Rule of Law and Israel’s WMD

The rule of law is the principle that all people and institutions are subject to and accountable to laws that are fairly applied and enforced.

By Eileen Fleming

On Wednesday, the Israeli Disarmament Movement petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice regarding the Dimona, “the most hazardous industrial complex in the country [which] operates in secrecy, without public control, oversight, or even under the law.”

In 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, declared the establishment of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), whose Director General reports directly to the Prime Minister.

The IAEC operates two research centers: the Soreq Nuclear Research Center and the Nuclear Research Center at Dimona in the Negev, which was established at the end of 1959.

The IAEC’s roles and methods of monitoring have never been enshrined in Israeli law.

The Israeli Disarmament Movement petitioners cite how the failure to regulate the IAEC’s “operations through Knesset legislation is adversely impacting democracy and the rule of law in Israel. In the same way that operations of the General Security Services were enshrined in the General Security Services Law in 2002, so should the operations of the IAEC.”

Sharon Dolev, Director of the Israeli Disarmament Movement explained:

The ambiguity typifying the work of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission has become dangerous in itself for Israeli citizens.

While vagueness regarding the existence of nuclear arms in Israel has always been the policy of Israel’s governments, its broadening into aspects pertaining to citizens’ health and security, the dangers deriving from the condition of the aging reactor, and long-term environmental hazards, is totally unjustified.

This is what we hope to change by appealing to the Supreme Court…

A former Knesset Member and Chair of the Israeli Disarmament Movement’s board, Mossi Raz said, “Ahead of Israel’s 70th year, the use of nuclear technology must be institutionalized and regulated. The appeal does not express opinions for or against the IAEC. Rather it presents a demand that the IAEC act in accordance with the law.”

Author and Professor Avner Cohen nailed it:

This petition to the Israeli Supreme Court concerns the very principle and substance of the rule of law.

The nuclear issue in Israel is wrapped in opacity, in both legal and democratic terms.

And precisely because Israel is perceived world-wide as a nuclear state for all practical purposes, legislating the nuclear issue will mean applying the rule of law to this fateful subject, still suspended in a twilight zone.

 

Israel has suspended its Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu into a ‘twilight zone’ of Orwellian proportions because ‘the rule of law’ in Israel’s High Court keeps changing!

LEARN about Vanunu’s human rights struggle to leave ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and SECURITY’S vendetta against Vanunu:

HERE

 

 

In April at a conference in Tel Aviv, an ultrasound report exposing 1,537 cracks in Israel’s Dimona’s nuclear reactor was revealed.

Haaretz reported:

Fears for the condition of the [Dimona] reactor were palpable at the conference…Israel received its nuclear reactor from France at the end of the 1950s and it was put into operation for the first time at the end of 1963. Such reactors are intended to be operational for about 40 years, to ensure they remain in one piece. The main problem with aging reactors is that the core is irreplaceable…

This Friday, President Nuclear Free World Obama will visit Hiroshima but he will not issue an apology for America’s terrorist actions of 6 August 1945, when over 140,000 civilians were vaporized when the U.S.A. dropped its first atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima.

On 5 April 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage in Prague and admitted:

As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends.

The voices of peace and progress must be raised together.

Human destiny will be what we make of it.

Words must mean something….

 

In 1987, from solitary confinement in Ashkelon prison, Mordechai Vanunu wrote:

The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today.

This struggle is not only a legitimate one – it is a moral, inescapable struggle.

Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over [and] this issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy.

Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons?