Just think about it. You read a title like this: “Dancing in
the Nuclear Dark” and below it the subtitle: “How will we know when Iran sprints
toward a bomb?” And the first thing that comes to mind is the following two
questions: Who is that we? And what right do “we” have to know when Iran does something about which Israel used to
say it had the right to be ambiguous?
Well, my friend, that title and that subtitle actually head
the column that was written by Bret Stephens, and published in the Wall Street
Journal on February 4, 2014. It is a column that discusses the nuclear issue as
it affects many places in the world while concentrating on Iran and the Middle East .
And yet, not once in that column is the word Israel mentioned or hinted at.
There was a time that lasted a number of decades during
which the Israelis went out of their way to let the world believe they had
hundreds of nuclear warheads. They even went as far as to train one of their
agents to talk like a nuclear technician. They had him “escape” to Europe where
he divulged the “secrets” of the Israeli bomb-making capabilities only to be
“kidnapped” by Israeli agents and brought back to Israel where he now lives incognito
– for his own protection, of course.
Those days are gone because the last thing that the Israelis
want to say now is that they have nuclear weapons when in reality they have
none, and could not have them given the primitive state of their industry. And
the compelling reason why they are keeping mum is that the regime of quackery
under which they lived for several decades is what prompted the rest of the
world to wake up to the fact that a review of the nuclear balance is in order
both from the civilian and the military points of view.
This being the noxious quandary that has placed America in a
tight corner, it forces the superpower to continue protecting Israel's right to
be ambiguous about its nuclear arsenal while privately whispering the truth in
the ears of the leaders in the Middle East. In fact, the Americans have lately
been running around reassuring those leaders that the story about Israel 's
nuclear arsenal was a fiction from end to end, created by a nation that feared
an Arab attack that would finish it off.
But now that the Israelis are convinced the Arabs never had
such intention, they still worry about divulging the truth publicly because
such act would rob them of their credibility. When this happens, everything
else that was said about them will be suspect, they argue, and this will
encourage the terrorists to attack Israel . The truth about these
people is that they keep digging the holes from which they cannot get out, then
get scared and hide by digging the holes even deeper.
Thus, the dance that Bret Stephens is talking about has been
none other than Israel's own game of ambiguity; and the darkness to which he
has referred was, and continues to be none other than what lurks in the hearts
of the Jewish culture, and the mentality by which that culture is propelled.
And what is discouraging about the way that the nuclear matter is being handled
at this time is that not one iota of possibility appears to be at work to the
effect that somebody will soon muster the courage to come out and say publicly
that enough is enough; we are going to tell the truth come what may.
What is needed is a public admission that Israel does not
have nuclear weapons and never had them. It did not have them for the simple
reason that industry in Israel
is too primitive to produce such devices – at least not on an industrial scale.
This done, everyone that is a stakeholder in this matter can then sit down and
negotiate a deal that will keep the region free of nuclear weapons with a
system of verification that will be as tight as it can be made.
And we won't have little nobodies running around with a
laptop writing things like: “How will we know when Iran sprints toward a bomb?” and be
published in prestigious newspapers.