by DESMOND TUTU
The cover-up has to stop – and with it, the huge sums in aid for a country with oppressive policies towards Palestinians
Every recent US administration has performed a perverse ritual as it has come into office. All have agreed to undermine US law by signing secret letters stipulating they will not acknowledge something everyone knows: that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal.
Part of the reason for this is to stop people focusing on Israel’s capacity to turn dozens of cities to dust. This failure to face up to the threat posed by Israel’s horrific arsenal gives its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a sense of power and impunity, allowing Israel to dictate terms to others.
But one other effect of the US administration’s ostrich approach is that it avoids invoking the US’s own laws, which call for an end to taxpayer largesse for nuclear weapons proliferators.
Israel in fact is a multiple nuclear weapons proliferator. There is overwhelming evidence that it offered to sell the apartheid regime in South Africa nuclear weapons in the 1970s and even conducted a joint nuclear test. The US government tried to cover up these facts. Additionally, it has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Yet the US and Israeli governments pushed for the invasion of Iraq based on lies about coming mushroom clouds. As Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu said: the nuclear weapons were not in Iraq – they are in Israel.
Amendments
by former Senators Stuart Symington and John Glenn to the Foreign
Assistance Act ban US economic and military assistance to nuclear
proliferators and countries that acquire nuclear weapons. While
president, Jimmy Carter invoked such provisions against India and
Pakistan.
But no president has done so with regard to Israel.
Quite the contrary. There has been an oral agreement since President
Richard Nixon to accept Israel’s “nuclear ambiguity” – effectively to
allow Israel the power that comes with nuclear weapons without the
responsibility. And since President Bill Clinton, according to the New Yorker magazine, there have been these secret letters.
US presidents and politicians have refused to acknowledge
that Israel has nuclear weapons even though the law offers an exemption
that would allow the funding to continue if the president certified to
Congress that aid to a proliferator would be a vital US interest.
Israel’s
per capita gross domestic product is comparable with that of Britain.
Nevertheless, US taxpayer funds to Israel exceed that to any other
country. Adjusted for inflation, the publicly known amount over the
years is now approaching $300bn.
This
farce should end. The US government should uphold its laws and cut off
funding to Israel because of its acquisition and proliferation of
nuclear weapons.
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