A nuclear-free Middle East is a pipe dream until the US changes its stance towards Israel, writes Ayman El-Amir* Like all UN international parleys, the eighth Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) was recently concluded in New York by a compromise agreement that presumably gave every one of the 189 signatory states something to take home. It upheld the decades-old goodwill rhetorical commitment to rid the world of all nuclear weapons and to hold a conference for that purpose on the Middle East in 2012. While the final document failed to commit the five permanent members of the Security Council to liquidate their nuclear arsenals by 2025, it fulfilled the demands by Arab and Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) states to call upon Israel to join the NPT. In order not to single out Israel, the final document also called upon India and Pakistan, two non-signatory nuclear powers, to do the same. With all its cited achievements the conference did not move the world any closer to nuclear non-proliferation or disarmament. Despite marathon negotiations, the five nuclear powers declined again to give nations not possessing nuclear weapons a legally binding commitment not to attack them. Since the threat of the use of nuclear weapons has been demonstrated by the US's use of nuclear bombs against Japan at the end of World War II, the danger to non-nuclear nations is real and their need for assurances is legitimate. However, they did not make any progress on that front. It was in the Middle East that the conference made a modest progress. For almost three decades, Egypt, a non-nuclear nation and member of NAM, called for declaring the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The move was primarily aimed at Israel, a non-declared nuclear power that declined to join the NPT, which Egypt signed in 1968 and ratified in 1982. Israel's ambiguous position on the possession of a variety of nuclear weapons, estimated by independent experts and researchers at between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads, did not persuade anyone that its nuclear arsenal was not a threat to the Middle East and to other countries in the world, including the former Soviet Union. It has recently been revealed by declassified British documents that Israel tried to sell nuclear warheads to apartheid South Africa under the rule of P W Botha. In September 1979, a huge white flash was recorded off the southern coast of South Africa, which scientists and nuclear test monitoring stations at the time interpreted as a joint nuclear test by Israel and South Africa. South Africa joined the NPT soon after majority rule took hold in the country in 1994. Israel did not. The US, a major catalyst in Israel's development of nuclear weapons since the time of the Nixon administration, has accepted the Israeli policy of "don't ask, don't tell" to help it maintain the ambiguity of its nuclear status. It supported the Israeli argument that it could not join the NPT and open its nuclear facilities for inspection as long as it was in a state of war with its Arab neighbours. However, the Obama administration changed this stance at the review conference, accepting the call on Israel to join the NPT and the convening of a regional conference on the elimination of unconventional weapons in the Middle East. Without this concession, the administration would have been inconsistent with Obama's policy of a nuclear-free world, or with the credibility of his recent Washington conference on nuclear security. It would also have weakened his campaign for imposing new Security Council sanctions against Iran. This policy departure in US-Israeli relations will probably hold either until a conference is held and Israel pressured to participate, or until Obama comes under the pressure of a second-term election campaign in 2012. It also saved the conference from doomed failure like its predecessor in 2005. The achievement of the Egyptian-led NAM diplomatic battle at the conference was more than symbolic. It linked the much-touted Iranian nuclear programme with Israel's massive nuclear stockpile. None could be considered without the other in the context of a strategy to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and bacteriological weapons. The question is: if horses are brought to the water of a regional Middle East conference, how and who could force them to drink? Even before the convening of the eighth review conference, the issue of Iran's nascent nuclear programme and the Israeli arsenal of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction were interlinked. Like a mad dog, Israel hounded Western countries led by the US to force Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment activities long before any proof was established that it was indeed leading to a weapons programme. It is based on the fundamental, US-supported Israeli strategy that its security could only be guaranteed by military superiority over all its neighbours all the time, not on peaceful coexistence. This has turned Israel into a warrior state that uses its superiority to expand its existence at the expense of its neighbours. It is the concept of a horse thief who is sworn to keep his loot by the force of gunfire. After its six-day war of aggression in 1967, Israeli military strategists sought the ultimate weapon that assures unchallenged superiority or Armageddon -- the nuclear bomb. Israel, with Western support and fraud, worked feverishly to develop nuclear technology, an enrichment programme and the production of nuclear weapons, as revealed in detail by the Dimona reactor worker Mordechai Vanunu to the British press in 1986. To the entire world, Israel is a de facto but non-official nuclear weapon state that uses its Jewish lobby in Europe and the US to stay ambiguous and unaccountable. Israel knows by experience that mastering the enrichment technology could pave the way to either peaceful or military uses of nuclear energy. That is why it has gone haywire over Iran's enrichment programme and is agitating compliant Western powers against it. Israel will never abandon its superiority built on camouflaged nuclear threat against its neighbours under any circumstances. Because of its criminal past and illegal present actions Israel considers the prospects of Iranian development of a weapons-grade enrichment programme an "existential threat" in that it would neutralise its nuclear monopoly and possibility of blackmail. Therefore, an international conference on a Middle East free of unconventional weapons is a pie in the sky, unless there is a fundamental change of US policy towards Israel. Or it may turn into a twin forum to the decades-old Geneva-based Disarmament Conference. The anticipated stalemate of such an effort may encourage other regional powers, including Turkey and Iran, to develop their own nuclear ambitions, as Israel becomes an increasing threat to the security of the region. It may not be a far-fetched concept that only the threat of nuclear retaliation could inculcate a sense of responsibility and establish an edgy peace based on military balance. That is how it was developed between the two superpowers since the late 1940s; that is how it now prevails between India and Pakistan. The world has always been a dangerous place to live in and Israel, more than any other nation since the Third Reich, has pursued the concept of militarism as the best guarantee of peaceful existence. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington DC. He also served as director of the United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
