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MUNDO ARABE.ORG |
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Israel:
Nuclear Weapons
The
Bomb that Never is Avner
Cohen Israel crossed the nuclear-weapons
threshold more than three decades ago, but the Israeli parliament--the Knesset--has
never discussed the substance of nuclear policy in an open session; it treats
the subject as if it did not exist. On the few occasions in the distant past
when some left-wing member--usually an Arab--tried to place the issue on the
agenda, the leadership blocked open debate, ensuring that the motion would die
in oblivion in a closed-door session of the Defence and Foreign Affairs
Committee. The motions became meaningless and, for a long time, were no longer
made. Earlier this year, however, Knesset member
Issam Mahoul--a member of the predominantly Arab communist party Hadash--filed a
motion to debate the nuclear issue. (His motion was triggered by the first-ever
publication, in Yediot Ahronot, of selected portions of the transcript of
the trial of Mordechai Vanunu, imprisoned since 1986 for revealing the existence
of Israel's bomb program.) Knesset Speaker Avrum
Burg was about to handle the request in the usual manner, but Mahoul threatened
to battle the procedure in the Israeli High Court of Justice. To avoid that
embarrassment--and after considerable consultation-- Burg decided to allow
Mahoul to present his motion in open session. Burg's decision was described by
the media as "historic"--permitting the first "open" debate
of the nuclear issue in the Knesset. In reality, however, the 52-minute
"debate" that occurred on February 2 was an insult to the subject
matter. It was a shouting match between Mahoul and his critics about the
legitimacy of the debate itself, marked by a barrage of verbal attacks on Mahoul,
the removal of four other Arab members who had interrupted a response by
government minister Haim Ramon, and a protest walkout by right-wing members. A vote the following week on whether to
hold a wider debate was defeated 61 to 16. The "historic" debate was
over. No major party with influence in the
mainstream Jewish and Zionist public had the courage to raise this important
topic, so it was left exclusively to Hadash, an Arab anti-Zionist party, and was
therefore perceived as antipatriotic. In the end, the majority refused to look
straight at this large and deep "black hole" in Israeli democracy. The government's response, as expressed by
Minister Ramon, was also hollow. Ramon made a series of banal assertions about
the security of the state and the value of patriotism and secrecy, with no
serious explanation of why in the year 2000 Israel has the same ostrich-like
policy it had in the 1960s and 1970s. On February 4 an Ha'aretz's
editorial criticized the parliamentary spectacle and called for opening the
nuclear issue to a real public debate: "Israeli society is mature enough to
open its nuclear 'black box' with all due caution and look inside." Even Ha'aretz, however, fell back on
Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity, distinguishing on the one hand between
"opacity" as a national strategy, which should be supported and
preserved for strategic reasons, and its translation into a code of discourse
and a system of censorship, which should be modified, on the other. But that separation is both wrong and
misleading. It is wrong not to recognize opacity as both undemocratic and a
political anachronism. It is misleading because it assumes that under the
conditions prevailing in Israel--the only democracy that has a military
censor--it is conceptually and practically possible to distinguish between
opacity as a strategy and opacity as a code of internal discourse. The problem
is not the censor or internal security. The problem is the policy of nuclear
opacity itself. Opacity served Israel
well in the past, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s. Originally, it was a
tactic that enabled Israel to continue its nuclear development while minimizing
international frictions, especially with the United States. By the 1970s it had
become a strategic foundation of Israel's national security policy. In those years nobody expected the semantic
gymnastics of David Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres, and, later, of Levy Eshkol and
Yitzhak Rabin (in his capacity as ambassador to the United States) to last so
long. As early as the early 1960s, Golda Meir as
foreign minister criticized this policy of deception; in internal deliberations
she called for "telling the truth [to the Americans] and explaining
why." A few years later Meir as prime minister
told the truth to U.S. President Richard Nixon. She explained why a policy of
opacity, with the Americans looking the other way, served the best interests of
both countries. Her statement became the basis for understandings between the
two countries. Thirty years have passed since then, but
almost nothing has changed in the practice of these understandings or the manner
in which they have been translated in Israel into an internal code of discourse. What has changed, beyond recognition,
during these years is the state of Israel itself, its domestic culture, and the
region in which it resides. Israel today is the strongest and most dominant
country in the region and the Soviet threat no longer exists, but when it comes
to the nuclear issue, it still acts as if it is afraid of its own shadow,
stubbornly refusing to acknowledge anything about what has made it a first-rate
regional power. In the last decade the nuclear issue has emerged as the source
of grave tensions between Egypt and Israel. Those who believe that opacity has no
substitute--and almost the entire Israeli defense establishment adheres to that
position--rely on two major arguments. The first is based on the notion that any
deviation from the policy will be costly--causing damage to U.S.-Israeli
relations, possibly even resulting in sanctions. And it could, they add,
undermine U.S. nonproliferation policy itself. Therefore, opacity is described
as indispensable for both American and Israeli vital interests. This argument is anachronistic and
overstated. A growing number of people within the American nonproliferation
community realize that the old American-Israeli nuclear understandings have
become a burden for both countries and that there is a need to find new and
creative ways to put the issue on the table, to legitimize it and integrate it
into the peace process. The time is ripe to replace the old understandings with
something more suitable to the needs of the present, regionally and globally.
The time has come for an honest American-Israeli dialogue on the nuclear issue.
Israel should receive legitimacy for its nuclear status, and in return it should
be held accountable. Such sentiments are being quietly but
increasingly voiced within the U.S. administration and without. It is true that
the Americans do not want to push Israel on the nuclear issue because they
recognize the depth of the Israeli taboo, and also because there are more
pressing political issues on the agenda--the delicate peace negotiations between
Israel and both the Palestinians and the Syrians. But American compliance with Israel's
nuclear opacity should not be read as an American demand that it not be modified,
as Israeli strategists seem to think. The last line of defence of Israeli
supporters of opacity is the "slippery slope" argument--the fear that
if the subject is discussed, there will be never-ending demands for more and
more transparency. This was a reasonable concern at one time,
but it has grown until it now assumes irrational proportions. A strong country
like Israel, confident in its own power, is capable of drawing for itself the
line beyond which it will not go. And it is possible to determine this ahead of
time, in coordination with the United States, as part of a post-opacity policy. The defenders of the "slippery slope"
argument often argue that opacity is also the best way to deal with Egypt's
opposition to Israel's nuclear status. Openly discussing the nuclear issue, they
argue, would cause much worse damage to Israeli-Egyptian relations. But one could argue to the contrary--that
Israel's refusal to engage the Egyptians on the nuclear issue, under the banner
of opacity, has done more harm than good. The fact is that after the Gulf War
the Egyptians are no longer willing to close their eyes to Israel's nuclear
status. They insist on discussing it. Israel's refusal to discuss the subject
enrages the Egyptians. One could argue that Golda's view--that "we must
tell them the truth and explain why"--would also be good for Israeli-Egyptian
relations. In any case, without a quiet and direct dialogue with the Egyptians
over the nuclear issue, there will be no progress on arms control issues. Perhaps hidden behind the Israelis' "slippery
slope" argument is nothing more than a preference for the sweet comfort of
a culture of secrecy and a primordial fear of coming out of the closet. But just
as the declared nuclear countries meticulously keep their nuclear secrets, so
also will Israel in a post-opacity era. Ultimately, the central
reason for liberating this topic is not external, but internal. Israel can no
longer accept the principle that there is one subject, central and fateful like
no other, that is unacknowledged and untouchable. In the Israel of this time
there should be no room for the culture of secrecy. Avner Cohen: Israeli and
a senior research fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington
University and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security Studies
at Maryland. He is the author of Israel and the
Bomb (1998), a Hebrew version of which will be published later this year. |
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Editor Ahmed
Hijazi Teléfono: 915228922 - 637979217 E-mail: mundoarabe@mundoarabe.org Copyright ©Mundo Árabe 2000-2007 Madrid-España Resolución de pantalla recomendada 1024 x 768
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