Israel's chemical arsenal under new scrutiny

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Israel's chemical arsenal under new scrutiny

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A plan to inspect and destroy Syria's chemical weapons has focused new attention on Israel's undeclared WMDs.

Jonathan Cook Last Modified: 20 Sep 2013 11:41

Nazareth, Israel - Israeli officials are reported to be increasingly nervous that international efforts to destroy of Syria's chemical weapons might serve as a prelude to demands on Israel to eliminate its own, undeclared weapons of mass destruction.

Israel maintains a posture it terms 'ambiguity' on the question of whether it possesses either nuclear or chemical weapons.But Israel is widely believed to have a large arsenal of nuclear bombs, concealed from international scrutiny, and there are strong suspicions that it has secretly developed a chemical weapons programme.

Those concerns intensified following the disclosure this month of a confidential CIA report [ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... eapons_too ] suggesting that Israel had created a significant stockpile of chemical weapons by the early 1980s. Israel has refused both to sign the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, covering the regulation of nuclear arms, and to ratify the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which obligates states to submit to international oversight and destroy chemical agents in their possession.

Over the past few days there have been a series of moves by other states in the Middle East to bring international attention to Israel's WMD.

Those efforts followed Damascus' ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention last week and the announcement at the weekend of a timetable agreed by Russia and the United States to disarm Syria of its chemical stockpiles by the middle of next year.

Israel is now one of only six states refusing to implement the convention, along with Egypt, Myanmar, Angola, North Korea and South Sudan. That has prompted concerns that Israel could rapidly become a pariah state on the issue.

The Haaretz daily newspaper reported this week that the prospect of mounting international pressure on Israel to come clean on its WMD was "keeping quite a few top Israeli defence officials awake at night".

Shlomo Brom, a former Israeli general and now a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, called Israel's current policy on chemical weapons "unwise".
"The reality in the Middle East has changed since Israel refused to ratify the convention. There is no longer a good reason for Israel to remain with the handful of regimes that oppose it."

This week Arab states submitted a resolution to the United Nations' nuclear watchdog body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, calling on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the IAEA's inspection regime as part of efforts to create a nuclear arms-free zone in the region.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel has refused to sign, was drawn up in 1968, the year after Israel is widely believed to have produced its first warhead.

'Serious measures'

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