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority) and to get over its aversion to dealing with Islamists. Ibrahim Moussawi of Hezbollah said given the choice between resistance and compromise, resistance was the obvious option. "When we face aggression," he said, "we have to defend ourselves."

Both proudly listed the achievements of their "asymmetric" struggle against Israel. Hezbollah is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its greatest victory ‑ Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. Other landmarks include Ariel Sharon's unilateral "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the 2006 Lebanon war and last year's Cast Lead offensive, with all their human and material losses to a technologically superior enemy.

Both are implacably opposed to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which first under Yasser Arafat and then Mahmoud Abbas abandoned armed struggle for negotiations, resistance for diplomacy. Negotiations have been going nowhere, slowly and sporadically, for 17 years while Israeli settlements in the West Bank have more than doubled.

Prospects for the US-brokered "proximity talks" between Israelis and Palestinians range from slim to hopeless. But, as Malley pointed out, US and western support for the PA, combined with the siege of Hamas-controlled Gaza, means that any opening to Hamas would infuriate Abbas and Israel. Hamdan hit back by accusing the Americans of seeking to block any hopes ‑ admittedly slender ‑ of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

Still, not everything is set in stone. There was a sign of movement on the Lebanese front last year when the British government recognised what it called the political wing of Hezbollah. Obama's terrorism adviser, Jim Brennan, talked recently of strengthening "moderate elements" in the movement.

In European countries there are regular calls for dialogue with Hamas and warnings that it cannot be excluded from any peace process. This is no fringe position: advocates in the UK include establishment figures as weighty as lords Patten and Ashdown and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former ambassador to the UN.

Al-Jazeera's framing of the "engagement" question this week implied that talking to the Resistance was a necessity. Perry, his finger on the pulse of debates inside the US military and the Obama administration, predicted that Mashal and Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah would one day find a US envoy knocking on their doors. But for that to happen the Palestinians and Lebanese will need to answer the questions their representatives ducked in Doha. Simply affirming ‑ and exercising ‑ their right of resistance will not be enough.

Monday, May 17, 2010

US funds Israel's 'apartheid' road networks in Israel by Jonathan Cook (The National - 5/14/10)

The construction of sections of a controversial segregated road network in the West Bank planned by Israel for Palestinians – leaving the main roads for exclusive use by settlers – is being financed by a US government aid agency, a map prepared by Palestinian researchers has revealed.

USAid, which funds development projects in Palestinian areas, is reported to have helped to build 114km of Israeli-proposed roads, despite a pledge from Washington six years ago that it would not assist in implementing what has been widely described by human rights groups and the Israeli media as Israel’s “apartheid road” plan.

To date the agency has paid for the construction of nearly a quarter of the segregated road network put forward by Israel in 2004, said the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ).

The roads are designed to provide alternative routes to connect Palestinian communities, often by upgrading circuitious dirt tracks or by building tunnels under existing routes.

Meanwhile, according to human rights groups, Israel has reserved an increasing number of main roads in the West Bank for Israelis so that Jewish settlers can drive more easily and quickly into Israel, making their illegal communities more attractive places to live.

The US agency’s involvement in building a segregated West Bank road infrastructure would run counter to Washington’s oft-stated goal, including as it launched “proximity talks” last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity.

“The displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank’s main roads improves the appeal of the settlements by better integrating them into Israel,” said Suheil Khalilieh, the head of settlement monitoring at ARIJ. “Conversely, creating an inferior, alternative network of local roads makes travel between the main regions of the West Bank difficult and time-consuming for Palestinians.”

Israel proposed the creation of two separate road systems in 2004, after many of the West Bank’s main roads had been sealed off to Palestinians following the outbreak of the second intifada.

Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister, argued that segregated infrastructure would create “contiguity of transportation” for Palestinians and help to alleviate economic hardship resulting from hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that restrict Palestinian movement.

The international community was asked to finance 500km of roads for the Palestinians, later termed “fabric of life” roads, including upgrading agricultural tracks and constructing many underpasses and bridges, at a cost of US$200 million (Dh730m).

The Palestinian Authority, however, objected, saying the plan would further entrench the illegal settlements in the West Bank and justify confiscating yet more Palestinian land for the new roads.

That position was backed by international donors, including the US, which declared it would not finance any road projects against the PA’s will.

Despite the US promise, however, a map of the West Bank recently published by ARIJ shows that 23 per cent of the “alternative” road network Israel proposed has been built with USAid money.

Many of these roads are located in so-called Areas B and C, more than 80 per cent of the West Bank that was assigned to Israeli security control by the Oslo accords. Israel oversees all road projects in these areas.

Mr Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road infrastructure wanted by Israel.

“What happens is that USAid presents a package deal of donations for infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads it does not want.”

He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said, following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

After PA officials were presented with ARIJ’s map, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, issued a statement last weekend denying that the PA had contributed to the Israeli-proposed road network.

However, in a sign that such reassurances were unlikely to dampen concerns, he reconvened the inter-ministerial committee to conduct field vists to check on road projects that had been carried out or were in progress.

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman and a former planning minister, said the PA was taking the issue “very seriously” and was doing everything possible to resist the emergence of an “apartheid system” in the West Bank.

He added that, if roads were being built that served the settlers’ interests, “that is not supposed to happen”.

According to USAid’s figures, it has financed 235km of roads in the West Bank in the past decade, and is preparing to add another 120km by the end of this year.

Critics add that in some cases the upgrading by USAid of minor roads, even those not included in the Israeli plan, has worked to the same end of keeping Palestinians off the West Bank’s main highways.

USAid officials were unavailable for comment.

Among roads for Palestinians funded by USAid are several projects south of Bethlehem that appear to be providing an “alternative” to Road 60, a busy highway that has traditionally linked Jerusalem with the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank.

Israel has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to Road 60 because it also serves as a fast direct route for Jewish settlers in the Gush Etzion bloc driving to and from Jerusalem.

As a result, residents of several nearby Palestinian villages, including Batir, Wadi Fukin, al Walaja and Husan, have been forced off Road 60 and on to USAid-funded side roads and underpasses to connect them to Bethlehem and other neighbouring communities.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said 170km of roads in the West Bank were either off-limits to Palestinians or highly restricted, creating what the organisation has called “forbidden roads”.

The organisation noted that, after the 2004 scheme for complete separation was rejected by donors, Israel adapted the plan, using bridges, tunnels and interchanges to create partial separation, with the Israelis “traveling on the fast upper levels, and Palestinians on the lower levels”.

It concluded: “The plan allows Palestinian vehicles to travel on only 20 per cent of the [West Bank] roads on which Israeli vehicles travel.”

Ms Michaeli added that the growing dependence of Palestinian traffic on underpasses meant that Israel was in a position to control or even sever connections between Palestinian areas with only one military jeep.

Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, the director of Badil, a Bethlehem-based organisation that has lobbied against road segregation in the southern West Bank, said there was considerable domestic and international pressure on the PA to agree to roads dictated by Israel, if only because they often eased the existing restrictions on Palestinian movement.

“Sadly, the PA is helping to build its own Bantustans,” she said. “Palestinian towns and villages connected by back roads and tunnels while the settlers control the main highways is what the US appears to mean when it talks about a viable Palestinian state.”

Thursday, May 13, 2010

For the Children of Gaza by Maurice Jacobsen

For the Children of Gaza_Short Version for Review from Maurice Jacobsen in Gaza on Vimeo.

Israel seeks to silence dissent by Ben White (The Guardian - 5/11/10)

Last Thursday, in the early hours of the morning, a Palestinian community leader's home was raided by Israeli security forces. In front of his family, the wanted man was hauled off to detention without access to a lawyer, while his home and offices were ransacked and property confiscated.

While this sounds like an all-too typical occurrence in West Bank villages such as Bil'in and Beit Omar, in fact, the target in question this time was Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and head of internationally renowned NGO network Ittijah.

After being snatched last week, Makhoul's detention was subject to a court-enforced gagging order, preventing the Israeli media from even reporting that it had happened. This ban was finally lifted yesterday, as Israeli newspapers were being forced to report on angry protests by Palestinians in Israel without explaining the specific provocation.

It turned out that another Palestinian citizen of Israel, Balad party activist Omar Said, had also been arrested, and interrogated by the Shin Bet since the end of April. Now, both Makhoul and Said are to be charged with espionage and "contact with a foreign agent" – namely, Hezbollah. On Monday night, hundreds of demonstrators rallied in Haifa to protest against what they call "an escalating campaign to crack down on Israel's Palestinian citizens".

The gagging order recalls the Anat Kam case, where for several months it was forbidden to report that the former soldier was under house arrest and being investigated by the Shin Bet for "leaking classified military information". The facts about Kam were first circulated by bloggers and campaigners, something repeated in Makhoul's case (including this Facebook group).

The night raids, interrogations, and charges are not isolated incidents – indeed, Makhoul had been prevented from leaving the country in April, according to an order (PDF) by the interior minister. Days later, a West Bank Palestinian non-violent resistance organiser, Iyad Burnat, was also banned from travelling at the Jordan crossing, en route to, among other things, a conference on the Geneva conventions.

Several examples now point to an uncomfortable reality for the self-proclaimed "only democracy in the Middle East": practices that have long been routine in the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are being used in Israel to suppress dissent and limit civil liberties. The green line is increasingly blurry.

There are the Sheikh Jarrah protests, where marches and rallies against the eviction of Palestinians from their homes have been targeted by the police, including the arrest of an organiser at his home – only for him to be released without charge and no evidence presented. Then there is the trend towards repressive legislation, with the so-called nakba law making its way through the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that will ban state funding for any group that marks the expulsions of Palestinians in 1948.

Two weeks ago, a new bill was proposed by more than a dozen cross-party members of Knesset (MK), which would outlaw any organisation "if there is a reasonable basis to conclude that the organisation is providing information to foreign bodies or is involved in lawsuits abroad against senior officials in the government in Israel and/or officers in the Israeli army regarding war crimes". Adalah, one of the groups specifically targeted, stated: "Only a state that commits prohibited acts would be interested in such legislation."

Arab members of the Knesset are also increasingly under attack. MKs Mohammad Barakeh and Said Naffaa have had their parliamentary immunity stripped so that they can face criminal proceedings, with the chair of the committee which deals with immunity issues reported to have suggested that "a serious decision" would have to be made as to "whether or not these parties can continue to sit in the Israeli parliament, even while they operate against the country".

More recently, a trip by Arab MKs to Libya has been greeted by attempts to "strip the members of their immunity", with MK Michael Ben-Ari declaring "an historic opportunity to abolish once and for all the immunity and rights of Knesset members who hate Israel and denigrate the state".

At the heart of this and other cases against Palestinian citizens is contact with the wider Arab world. According to Adalah, the "charge of meeting a foreign agent" is so broad that it criminalises "almost any Arab who establishes legitimate relations with political and social activists in the Arab world".

So why is this happening now? First, it is the latest manifestation of a deteriorating atmosphere in Israel, with political dissent and human rights groups under attack. Depressingly, there is considerable support among Jewish Israelis for this kind of crackdown: one poll found that 57.6% of respondents "agreed that human rights organisations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely".

Second, there is also a specific focus on Israel's Palestinian minority. Three years ago, it was revealed that the Shin Bet intended to "thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel, even if such activity is sanctioned by the law". This is no doubt in part a response to the kind of developments Makhoul talked about in January when I met him in Haifa: how "this generation" of Palestinian citizens "has grown up with October 2000. The green line disappeared – in terms of thinking, behaviour, and consciousness."

Hussein Abu Hussein, the lawyer for both Makhoul and Said, stressed the role of someone like Makhoul in being a prominent advocate internationally for "the need for accountability" – in other words, "the state has enough reasons to stop this voice". Mohammad Zeidan, of the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA), says that the arrests are "clearly political". He believes that for some in Israel, the work being done by NGOs and Arab parties on the international level is "crossing a red line" – "they want to remind us that this is not a democracy".

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Put Conditions on Israel's OECD entry by Avi Shlaim and Simon Mohun (The Guardian - 5/7/10)

In the absence of any last-minute objections, Israel will be welcomed as a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development at its annual ministerial council in Paris on 26-28 May.

A successful outcome to the long-standing Israeli campaign to be admitted to the OECD would be hailed by Israeli government ministers as a major diplomatic triumph at a time when they have come under growing global criticism for the policy of building settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

It is vital therefore that the OECD makes Israeli accession conditional on tangible improvements in its human rights record and a commitment to embark on a credible peace process.

In November 2007, a process was set in motion with the ultimate goal of admitting Israel to the prestigious club of developed high-income democracies.

The working committees charged with examining whether Israel meets accepted standards have quietly finished their work and submitted their findings.

The committees did raise a number of "technical questions": over intellectual property issues, over foreign bribery involving the defence industry and, last but not least, over the small issue of the territorial scope of Israel's economic data, under which Israel insists on including settlers in the occupied territories, while excluding their Palestinian inhabitants.

However, all these have now been broadly resolved to the satisfaction of all 30 member countries of the OECD – even of the UK, which was the first to question the inclusion of statistics from the occupied territories.

The issue of statistics has apparently been resolved by inserting a simple disclaimer, according to which the OECD will use Israeli data but add that its use "is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law".

So quietly has the process progressed that at no stage have the political ramifications of Israel's accession been open to public debate. That the benefits for Israel would be immense is evidenced by the energetic lobby for Israeli accession by the Bank of Israel's governor, Stanley Fischer, and by the strongly pro-Israel American Israel Public Action Committee .

Stated OECD values include "a commitment to pluralist democracy based on the rule of law and the respect of human rights".

Israel's numerous breaches of human rights principles and of international humanitarian law, whether during the Gaza offensive in the winter of 2008-09 or through the continuous expansion of its settlement project in the West Bank, clearly contravene this commitment.

The blockade of Gaza, severely restricting the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to its 1.5 million inhabitants, is a form of collective punishment, clearly proscribed under international law – yet these issues have not been brought up at all in the accession process.

The OECD Convention also stipulates that members "avoid developments which might endanger their economies or those of other countries", and "reduce or abolish obstacles to the exchange of goods and services". But, as evidenced by a recent IMF report, Israeli policies toward Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza are characterised by crippling restrictions on their economies.

In its report, the IMF concluded that "a breakthrough in the peace process and removal of restrictions on a wider scale are essential for a durable and regionally balanced growth in the Palestinian territories".

President Obama has recently declared his wish for a new "Middle East order" based on a growing recognition that Israeli-Palestinian peace is key to US interests in the region. But it is unclear whether Israel has heard the message.

Indeed, since his visit to the US last month and despite the requests made by the Obama administration, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has repeatedly declared that construction will continue in East Jerusalem – a policy that makes the chances of restarting negotiations very faint.

Netanyahu can feel justified in his claim, made years ago, that prosperity can be achieved in Israel even without a peace deal. According to Israeli analysts, Israel will reach an unprecedented per capita GDP of $30,000 this year, and Israeli government debt is expected to decline. As reported recently by Israeli media, part of this wealth is the illegal fruit of Israeli economic activities in the occupied territories.

Traditionally, political agreements and trade agreements are reached on separate if closely linked tracks. While politics may limp and falter, business must be allowed to proceed smoothly. The Israeli OECD accession process is a perfect example of how such separations can become counterproductive.

Making Israel's accession to the OECD conditional on concrete improvements in human rights on the ground might send a clearer message to Israel that the international community is consistent and serious about Middle East peace.

More generally, if the US and the EU learn to use their trade relations with Israel as leverage, they may discover that the much-sought-after incentive for peace is to be found there, if nowhere else.