Israel and the WMD-free zone: Has Israel closed the door?
By Emily B. Landau and Shimon Stein | 27 September 2012
Article Highlights
* With the 2012 Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference still on the agenda in Helsinki, speculation remains whether Israel will attend.
* Shaul Chorev, head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, delivered a strongly worded speech to the IAEA general conference in Vienna earlier this month, laying out what Israel is likely to accept and not accept as far as the conference is concerned.
* The time might be ripe to start thinking about a more far-reaching and radical approach that would involve rethinking the entire framework for considering WMD arms control in the Middle East.
Last week, Israel's influential paper, Haaretz, led its front page with a rather decisive headline: "Israel rejects US-backed Arab plan for conference on nuclear-free Mideast." The problem, however, is that the country announced no such decision.
The headline appeared the morning after Israeli nuclear chief Shaul Chorev delivered a cutting speech to the International Atomic Energy Agency's general conference in Vienna. So far, Israel has not officially closed the door on the 2012 Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference, which is still on the agenda for December in Helsinki. However, as Chorev articulated, Israel's attendance cannot be assured either.
The Israel Atomic Energy Commission head certainly used some choice, sharp words about what can and cannot work in moving forward with a WMD-free zone: .. http://iaec.gov.il/About/SpeakerPosts/Documents/IAEA%20statement%20Sep2012.pdf .. PDF "Any initiative to promote the 2012 conference on the Middle East -- under the banner of the [Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference] or the general conference of the IAEA -- in complete disregard to the present regional somber realities, is futile."
Directly preceding this remark, Chorev provided some insight into his thinking on these "somber realities" and geopolitical changes, which were dominated, in his view, by adverse developments in Iran and Syria. He highlighted the clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in both states, their violations, as well as the fact that these deceptive activities are proceeding unabated, with the international community powerless to stop them. Syria, for one, is known to have one of the world's largest and most advanced chemical weapons programs .. http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/fearful-of-nuclear-iran-the-real-wmd-nightmare-syria .. (and could possibly have offensive biological weapons); in his speech, Chorev pointed out that this stockpile -- which the Assad regime recently threatened to use .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/world/middleeast/chemical-weapons-wont-be-used-in-rebellion-syria-says.html?pagewanted=all .. -- stands in direct contradiction to a report submitted to the UN in late 2005, in which Syria stated that it "neither possesses nor intends to acquire weapons of mass destruction." .. http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/syria_biological.pdf?_=1316466791
The "acute deficit created for decades by [the] non-compliance, proliferation, violence, and terrorism practiced by [despotic] regimes [in the Middle East]," he emphasized, cannot be ignored. While Israel did not make a dramatic announcement on its attendance to the 2012 conference, the statements that were made provide an opportunity to assess prevalent and evolving trends in Israeli thinking on the idea of a WMD-free zone.
The triggers. Israel's overall position on arms control relating to WMD has two outstanding features. First, Israel has traditionally favored a regional approach to arms control over the global approach, whereby states join broad international disarmament treaties on an individual basis. A primary reason is that states have cheated on their commitments to the global treaties, and when considering the NPT, many of the violators have been states in the Middle East. The problem is compounded when one considers the very poor record of the international community as far as confronting these violations -- and the cases of Iran, Syria, and North Korea stand out prominently in this regard.
The second important feature is that when contemplating regional arms control, Israel advocates a gradual process that must begin by addressing tensions, threats, and conflicts in the Middle East. Israel supports a regional arms control process in which states communicate with one another, and build a significant basis of confidence and mutual trust before addressing capabilities. This is not a dialogue that can take place in an atmosphere of extreme animosity and rejection. And this has been Israel's position since the 1980s, when it supported a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East, and the 1990s, when it signed on to the short-lived Arms Control and Regional Security Working Group, a process that began by building confidence through various measures. Israel has -- and continues to be -- wary of finding itself in a process in which dynamics proceed too quickly to a discussion of capabilities, without first establishing an improved regional atmosphere and peace agreements.
Deal breakers. It is well known that Israel rejected the way that the WMD-free zone conference idea came onto the agenda in 2010, embedded in the final document at the NPT review conference; the document refers back to the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East .. http://www.un.org/disarmament/WMD/Nuclear/1995-NPT/pdf/Resolution_MiddleEast.pdf , PDF which called on Israel to accede to the NPT, and address first and foremost the nuclear issue. Israel, which is not a state party to the NPT, strongly disapproves of a regional discussion of WMD -- which include nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and means of delivery -- being included on the agenda of a global nuclear disarmament treaty.
Moreover, Israel deplored the political agendas that overshadowed the 2010 NPT Review Conference and allowed for Israel to be singled out by name, whereas Iran, which had been found in non-compliance with its safeguard obligations, was not named because it threatened to block consensus on the document if it was. The fact that all other members of the NPT found this acceptable was highly disconcerting. Though the Obama administration later communicated significant assurances to Israel with regard to its strategic deterrence, Israel -- due to Obama's own expressed commitment to a nuclear disarmament agenda -- still has questions whether it might face new pressure from the administration down the line. On an additional point, but unrelated to the 2010 review conference, Israel also has reservations about the double standard that it regards the United States has established with India. Beginning with George W. Bush, and continued by Obama, India is allowed to engage in civilian nuclear cooperation with nuclear states even though, like Israel, it remains outside the NPT.
Convening the 2012 Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference under the direct auspices of the NPT could well be a deal breaker as far as Israel's participation.
A fresh look. More than anything, Chorev's remarks emphasize what Israel sees as the incongruence between the current regional realities in the Middle East and discussion of a WMD-free zone. But the question is whether expression of strong concern spells rejection, or whether Israel is still hoping to influence how this regional conference is being envisioned and planned. Israel will certainly not agree to take part in a process if it feels that it is being isolated and pressured -- nor will it agree to discuss weapons capabilities and ignore the regional realities. It could be that the true message is that these realities simply cannot sustain such a process.
In this atmosphere, perhaps the time has come to start considering a more far-reaching and radical approach that would involve rethinking the entire framework for WMD arms control in the Middle East. It would necessitate removing some long-held masks and looking at the regional situation in a very direct and serious manner, and especially coming to terms with the fact that the stark asymmetries in the Middle East cannot support the underlying norms of equality embedded in the WMD-free zone way of thinking.
While asymmetries in weapons capabilities are regularly discussed, the fundamental disproportionateness in basic security concerns are not. Israel faces existential threats on a regular basis and in a manner that no other state in the region experiences. In the nuclear realm, Israel has a strong ongoing record of deterrence and non-issuance of public threats -- other states, however, are looking to enhance their regional influence and hegemony, using aggressive rhetoric that rejects and threatens Israel's existence in the region. When it comes to weapons of mass destruction, the culture of blatant deceit is prevalent in states across the Middle East and adds to the security asymmetry.
Israel still might participate in the WMD-free zone conference later this year. But one thing seems fairly certain: Until asymmetries in the Middle East are placed squarely on the agenda, states cannot even begin considering regional security in a new and realistic manner.
.. Iran and Israel should be talking to each other .. what the hell .. it would be in line with the regional approach Israel wants .. and as well .. keep the international thing chugging .. what could Israel have lost by attending Helsinki? .. what could either lose by friggin' secret or open .. better open, but fss .. talk to each other .. go sit in the corner and talk to each other .. dunno what else to say .. :)
Encountering Peace: Message to Hamas, Israel leaders
By GERSHON BASKIN - 11/12/2012 23:04
If Hamas would stop smuggling weapons and focus on building rather than destroying we could speak about a port in Gaza, and reopening the passage to the West Bank.
Photo: Amir Cohen / Reuters
There is a petition that went online on Sunday, put out by an organization called “Other Voice.” They wrote: “To: Israeli government, Hamas and Palestinian leaders, USA government, European leaders. We, Israeli civilians living along the border with Gaza, civilians in Gaza and citizens from all around the world call to end the violence! Every few weeks violence across the Gaza/Israel border surges. Israel air raids in Gaza kill and injure innocent civilians, and rockets fired from Gaza into civilian populations in Israel, cause trauma, chaos and physical harm. We have lived through this long enough, and will no longer sit by quietly. We are people on both sides of the border who deserve the right to live normal lives. That’s it! We call upon the Israeli and Hamas governments to end this violence once and for all. Find the ways to sit down and talk, end the attacks on Israelis and Palestinians, and end the siege on Gaza, and stop playing with our lives.”
Every time over the past years that there is a flare-up along the Israel-Gaza border I get called by officials on both sides, and I also initiate my own calls to officials on both sides appealing for reason and a return to calm. I don’t want anyone to be killed on either side and I want the feeling of terror that millions of people on both sides of the border feel, too frequently in the past month, to come to an end.
I would like to share with you a small sample of the messages I have been delivering to some Hamas leaders (unnamed).
Sunday of this week: It is the worst political move possible to turn the security situation regarding Israel and Gaza into an elections issue. That is what is happening. I know there are four people killed in Gaza. The Israeli response is that your side started with the tunnel bomb and four soldiers were seriously wounded. They say that if Hamas is the government it must be responsible for making sure that no one puts bombs along the border or shoots rockets into Israel.
You get quiet for quiet. You know very well, these rockets do nothing to help the Palestinian people – they only do more damage to your people and get people killed. Doesn’t Hamas want to work to improve the lives of your people? Where are smart people in Hamas? Why don’t they raise their voice? Do you really think that Israel will continue to tolerate these rocket attacks? The harsh Israeli response will be Cast Lead II, and even worse. There are much better alternatives for both peoples.
We are not talking about making peace with Israel; that is too much for Hamas to accept, but we could have a real hudna. That takes political leadership. Do you have it on your side?
October 28, 2012:
I had a conversation with an important official on the Israeli side. It is so clear to me that the total lack of trust and communication between the sides is a major contributing factor to the breakdown of cease-fire understandings.
The Israeli action yesterday with tanks and troops along the border was not an attack against Gaza but only meant to clear the area along the fence so that bombs cannot be placed there by fighters from your side. There was no aggressive intent from Israel’s point of view.
The Israeli side says that if Hamas does not want an aggressive intent from Israel they should make sure that no bombs are placed along the fence to attack Israeli soldiers who patrol the Israeli side of the fence and have no intention to attack beyond that.
I know that Hamas has a completely different view of the events and saw the Israeli action along the fence as Israeli aggression. This goes back to what we proposed once in the past – Hamas should decide and announce that the border area, the buffer zone, is a closed military zone under the sole authority of the Hamas security. This is a sovereign act of the sovereign government in Gaza and aimed at ensuring the security of Gaza.
If Hamas security ensures that there will not be attacks against Israel from the border, along the fence or in any area controlled by the Hamas security, the border will remain quiet and we will not risk the possibility of explosions and escalation.
We need the mechanism in place so that when and if Israel or Hamas is doing something along the border fence area, it is not interpreted by the other side as an act of aggression (unless it is an act of aggression). This is the lowest level of coordination that should be put in place to save human lives.
May 2, 2012
Don’t you think that it is time for the energy of your movement to be placed in something positive? Shouldn’t your leaders be investing in your people, in education, in development, culture, industry? Don’t you want to give your children the kind of life that you never had? Israel does not seek to destroy Hamas or the Palestinian people. Israel does not want another war in Gaza and does not want to kill any people there, or in the West Bank.
We need for people like yourself to stand up and begin speaking a new kind of language to your people. It is time to put the war behind us, to end trying to kill each other, to end the armed struggle finally. Hamas could invest its resources in education and development and not in weapons and rockets.
You know that there is no chance to destroy Israel and every time there is a new round of violence it is your people which pay the heaviest price.
I know that quiet will be answered with quiet. A cease-fire which is a real one, not just a resting period between rounds of violence, will enable the economic development of Gaza, the opening of Gaza to the West Bank and to the world.
If Hamas would stop smuggling weapons and focus on building rather than destroying we could speak about a port in Gaza, and reopening the passage to the West Bank, infrastructure projects, building schools, etc. Enough hate language and culture. It is time to focus inwards, to what your people need and deserve.
I know that there are serious leaders in Israel who would respond positively to positive changes in Hamas. This is not just a naïve dream. This is all possible.
This can happen sooner than you believe. There is no need for big speeches and ceremonies. It is enough to begin to change directions and for the Hamas leaders to speak about development, economy, education, etc.
The writer is the co-chairman of IPCRI, the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Schalit.
good .. talk to each other .. Israel should be talking to Hamas .. why not .. direct talks .. they could build a bonfire and toast marshmallows (don't know why they don't spell them 'marshmellows' .. mellow is cool .. don't know, yet, what mallow means) .. lol ..
Strategic stability is one of those ideas that seem to enjoy almost unqualified support among nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states, nuclear disarmament advocates and skeptics, as well as nuclear abolitionists and nuclear hawks. And it is probably because of this universal support that the pursuit of strategic stability became the single most serious obstacle on the way toward nuclear disarmament.
Strategic stability usually refers to a state of affairs in which countries are confident that their adversaries would not be able to undermine their nuclear deterrent capability. It is generally believed that, if the nuclear deterrence potentials are secure, nuclear powers would not feel the need to build up their strategic arsenals and, most important, would not be under pressure to launch their missiles in a crisis. Understood this way, strategic stability does not seem a particularly controversial concept. Few people would advocate instability in matters that involve nuclear weapons. But the problem is that the key elements of the concept are so poorly defined that it has no useful meaning and virtually no practical value.
First of all, the numbers that are used to judge the effectiveness of deterrence have always been completely arbitrary. For example, in the early 1980s, the US intelligence agencies estimated that, in the event of a surprise Soviet attack, surviving launchers in each of the three legs of the US strategic triad could independently destroy about 70 percent of the Soviet economic value .. http://russianforces.org/podvig/2008/06/the_window_of_vulnerability_that_wasnt.shtml .. -- a task that would require thousands of surviving warheads. And still the United States was concerned that this might not be enough to deter the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had a different view of what was necessary for effective deterrence: A Soviet official document from the late 1980s estimated that its retaliatory strike would destroy about 80 targets on US territory. Given that the Soviet strategic force still included more than 10,000 nuclear warheads at the time, this number does not seem particularly large. However, the authors of the estimate seemed quite confident that such a capability would provide the Soviet Union with an adequate deterrence potential.
These numbers are probably much lower today, but they are almost certainly as arbitrary as they were in the 1980s. All evidence suggests that the estimations of the number of weapons that might be required for deterrence have always been determined by the number of weapons available -- rather than the other way around. So, once nuclear states start cutting down their nuclear arsenals, they have no problem adjusting their views of efficient deterrence accordingly. In August, for example, a former commander of the US Strategic Command stated .. http://nukesofhazardblog.com/story/2012/8/2/175226/9059 .. on record that "the retaliatory capability of 300 nuclear weapons on anybody's territory is catastrophic." But there is no reason to believe that the retaliatory capability of, say, 30 nuclear weapons -- or even three -- is anything but catastrophic. Indeed, the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis .. http://bos.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/10/22/0096340212464364.full.pdf+html .. or concerns about the emerging nuclear capabilities of countries like North Korea and Iran tells us that just a small probability of having a single nuclear weapon delivered to someone's territory is a very strong deterrent.
The arbitrary nature of the assumptions that underlie the idea of strategic stability makes this concept extremely malleable and politically charged. Depending on the politics of the moment, just about any configuration of strategic forces could be declared sufficiently stable or dangerously unbalanced, and any imaginable threat could be brought into the equation or conveniently ignored. On the surface it may not look this way -- there is, after all, an intellectual tradition that explains, for example, why silo-based multiple-warhead missiles are destabilizing weapons or why missile defense undermines strategic stability. Historically, however, it has always been the politics and not the theoretical arguments that have had the upper hand in most of these discussions; even the most difficult strategic stability problems are usually resolved by a simple decision that they are not problems anymore.
Somewhat surprisingly, one of the best examples of the triumph of politics over theory is the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which has long been believed to embody the essence of strategic stability calculations by limiting destabilizing missile defenses and introducing a measure of predictability into the nuclear arms race. In reality, however, the decision to limit defenses came only after the United States and the Soviet Union had enough experience with missile defense to conclude that it would not be able to provide any useful protection. By the time the ABM negotiations began, neither country believed missile defense was going to be a serious problem.
During the MX missile debate .. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA478140 .. in the late 1970s -- in which the United States built its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile to date -- there was a great deal of controversy over the seemingly insurmountable problem of multiple-warhead land-based missile vulnerability. For a time, the missiles were supposed to be shuttled around the United States in an intricate, expensive, and wildly uncertain ploy to make them less vulnerable to Soviet attack. And yet, the matter was quickly resolved once the large-scale strategic modernization of US forces got underway in the early 1980s -- the missile vulnerability controversy had served its political purpose and the missiles were deployed in silos, even though they were as vulnerable as before.
Another example is Russia's recent position on missile defense, which -- despite all the harsh rhetoric -- turns out to be surprisingly flexible. The alleged grave destabilizing effects of missile defenses were conveniently overlooked every time the political benefits of moment felt right -- whether it was the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in 1991; the brief US-Russian rapprochement after the 9/11 attacks, which the United States used to withdraw from the ABM Treaty; or the success of New START in 2010.
Missile defense, of course, is back on the agenda, but only because the politics changed: Having secured an arms control agreement with the United States, Russia now needs a cover for its strategic modernization program. Besides, missile defense is far from the only problem that is being added to the strategic stability mix; there are weapons in space, conventional strategic weapons, upload potential, cruise missiles, and the balance of conventional forces.
Though as tempting as it might be to try to find a formula that would balance all these factors in one neat, strategically stable package, it is never that simple. The only reliable way to deal with the many alleged threats to strategic stability is to build a system of relationships in which countries make conscious decisions to exclude these "threats" from their national security calculations. This approach is, of course, a rather tall order; it would probably require a fundamental change to the architecture of international security, as well as to US policy and to the policies of other nuclear weapon states. But, unless the international community commits itself to a more rational security regime, the world could get bogged down in a quest for strategic stability -- which is increasingly becoming nothing more than a cover for obstructionism and cynicism in nuclear disarmament.
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