Apartheid

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Between 1987 and 2003, the IAEA appealed to Israel to sign the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty 13 times. All of these attempts were ignored by the Jewish state. 254
Moreover, under US influence the UN and the international community are pressuring
countries such as Iran and North Korea to prove that they have no intentions of developing
nuclear arms and to abandon their nuclear weapons program, respectively. The presumption
of innocence, a basic right, has flown out the window in the case of Iran. But nothing is done
to contain Israel’s gigantic nuclear war machine. According to several analysts referred to by
Reuters, Israel is the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power. 255
In 1981, Israel became the first country in the world to break the unwritten global rule
of not attacking nuclear power stations. In a totally unprovoked bombing raid, Israel reduced
Osiraq/Tammuz-1, to rubble. It was an Iraqi power plant under construction with the aid of
French scientists and under supervision by the UN body, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA). In marked contrast, all Israeli nuclear programs, civil and military, are in
practice allowed by the UN to continue to expand without any sanctions or controls by the
IAEA or by anyone else from the international community.
Iraq, however, was attacked and invaded 22 years later by a coalition force led by the
USA, unauthorized by the UN, officially because of US suspicions of Iraqi programs for the
development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which ‘could’ become a threat to the USA and
the UK, and due to US insistence on ‘liberating’ the country; unofficially, though, for a host
of different, possible reasons, including US and UK corporate control over the country’s vast
oil wealth and other rich resources, blind revenge for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
USA, a general anti-Muslim and anti-Arab policy, and, last but certainly not least, an end to
Iraqi support for the Palestinian uprising against the favorite ally of the USA. It meant a
hitherto unprecedented success for an apartheid state to export its apartheid violence. As far as
I know, not a single Israeli has been killed in the Iraq War, although Israel is the main
beneficiary of it, at least in military and political terms. 256
Three Iraqi people were killed in the 1981 attack by Israel on the Osiraq power plant.
The USA unofficially blessed the attack, which was sold to the world as a ‘pre-emptive
strike’, Newspeak for ‘retaliating in advance’, and to be used again in the following year’s
Israeli invasion of Lebanon (see Chapter II.9.3). The UN General Assembly resolutions 487
and 36/27 strongly condemned the Israeli attack, which was carried out with US-supplied F-
16 bombers, as an ‘unprecedented act of aggression’ and Israel was requested by the
international community to pay reparations to Iraq for the suffered damages. Israel never
complied with the request. The UN General Assembly also called upon all states to stop
Association, which says Israel’s ‘opacity’ with regard to its weapons of mass destruction is similar to that of the
Soviet Union, which unnecessarily hastened US nuclear programs and made the world a less safe place.
254 N.N.: IAEA Chief Urges Israel to Scrap Nuclear Weapons, November 26, 2003
255 Giacomo: Arabs Say World Ignores Israel’s Nuclear Program, 2003; N.N.: Factbox: Facts and Fears on
Israel’s Suspected Nuclear Arms, July 4, 2004. I am not in favor of any new country gaining nuclear military
capabilities – and Ukraine and South Africa have proven that nuclear weapons can be uninvented – but
proportionality must be observed here, too. Israel should not be protected from Iran by the ‘international
community’, and then expect it to accept that Israel is exempt from the same rules with which Iran is being
harnessed. In my opinion Israel should be expelled from the UN for its nuclear war program alone, and all the
more so for its continued perpetration of apartheid. To punish Iran for (perhaps) developing nuclear weapons
while Israel’s existing arsenal is ignored amounts to hypocrisy, and possibly also to racism and islamophobia.
All of these traits are unfortunately to be expected from the USA today, but not necessarily from the United
Nations.
256 Mearsheimer and Walt 2006; Harrer: Kriegs-Gründe: Versuch über den Irak-Krieg, 2003; Wise: Liberation or
Libation? Media Images, State Propaganda and ‘Happy Iraqis’, 2003; Abu-Jamal: The War for Empire, 2003;
Shalom: Iraq: War and Democracy, 2003. See also Leaper, Löwstedt & Madhoun: Caught in the Crossfire: The
Iraq War and the Media – A Diary of Claims and Counterclaims, 2003. One could perhaps argue that the
Congolese civil war in the 1960s was a similarly profitable war for South Africa, but the western powers
obviously perceived themselves as winners here, too, and they were probably more active than the remote
apartheid power in the earlier case.