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supplying Israel ‘with arms and related material which enabled it to commit acts of aggression
against other countries’. But to this day the UN took no steps to dismantle or even inspect
Israel’s nuclear program, nor to sanction Israel or the USA in any way because of the
attack. 257
Controversy also surrounds Israel’s claim of not having any biological and chemical
weapons programs. Along with a few other countries, including Libya, Sudan, and Syria,
Israel has not signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans the
production, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. In 1998, Israel’s High Court
suspended government plans to expand a top-secret scientific facility, because of widespread
civilian suspicions that it produces biological weapons. Residents (Jews) near the facility
feared that it might mean safety hazards. The plant, hidden behind a high wall in an industrial
area close to Tel Aviv, was said to have up to three hundred workers, 120 of whom were
scientists. 258
After the 1992 El Al cargo plane crash in a residential area in Amsterdam, in which at
least 47 people were killed, a Dutch parliamentary commission was set up to investigate the
causes of several deaths and injuries (including rescue workers’), the causes of which have yet
to be determined. (El Al is the state-owned Israeli airline.) The commission did not find out
much. However, after a revealing article had been published in the Dutch daily, Handelsblad,
in 1998, Israel admitted that the plane had been carrying hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and
dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) — three of the four essential components of sarin gas.
That is the same nerve poison that was to be used by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo Supreme
Truth cult in its infamous attack on the Tokyo subway, leaving twelve people dead and nearly
6,000 ill in 1995. These three chemical components made up 190 liters of the crashed plane’s
cargo and were reportedly part of a total of 10 tons of suspect chemicals. An independent
Dutch nuclear research group discovered that the plane, among other things, also used
depleted uranium as ballast. Israel then claimed, however, both that the material was not toxic
and that it was to have been used ‘to test filters that protect against chemical weapons’. 259 The
situation for Israel’s secret chemical weapons programs appears very similar to apartheid
South Africa’s ‘Project Coast’ and its ‘Medical Battalion’. No wonder. But in Israel’s case we
know a little more under the duration of apartheid, though much too little compared to the
revelations that the TRC eventually prompted in South Africa. Even the Israeli civil society
knows very little, by all measures.
The DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of
Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and was destined for the Israeli Institute
for Biological Research (IIBR) at Nes Ziona, near Tel Aviv. As MEI
[Middle East International magazine] noted in 1998, the IIBR is ‘the
Israeli military and intelligence community’s front organization for
the development, testing and production of chemical and biological
weapons’. A ‘senior Israeli intelligence source’ told the Sunday
257 N.N.: The Middle East in the Shadow of War: A Special Report of the Foundation for Middle East Peace,
Spring 2002; Prather: Can’t Rule Anything Out? 2001; N.N.: Osiraq / Tammuz 1, no date. In fact, the attack on
Osiraq has a precedent among flagrant breaches of international law, namely in the 1967 war of aggression by
Israel on its neighbors, as well as an equally notable and notorious successor in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
In fact, these three acts of aggression are the only ones considered together in Macartney: Preventive War Opens
Way to New Rules on Conflict, 2003. They are three of a kind, although there are surely other, earlier examples
of this kind of attempted justification of gross acts of aggression, which remain unpunished by the international
community although they break some of the most basic rules of international law and of civilized behavior.
258 Goller: Israel’s Biological Institute Plans Expansion, 1998. See also N.N.: World Must Pressure Israel over
Nukes-Arab League, October 1, 2003, according to which: ‘Experts believe the Jewish state has between 100 and
200 nuclear weapons, a stockpile of chemical weapons and an active biological arms program.’
259 Sammonds 2002; McBride: Dutch El Al Crash Report Said to be Critical of PM, April 21, 1999. The reason
the death toll could not be confirmed is that the plane crashed in an area inhabited largely by foreigners, some of
whom were illegal immigrants.