Another Tack: Ban Israel's bomb.

 

by Sarah Honig

How sweet the vision: our world nuke-free and menace-free, enveloped in harmony and goodwill. Lofty sentiments without a doubt - assuming they are sincerely subscribed to and remotely attainable.

That's a whopping assumption, though.

Ban-the-Bomb appeared a praiseworthy cause at its cold-war 1950s inception. No doubt lots of fine folks genuinely trusted they were doing their best for mankind and life on earth. Not many suspected right off that they were played for suckers, that no authentic grassroots anti-nuke outcry was possible behind the Iron Curtain, that the endgame was to weaken western deterrent - and guess who wanted that to happen?

    In time, anti-bomb fervor subsided, but not deep within the anti-establishment subculture inhabited, among  others, by Barack Obama and assorted diehard radical cronies. In the name of that ideal of old, US President Obama pretentiously chaired the UN Security Council session which re-ignited the vision of nuclear disarmament. Yet again, intentions may have been noble.

Nevertheless the niggling question is whom are sponsors of the renewed Security Council morality-drive out to weaken? Some argue that high-minded pontification is but a thinly veiled campaign against the burgeoning, very potent Iranian nuclear threat.

But since this was obliquely left for the vast and varied UN membership to interpret according to entrenched self-serving predispositions, then anything goes. And it will. You can bet your bottom shekel that the resultant anti-nuclear ardor will be nothing like what it may seem or like what certain manipulators would like to make others believe that it seems.

PARDON THE jaded perception. Less starry-eyed, admittedly more world-weary observers saw it all before. Déjà vu. Most aspirations ceremoniously ballyhooed in august international forums sound commendable and honorable. Yet inescapably these virtuous standards will be applied to one country exclusively - little Israel.

The Human Rights Council, until recently infamous as the Human Rights Commission, concentrates all its energies on painting Israel as the planet's great repressive ogre. It was the HRC which commissioned the recent farcical Goldstone Report at the benign behest of such liberal paradigms as Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

The UN after all once equated Zionism with racism. That was when it was headed by former Nazi Kurt Waldheim. It routinely singled Israel out for an exemplary set of unique restrictions. Israel alone is prohibited from responding to overt terrorist aggression. Decades before operations Defensive Shield and Cast Lead, all retaliatory raids of the Fifties and Sixties were identically condemned.

Unlike any country, Israel is obliged to fight - if at all - according to incongruent asymmetrical pacifist rules. Israel may not resort to weaponry allowed or overlooked in the case of other states. All hell breaks loose if "collateral damage" is incurred in any Israeli action, although Israel faces enemies given to hiding behind their women's skirts and tots' t-shirts. Schools, hospitals and the like are used as rocket launching pads against Israeli civilians. But Israeli civilians are expected to take it on the chin and not disturb the world's peace with interminable Jewish whines.

Israel's security fence, erected to hamper suicide-bombers, is raucously vilified in the name of freedom of movement. Yet this laudable principle isn't requisite for other UN members. Numerous governments fortify their borders via barriers of all sorts to obstruct the influx of economic migrants and foreign gatecrashers. It's quite acceptable for the US, to say nothing of Spain whose need to bar entry into Spanish Sahara goes unchallenged. Nobody minds that European Spain still has territory in Africa, which it still refuses to cede.

Spain, mind you, is hardly alone. Plenty of UN members, from the US, UK, Russia, Turkey and China - to name just one handful - occupy the territory of others without incurring extraordinary wrath or even a negligible demerit. Plenty establish settlements on usurped lands - the above handful comes to mind again, but not only it. Worldwide, untold millions of noncombatants were evicted, indeed entire ethnic populations. None of the dispossessors are expected to accept dislodged enemies or even innocuous refugees back. No way will Poles, Czechs and other Europeans take back expelled Germans (and rightly so). What's done is done.

Except in Israel's case. Israel is unique. Israel must abet its own extinction via inundation by millions of hostile Arabs, whose own belligerent forebears caused their displacement to begin with. Israel is the one testing ground for all disingenuous ethical experiments bombastically launched by the international community.

China may occupy Tibet with no ill-consequence. China has no justification for subjugating Tibet. It's land-lust and nothing but. Israel of course is weighed on different scales. Merely nine miles wide - enclosed by temporary armistice lines rather than recognized borders - Israel was forced into war in 1967 in order to avoid annihilation. It regained territory which was partly Jewish-owned and Jewish-inhabited just 19 years earlier and all of which constitutes its homeland.

THIS IS no faraway conquest motivated by greed and coercive realpolitik. If Israel cedes lowly hills overlooking its densest population center, one airport and exposed highways, it's a goner. Yet this is precisely what the international community, including professed friends, stridently clamors for.

China crowded out native Tibetans with Chinese settlers immeasurably outnumbering Israel's entire population, but their removal isn't a precondition for much of anything. Chinese settlement construction isn't even called that, as wasn't the Russian counterpart in the Baltics. We won't even get into the thorny subjects of the US or Britain (still in the Falklands, just a hop and a skip from Whitehall). Different strokes for different settlers.

Therefore, expect that eventually nuclear disarmament promoters will focus their sanctimonious zeal only on Israel - ever the global touchstone/scapegoat. The rallying cry will resound from all continents: Israel first. Nuclear disarmament's endgame will be to weaken Israel's deterrent and guess who wants that to happen?

This won't be the primary acknowledged goal for all countries. That said, no country plans to disarm but the "family of nations" will demand Israel disarm. There will be no distinction between nations which covet WMDs for openly hyped genocidal purposes and diminutive Israel - the only nation against which genocidal plots are currently hatched.

If tiny vulnerable Israel fails to cooperate, all nuke-stockpiling nations will posture resplendent in their self-righteousness and castigate it as the villain. Nothing new. For two millennia Christian Europe sermonized about turning the other cheek but invariably did the absolute reverse. It now demands the Jewish state abide by Christian precepts that obviously didn't ever bind Europe. Islam is altogether exempt because its motto is din Mohammad besayeff (Mohammad's law by the sword).

It's simply a matter of time - not much time, either - before the vision of a nuclear-free world is reduced to an ultimatum for a nuclear-free Israel. The mantra will be "Ban the Bomb." Its none-too-subtle subtext will be "Ban Israel's Bomb." •

Sarah Honig

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