At the end of last week, Nov. 14-15, high-level Israeli politicians and top-notch commentators were busy frightening the public over an Iranian bomb, loudly defaming the United States and publicly conducting a love affair with France. At the exact same time, a group of nuclear experts from Israel and the West gathered in a Tel Aviv hotel. This small forum was the joint initiative of four organizations: BASIC (British American Security Information Council), Green Cross, IKV Pax Christi (a Dutch organization for research and policy promotion of peace and security) and the Israeli Disarmament Movement.
About a dozen people participated in this forum, including a high-level government official, a former highly placed member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and an Al-Monitor commentator. For two days, they discussed an issue that the decision-makers in Jerusalem and the key Israeli media outlets dared not touch with a 10-foot pole: the initiative to disarm the Middle East of nuclear weapons. It should be noted that the very word "disarm" touches a raw nerve in Israel’s security agencies with regard to nuclear issues. As we know, Israel employs a long-standing policy of "nuclear ambiguity," a policy that requires me and my colleagues to add the expression "according to foreign sources" whenever we address the possibility of Israel being equipped with nuclear weapons.
At the end of the discussions, I asked a number of the participants to present their positions on the nuclear issue, as we neared the round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 forum that would open Wednesday, Nov. 20, in Geneva. I spoke to Ward Wilson, a senior fellow and director of BASIC’s rethinking nuclear weapons project and author of the book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, and asked him what he would do in response to the Iranian threat if he were Israel’s prime minister.
"I would start the process of changing people's minds,'' explained the researcher. ''Make them understand that nuclear weapons are a constant risk that will eventually overtake the very country that owns them. Time continues to march on. Israel cannot maintain its hegemony forever."
AL-MONITOR All-Access gives you unlimited access to all our journalism, the full Daily Briefing, exclusive interviews, premium newsletters, and live events — for less than $2/week.
