22 November 2013

by Praful Bidwai

Swiss radiation experts have confirmed the worst suspicion nurtured by independent observers of West Asia—namely, that the death of Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat in 2004 in France was not natural. Doctors were unable to specify the cause of Arafat’s death, which occurred barely a fortnight after he vomited during a meeting and then lapsed into a deepening coma. No autopsy was conducted in keeping with his widow’s request.

However, after analysing 75 samples from Arafat’s belongings, recently exhumed with his body, the experts have concluded that he was poisoned with polonium-210, a powerful radioactive isotope. Arafat had ingested supra-lethal quantities of polonium-210. The “smoking gun” has been found!

Earlier, misleading stories were planted in Israel, France and the US that Arafat died of gastroenteritis, AIDS or other causes. After the experts’ report, it’s clear that Arafat’s killing is a far greater scandal that the 2006 assassination of former Russian spy and government critic Alexander Litvinenko, which caused an uproar and led to several parallel investigations.

Arafat’s killing too should occasion further investigation under United Nations auspices to establish just who fired the “smoking gun” so that the culprits can be punished. This is crucial because Arafat was effectively in Israeli custody for years. The compound housing the Palestine Authority, which he headed, was surrounded by Israeli troops, who controlled its entry and exit points, and monitored and regulated the movement of goods and eatables, etc.

Israel must be made to come clean on the assassination. It’s to be seen whether its protectors and allies in the West, who claim a commitment to truthfulness, fair play, responsibility to punish crimes, and upholding democratic values, bring Israel to book. They have so far comprehensively failed to do so, and thus encouraged Israel to behave like a rogue state.

The needle of suspicion clearly points towards Israel in the present case. Israel has a shameful record of using unconventional armaments, including biological and chemical weapons, against innocent non-combatant civilians. In 1948, Zionist gangs working under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first Prime Minister, adopted a policy of genocide towards Palestine’s original inhabitants to evict them to occupy their land.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), these gangs besieged the well-fortified Palestinian city of Acre, and poisoned its water supply with typhoid bacteria. Zionists also targeted Egypt and Syria where they engineered cholera outbreaks. (Wendy Barnaby, The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare, London, Vision Paperbacks, 1997)

According to Avner Cohen, an authority on Israel’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Israel’s use of these weapons of mass destruction (WMD) derives from Ben-Gurion’s doctrine: “the destruction of the Palestinian society in Palestine is a necessary condition for the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins. If Palestinians cannot be removed by massacres and expulsion, they shall be removed by extermination.” Thus, Israel has repeatedly used WMDs, including poison gas and cancer-causing substances, against Palestinian civilians since the 1940s. It tried to poison Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in 2001. A 2003 BBC documentary “Israel’s Secret Weapon” amply records some of these nefarious activities.

The use of such weaponry against civilians is punishable under international law as well as the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Israeli state must be brought to justice more effectively than in the past when it blithely ignored an International Court of Justice judgment declaring illegal the Apartheid Wall it’s constructing to blockade, carve up and strangulate the Palestinians and their land.

We need a powerful international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign to mount public pressure on Israel—as in the South African apartheid regime’s case—to stop behaving like a bandit and persist with its illegal occupation of Palestine and countless crimes against its people. Yet, it’s the same state of Israel that adopts a holier-than-thou attitude to oppose a negotiated settlement of the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme through talks with P-5+1 (the UN Security Council five permanent members plus Germany), which recently ended without success when France, which has colonial ambitions in the region including Syria and Lebanon, scuppered them.

France, Israel and Saudi Arabia have come to form a troika which stridently opposes a reasonable agreement with Iran, which leads to its recognition as a normal and responsible state in return for accepting some restraint on its nuclear activities. Their motives differ widely. Saudi Arabia, which is probably the world’s most reactionary, socially backward-looking and oppressive regime, bears an anti-Shia animus against Iran. It’s so strongly opposed to reconciliation with Iran that it recently rejected a temporary Security Council seat in a show of peevishness.

Israel hates Iran for arming the Assad regime in Syria and the Hezbollah militia, the sole military force which has fought Israel to a standstill. And France is keen to exploit Saudi disaffection by selling arms to it and containing growing Iranian influence in the region.

Israel continues to make the maximalist but ludicrous demand that sanctions against Iran must not be lifted unless Tehran abandons uranium enrichment altogether—and dismantles its 19,000 enrichment centrifuges, which have produced an estimated 6,800 kg of 3.5-percent-enriched uranium, and 186 kg of uranium enriched to 20 percent, which can be relatively easily upgraded to the 20 kg of 90 percent-plus-enriched material needed for a Hiroshima-type bomb.

Iran also has a heavy water reactor under construction at Arak, which like India’s CIRUS or Dhruva reactors, is an efficient producer of plutonium, which can be used in Nagasaki-type bombs. Israel wants Iran to be prevented from completing the reactor—if necessary by militarily attacking it, as it has been imploring the US to do and threatened to do unilaterally.

Israel’s opposition would have sounded less disgustingly hypocritical had it not itself had a full-fledged nuclear weapons programme, with a stockpile of 200-plus warheads, or twice as large as India’s arsenal. At any rate, Iran has the legal right to enrich uranium (raise the proportion of the fissile isotope U-235 beyond the naturally occurring 0.7 percent) for peaceful purposes.

Iran’s nuclear activities can be closely monitored and verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections, especially if Iran agrees as part of larger deal to sign the IAEA’s Additional Protocol which mandates strict and intrusive inspections to ensure that no nuclear material is diverted from peaceful to military uses.

Even after the P-5+1 talks failed earlier this month, Iran continued to display moderation. It hasn’t resumed its 20 percent enrichment programme, suspended in August. Iran has slowed down its nuclear activities—for the first time in several years, according to IAEA inspectors—and installed very few new advanced centrifuges since President Hassan Rouhani took office in June.

Iran has also just signed an agreement with IAEA chief Yukia Amano to allow the Agency’ inspectors to visit Arak. That shows a strong will to build confidence among the Western powers.

An agreement that freezes 20-percent enrichment and converts the material already produced into plates that cannot be used to make a weapon, and further transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities, in return for a graded lifting of the sanctions that are hurting it economically, seems do-able. A precondition for this that President Barack Obama doesn’t cave in to the naysayers, contains the Zionist lobby’s influence in Washington, and works for a thaw with Iran by continuing the conversation begun in October with President Rouhani.

Mr Obama’s recent call for “patience” in dealing with Iran is a welcome sign that Washington is showing some recognition of the changed ground realities in West Asia-North Africa, in which Iran has emerged as a major strategic player which provides a useful counterweight to Saudi and Qatari influence, while acting as a moderate and positive force in Iraq, which Saudi Arabia resents.

No less important is Iran’s potential contribution to stabilising the situation in Afghanistan after the US and its allies withdraw from there next year. Iran, with India and Russia, has been a major influence in the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance, which cooperated with the US in driving al-Qaeda and Taliban out of the country after September 2001.

Rapprochement between the US and Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 ruptured their relations augurs well for the Middle East. It will not only strengthen the moderates in Iran and make way for more internal democracy and freedom. The moderates can breathe easy because a “regime change” in Iran, Mr Obama has made clear, is no longer on the US agenda.

Western acceptance of Iran as a normal state will also exercise a sobering influence on Saudi Arabia. Already, some Saudi commentators are urging that “reconciliation with Iran is in the interest of everyone…we have to look forward to it more than the Americans.”

A new cooperative security structure in West Asia could hopefully—at least eventually—facilitate an agreement on Palestine ending Israeli occupation. That’s still a long shot. But major changes do seem afoot in West Asia. They must be heartily welcomed.—end--