Israel Must Turn Over WMDs for Peace

Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, managing editor of Veterans Today, about Syria calling on the international community to put pressure on Israel to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.

What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Mr. Dean, Israel has weapons of mass destruction and that’s no secret. What makes Tel Aviv eligible to possess WMDs while it’s technically at war with many regional countries?

Chemical-Bio weapons storage in Israel – one of many sites.

Dean: Well that is very simple. They have a big brother, the United States that allows them to get away with it and I heard one report that in defending the claims about their weapons were a threat that because they were a democratic country,  everybody knows that Israel would not use WMD offensively.

But actually some years ago during an election, during a budget debate, the left was complaining about all the money being spent not only on a conventional military but they were talking about the nuclear developments themselves.

And in one of the debates …, they said we do not really have the nuclear or the WMD for defensive purposes because our conventional military is enough to take care of things. That [the WMD] is an offensive platform so when we want to negotiate with our neighbors we can do so by holding that WMD gun to their head.

And then later on in the last ten years we have had a lot of declassified intelligence here in United States and virtually every military intelligence report has always concluded that Israel had complete conventional weapons superiority against any potential enemies in the region and their weapons of mass destruction were not needed for defensive purposes. It was a completely offensive platform.

Press TV: Do you think the momentum is being created for an international action to bring Tel Aviv to abandon its nuclear weapons?

Dean: We should and really I have been surprised the archival record is just absolutely full of everything that you would need to prove why they did it. The French started helping them initially, they were stealing nuclear material from the British, the US during the Johnson years allowed them to steal nuclear material here.

So the whole record of how Israel was allowed to become a nuclear weapons powerhouse in the Middle East which was really a destabilizing force, that has been covered up because really it has been a big mistake and that’s what, they had everybody and that is the real big problem.

So I think…everybody, we should bet the farm now on putting Israel on the spot, that if the West really wants peace and stability in the Middle East they basically have to get Israel to turn all their WMDs over to  international supervision, also.