Israel's
Plan For A Military
Strike On Iran
By Jonathan Cook
13 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The
Middle East, and possibly the world, stands on the brink of a terrible
conflagration as Israel and the United States prepare to deal with Iran's
alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, it becomes clearer
by the day, wants to use its air force to deliver a knock-out blow against
Tehran. It is not known whether it will use conventional weapons or
a nuclear warhead in such a strike.
At this potentially cataclysmic
moment in global politics, it is good to see that one of the world's
leading broadcasters, the BBC, decided this week that it should air
a documentary entitled "Will Israel bomb Iran?". It is the
question on everyone's lips and doubtless, with the imprimatur of the
BBC, the programme will sell around the world.
The good news ends there,
however. Because the programme addresses none of the important issues
raised by Israel's increasingly belligerent posture towards Tehran.
It does not explain that,
without a United Nations resolution, a military strike on Iran to destroy
its nuclear research programme would be a gross violation of international
law.
It does not clarify that
Israel's own large nuclear arsenal was secretly developed and is entirely
unmonitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or that it is
perceived as a threat by its neighbours and may be fuelling a Middle
East arms race.
Nor does the programme detail
the consequences of an Israeli strike on instability and violence across
the Middle East, including in Iraq, where British and American troops
are stationed as an occupying force.
And there is no consideration
of how in the longer term unilateral action by Israel, with implicit
sanction by the international community, is certain to provoke a steep
rise in global jihad against the West.
Instead the programme dedicates
40 minutes to footage of Top Gun heroics by the Israeli air force, and
the recollections of pilots who carried out a similar, "daring"
attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor in the early 1980s; menacing long shots
of Iran's nuclear research facilities; and interviews with three former
Israeli prime ministers, a former Israeli military chief of staff, various
officials in Israeli military intelligence and a professor who designs
Israel's military arsenal.
All of them speak with one
voice: Israel, they claim, is about to be "wiped out" by Iranian
nuclear weapons and must defend itself "whatever the consequences".
They are given plenty of
airtime to repeat unchallenged well-worn propaganda Israel has been
peddling through its own media, and which has been credulously amplified
by the international media: that Iran is led by a fanatical anti-Semite
who, like Adolf Hitler, believes he can commit genocide against the
Jewish people, this time through a nuclear holocaust.
Other Israeli misinformation,
none of it believed by serious analysts, is also uncritically spread
by the film-makers: that Hizbullah in Lebanon is a puppet of Iran, waiting
to aid its master in Israel's destruction; that Iran is only months
away from creating nuclear weapons, a "point of no return",
as the programme warns; and that a "fragile" Israel is under
constant threat of annihilation from all its Arab neighbours.
But the programme's unequivocal
main theme -- echoing precisely Israel's own agenda -- is that Iran's
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is hellbent on destroying Israel. The
film-makers treat seriously, bordering on reverentially, preposterous
comments from Israel's leaders about this threat.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli
government's veteran roving ambassador, claims, for example, that Iran
has made "a call for genocide" against Israel, compares an
Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp", and
warns that "no one would like to see a comeback to the times of
the Nazis".
Cabinet minister Avi Dichter,
a former head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, believes Israel
faces "an existential threat" from Iran. And Zvi Stauber,
a former senior figure in military intelligence, compares Israel's situation
to a man whose neighbour "has a gun and he declares every day he
is going to kill you".
But pride of place goes to
Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current leader of
the opposition. He claims repeatedly that the only possible reason Iran
and its president could want a nuclear arsenal is for Israel's "extermination".
"If he can get away with it, he'll do it." "Ayatollahs
with atombic bombs are a powerful threat to all of us." A nuclear
Iran "is a threat unlike anything we have seen before. It's beyond
politics" -- apparently worse than the nuclear states of North
Korea and Pakistan, the latter a military dictatorship and friend of
the US barely containing within its borders some of the most fanatical
jihadist movements in the world.
Apart from a brief appearance
by an Iranian diplomat, no countervailing opinions are entertained in
the BBC programme; only Israel's military and political leadership is
allowed to speak.
The documentary gives added
credence to the views of Israel's security establishment by making great
play of a speech by Ahmadinejad -- one with which the Israeli authorities
and their allies in Washington have made endless mischief -- in which
the Iranian president repeats a statement by Iran's late spiritual leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini, that went unnoticed when first uttered.
In the BBC programme, Ahmadenijad
is quoted as saying: "The regime occupying Jerusalem should be
eliminated from the page of history". This is at least an improvement
on the original translation, much repeated in the programme by Netanyahu
and others, that "Israel must be wiped off the map".
But for some strange reason,
the programme makers infer from their more accurate translation the
same diabolical intent on Ahmadinejad's part as suggested by Netanyahu's
fabricated version. Iran's nuclear weapons, we are told by the programme
as if they are already in existence, have "presented Israel's leaders
with a new order of threat". In making his speech, the BBC film
argues, Ahmadinejad "issued a death sentence against Israel".
But, as has now been pointed
out on numerous occasions (though clearly not often enough for the BBC
to have noticed), Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the need
for regime change, the ending of the regime occupying the Palestinians
in violation of international law. They were not talking, as Netanyahu
and co claim, about the destruction of the state of Israel or the Jewish
people. The implication of the speech is that the current Israeli regime
will end because occupying powers are illegitimate and unsustainable,
not because Iran plans to fire nuclear missiles at the Jewish state
or commit genocide.
Overlooked by the programme
makers is the fact that "fragile" Israel is currently the
only country in the Middle East armed with nuclear warheads, several
hundred of them, as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world,
which presumably make most of its neighbours feel "fragile"
too, with far more reason.
And, as we are being persuaded
how "fragile" Israel really is, another former prime minister,
Ehud Barak, is interviewed. "Ultimately we are standing alone,"
he says, in apparent justification for an illegal, unilateral strike.
Iran's nuclear reasearch facilities, Barak warns, are hidden deep underground,
so deep that "no conventional weapon can penetrate", leaving
us to infer that in such circumstances Israel will have no choice but
use a tactical nuclear strike in its "self-defence". And,
getting into his stride, Barak adds that some facilities are in crowded
urban areas "where any attack could end up in civilian collateral
damage".
But despite the terrifying
scenario laid out by Israel's leaders, the BBC website cheerleads for
Israel in the same manner as the programme-makers, suggesting that Israel
has the right to engineer a clash of civilisations: "With America
unlikely to take military action, the pressure is growing on Israel's
leaders to launch a raid."
As should be clear by now,
the Israeli government's fingerprints are all over this BBC "documentary".
And that is hardly surprising because the man behind this "independent"
production is Israel's leading film-maker: Noam Shalev.
Shalev, a graduate of a New
York film school, has been making a spate of documentaries through his
production company Highlight Films, based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv,
that have been lapped up by the BBC and other foreign broadcasters.
With the BBC's stamp of approval, it is easy for Shalev to sell his
films around the world.
Shalev, who claims that he
doesn't "espouse a political view", started his career by
making documentaries on less controversial subjects. He has produced
films on Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, and on the Zaka organisation,
Jewish religious fundamentalists who arrive at the scene of suicide
attacks quite literally to pick up the pieces, of human remains.
In the past his films managed
to bypass the reticence of broadcasters like the BBC to broach the combustible
subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside their news programmes
by touching on the topic obliquely. Importantly, however, Shalev's films
always humanise his Israeli subjects, showing them as complex, emotional
and caring beings, while largely ignoring the millions of Palestinians
the Israeli government and army are oppressing.
According to a profile of
Shalev published in the Israeli media in 2004, his success derives from
the fact that he has developed a "soft-sell approach", showing
Israel in a good light without "the straightforward 'hasbara' [propaganda]
efforts which explain Israel's case that Israel's Foreign Ministry is
required to disseminate to European and American news outlets."
In the words of an Israeli
public relations executive, Shalev has a skill in telling Israel's story
in ways that international broadcasters appreciate: "[Shalev] also
shows the Israeli side, he is not one of those traitors who sell their
ideology for money. He has the skill to market it in such a way that
overseas they want to see it, and this is very important."
But recently Shalev has grown
more confident to try the hard sell for Israel, apparently sure that
the BBC and other foreign broadcasters will still buy his films. And
that is because Shalev offers them something that other film-makers
cannot: intimate access to Israel's security forces, an area off-limits
to his rivals.
Before the disengagement
from Gaza last year, for example, Shalev made a sympathetic documentary,
shown by the BBC, about a day in the life of one Israeli soldier serving
there. The film largely concealed the context that might have alerted
viewers to the fact that the soldier was enforcing a four-decade illegal
occupation of Gaza, or that the Strip is an open-air prison in which
thousands of Palestinian have been killed by the Israeli army and in
which a majority of Gazans live in abject poverty.
Interviewed about the documentary,
Shalev observed: "The army really is very, very careful. There
is no indiscriminate firing. I saw, and this was not a show put on just
for us, that before any shot is fired there is confirmation that there
is nobody behind or in front of the objective. The army is very sensitive
to non-deliberate fire."
In other words, Shalev's
film for the BBC shed no light on why Israel's "deliberate"
fire has killed hundreds of Palestinian children during the second intifada
or why a large number of civilians have died from Israeli gunfire and
missile strikes inside the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this year Shalev
made another film for the BBC, "The Hunt for Black October",
to coincide with the release of Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich. "The
BBC gains exclusive access to the undercover Mossad agents assigned
to track down the Palestinian group responsible for the murder of Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics," the BBC was able to glow
in its promotional material.
Shalev's latest film, "Will
Israel bomb Iran?", follows this well-trodden path. Arabs and Muslims
are again deprived of a voice, as are non-Israeli experts.
So why did the BBC buy this
blatant piece of propaganda?
Here are a few clues. Shalev's
film includes:
* footage taken from inside
Hizbullah bunkers under the supervision of the Israeli army as it occupied
south Lebanon.
* a "rare view"
of the inside of the Israeli army's satellite control room, which spies
on Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran and which, according to programme,
is "incredibly guarded about its security arrangements".
* an exclusive appearance
by Israel's former military chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, who we are
told is "rarely interviewed".
* a glimpse inside a Rafael
weapons factory, which the programme tells us is "rarely filmed".
In other words, the BBC,
and the other broadcasters who will air this "documentary"
in the coming weeks and months, has been dazzled by Shalev's ability
to show us the secret world of the Israeli army. So dazzled, it seems,
that it has forgotten to check -- or worse, simply doesn't care -- what
message Shalev is inserting between his exclusive footage.
It might have occurred to
someone at the BBC to wonder why Shalev gets these chances to show things
no one else is allowed to. Could it be that the "hasbara"
division of the Israeli Foreign Ministry has got far more sophisticated
than it once was?
Is the Israeli government
using Shalev, wittingly or not, and is he in turn using the BBC, to
spread Israeli propaganda? Propaganda that may soon propel us towards
the "clash of civilisations" so longed for by Israel's leadership.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His website is
www.jkcook.net
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