BNC Statement

BDS Statement on apartheid Israel's WMDs

152 States voted for IAEA supervision of Israel’s nuclear facilities, yet apartheid Israel avoids supervision thanks to European and US support.

In light of the overwhelming vote by 152 states at the United Nation’s First Committee for IAEA supervision of apartheid Israel’s nuclear facilities, Palestinian civil society calls for global pressure on the UN to force Israel to declare and dismantle under UN supervision all its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). If it refuses, it should be subjected to targeted, lawful and proportionate sanctions to force it to.

Apartheid Israel is, after all, the only state in the “Middle East” – and one of the few among the UN's 193 member states – which has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). 

In sharp contrast, the UN has imposed severe sanctions on North Korea since 2006 for testing nuclear weapons and not joining the NPT, and the U.S. and Europe have imposed a brutal regime of sanctions on Iran, a signatory of the NPT that has no military nuclear program. Yet, no UN or Western sanctions whatsoever have ever been imposed on apartheid Israel despite the compelling evidence of its decades-old nuclear weapons program and large arsenal of nuclear bombs.

Israel does not only develop WMDs, it has used them, as the irrefutable record shows. Newly uncovered Israeli archival documents reveal that in 1948 Zionist militias and later Israeli troops poisoned Indigenous Palestinian wells as part of the premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Naqab and Acre, and in order to stop the advance of the Egyptian army. When Egypt complained against the use of banned WMDs, Israeli officials accused Egypt of antisemitism.

Thirty years after the crash of El Al cargo flight 1862 into the Bilmermeer neighborhood in Amsterdam, many questions about that disaster remain unanswered, including the refusal of the Israeli authorities to provide the full manifesto of the potentially military-grade deadly chemicals on board. Destined for the Nes Tsiona Biological Research Center, which belongs to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and which also developed the poisons used in the 1948 well poisoning, such deadly cargo could explain the spread of illness among the surviving residents of the neighborhood.

The Israeli Mossad has used poison on multiple attacks, most famously in a failed assassination attempt in Amman on September 1997 against a leader of a Palestinian party. The then Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just been reelected to the premier’s office in a coalition that includes openly fascist parties. 

Israel has never faced any accountability measures from the UN or individual states for its use of banned weapons.

No WMD is more dangerous than nuclear weapons, however, and international action is urgently needed to dismantle these weapons which pose a risk to the entire human race. Israeli politicians who obsess about the State of Israel’s “right to exist” and who refer to the non-violent BDS movement as an “existential threat” cannot be trusted with nuclear warheads. 

 


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