SIXTY YEARS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST GENOCIDE THEN AND NOW
12 May 2005
Louis Rene Beres
Professor of International Law
Department of Political Science
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907
USA
TEL 765/494-4189
FAX 765/494-0833
BERES@POLSCI.PURDUE.EDU
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The end of World War II in Europe is only a receding memory, but
genocide now has a plausible future as well as a definite and indelible past.
Sixty years after Europe's liberation, the State of Israel has become the
individual Jew in macrocosm, and the explicit objective of various
Arab/Islamic states and movements is indisputably identical to that of the
Third Reich. The objective in both cases, past and future, is genocide
against Jewish populations. Currently, even by the strict jurisprudential
standard established at the 1948 Genocide Convention, the openly-stated
policies and codified doctrines of certain Arab/Islamic states and terror
groups qualify unambiguously as intended crimes against humanity.
In the eyes of the world, of those that the UN Charter calls the
"civilized nations," Israel is the individual Jew writ large. Since 1948,
unhidden plans for extermination and annihilation of the Jewish State have
been animated by age-old fanatical hatreds based on anti-Semitism. Among
pertinent elements of the Arab/Islamic world, issues of land and politics
remain a mere pretext for orchestrated convulsions of outrage.
In substance these issues are always peripheral. For these elements,
war and terror against Israel are now little more than a newer and
considerably more efficient means to commit Holocaust-era crimes. Should
Iran or any Arab state or movement be permitted to acquire nuclear or even
certain biological weapons, the probable result to Israel might well be
another Jewish genocide.
Beginning in 1938, small groups of predominantly Jewish scientists
from Central Europe living in the United States began to express informed
fears that Nazi Germany could build nuclear weapons. About two years after
Einstein transmitted these authoritative apprehensions to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt in his now-famous letter of August 1939, the United
States launched the Manhattan Project. In part, this effort was the result
of a perceived danger by Jewish emigres of an incontestably existential
threat to then widely dispersed European Jewish communities.
Today it is the responsibility of all "civilized nations" to recognize
another existential danger, this time to the ingathered Jewish population
of the State of Israel. Should it face the prospect of a nuclear Iran, or of
any Arab state or movement with atomic or even certain biological weapons,
Israel would have absolutely no rational choice but to act preemptively.
This is exacty what Prime Minister Menachem Begin did on June 7, 1981, when
Israel's "Operation Opera" successfully destroyed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear
reactor.
This operation, best described under international law as a
permissible act of "anticipatory self-defense," was an expressed
application of the "Begin Doctrine." This doctrine clearly affirmed Israel's
policy to deny certain weapons of mass destruction to particular enemy
states. It was drawn directly from Prime Minister Begin's awareness that
the developing nuclear threat then facing Israel - a country already the
individual Jew in macrocosm - was merely a new form of a previous
slaughter.
It is essential today, when Israel is under intense American pressure
to turn a blind eye to Iranian and possibly other regional efforts at
nuclearization, that the Begin Doctrine be reinvigorated and declared. Now,
just as during the Second World War, Jews face the threat of mass murder
because of atomic weapons. Now, however, the danger is not that these
weapons will be used by a genocidal state against other states to acquire
physical custody over Jewish bodies; rather, it is directed against that
single state which was expressly created for the eternal protection of
these bodies.
In certain respects at least, the nuclear danger to Jews is even
greater today than during World war II; that is, it looms even more
menacingly over those Jews who live in Israel. Logistically, with the
concentration of more than five million Jews within a state that is half the
size of Lake Michigan, genocide has now become a much simpler operational
task. In an unspeakable irony, the Zionist solution to what Herzl called the
"Jewish Problem" could soon make much easier what Hitler called the "Final
Solution to the Jewish Question."
Presently, as UN-member states convene in New York to re-examine
the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty of 1970, Israel is already coming
under increasing pressure to dismantle and renounce its still undeclared
nuclear weapons capacity. In the name of "fairness," dozens of countries,
including virtually all Arab/Islamic states and many others, now insistently
demand that Washington push Israel to accept a regional "nuclear weapon
free-zone." Any misguided Israeli move to comply with such sinister
pressure would effectively assure Israel's apocalyptic disappearance.
International law is not a suicide pact. From the standpoint of
criminal intent, Israel cannot possibly be compared to various Arab and
certain other Islamic states, whose only undeniable rationale for weapons
of mass destruction vis-a-vis Israel is manifest aggression and offensive
war. It is absolutely certain that Israel's nuclear weapons exist only for
national survival and self-protection, and that these weapons - which have
never been flaunted, brandished or even acknowledged - would be used only
in reprisal and only for this reason.
Faced with the newest form of organized Jewish extinction, Israel's
leaders must soon remind the world that the "Begin Doctrine" is still
entirely consistent with the established right of anticipatory self-
defense under international law. Following such an appropriate
jurisprudential reminder, it must make prompt tactical preparations to
prevent a looming Jewish genocide by implementing a number of established
military means, including comprehensive plans for the preemptive
destruction of various enemy WMD targets and infrastructures. Other
coordinated and corollary Israeli efforts must be directed at particular
regime targets, ranging from pertinent national leadership elites to those
individual scientists in different parts of the globe who now fashion or
prepare to fashion biological and nuclear weapons for exclusively
genocidal purposes. This proposed killing of enemy scientists making mega-
weapons for dangerous regimes is assuredly not unprecedented practice by
Israeli or American operatives, nor is it by any means a prima facie
violation of international law. Similar Israeli/American tactics of
"targeted killings" must remain in place against certain terrorist leaders,
and should quickly be extended and expanded to any such leaders with
documented plans to create nuclear or certain biological weapons of mass
destruction.
During World War II, a number of Arab leaders went directly to Berlin
to meet with Hitler. They enthusiastically offered their own armed forces
to extend the European annihilation of Jews to portions of the Islamic
Middle East. At that time the Allies did everything possible to prevent the
wartime nuclearization of Germany and, very successfuly, at least for the
moment, to create an atomic monopoly for the United States. Today, aware
that it cannot possibly permit a single Arab state or movement or Iran to
ever acquire authentic weapons of mass destruction, Israel must prepare
to do whatever is needed to prevent another Jewish genocide. This is now a
genuinely sacred obligation, not only to Israel's currently imperiled
population, but also to the memory of those murdered Six Million who now
sleep in the dust.
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LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Chair of "Project Daniel," a
small private group advising the Prime Minister of Israel on nuclear
security issues. Born in Switzerland at the end of World War II, his
Austrian-Jewish grandparents were murdered at the SS-killing grounds in
Riga, Latvia.
