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Israel's Right to the Dimona Reactor

(Ha'aretz) Ari Shavit - According to foreign reports, the nuclear reactor at Dimona built in the early 1960s is not there for peaceful purposes. Why should Israel be permitted that which is prohibited to other states? Why has the international community agreed that it should exist inside a cloud of ambiguity? Because the international community of the second half of the 20th century was moral. It remembered that for more than a millennium the Jewish people was the persecuted "Other" of Europe, and that between 1940 and 1945 a third of its number were murdered, and even Roosevelt and Churchill didn't lift a finger to save the one million Jews who could still have been rescued in 1944. The international community could see that the Jewish state was surrounded by a sea of enmity. It also understood that precisely because the nuclear reactor was not for peaceful purposes, it would ensure peace. It is Dimona that stabilizes the Middle East. Israel did not boast or behave ostentatiously, or in any way misuse the capability that was attributed to it. Even in difficult circumstances, it acted with deliberation and composure. It never unsheathed the sword that those foreign reports describe as a terrible one. If the international community of the 21st century tries to force fashionable norms on the Dimona reactor, it will cause a disaster to itself. History will not forgive anyone who undermines the order that is based on Dimona, or anyone who tries to crack the glass that protects the Jewish state from those who want to do away with it.
2010-05-13 08:23:51
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