REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE

                          GENOCIDE THEN AND NOW

      Memory is indispensable to justice. But it is also necessary for the

prevention of future crimes. In addition, justice and future crime

prevention are intimately intertwined, as each expectation draws deeply

and authoritatively from the other.

      Now the end of World War II in Europe is only a receding memory, but

there are distressingly obvious instances of justice denied. Even more

disturbing is the undeniable fact that another genocide is currently being

planned against "The Jews." It is true, of course, that this new genocide

will be directed against the entire state of the Jews - Israel, the

individual Jew in macrocosm - but the annihilatory motives are exactly the

same. Moreover, under binding international law, war and genocide are not

mutually exclusive. An Arab/Islamic war to "liquidate the Zionist entity"

would be jurisprudentially indistinguishable from what happened to our

people before and during the second world war.

      Let us be frank. Genocide now has a plausible future as well as an

accursed and indelible past. More than sixty years after Europe's blessed

liberation, the State of Israel has become the individual Jew writ large,

and mass murder is plainly the explicit objective of various Arab/Islamic

states and movements. The goal of these nations and organizations is

indisputably identical to that of the Third Reich. Even by the strict legal

standard established at the 1948 Genocide Convention, their openly-stated

policies and carefully-codified doctrines qualify unambiguously as fully

intended crimes against humanity.

      In the eyes of all the world, including those states that the UN

Charter calls the "civilized nations" (yes, this term is actually found at

Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice), Israel is

the New Jew. Whatever passions and hatreds were directed against flesh-

and-blood Jewish individuals in the past can now be focused upon those

Jews bound together in an institutionalized "entity." To translate a well-

founded French expression, "The more things change, the more they remain

the same."

      Since 1948, altogether unhidden plans for extermination of the Jewish

State have been animated by age-old fanatical hatreds. Among pertinent

elements of the Arab/Islamic world, issues of land and politics remain a

mere pretext for orchestrated convulsions of outrage. These enemies of

Israel do not read Clausewitz; they are far more comfortable with MEIN

KAMPF. They do not really "think" about Israel; they erupt.

      In substance, these issues of territory and "negotiations" 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. Here it is

especially regrettable that Prime Minister Sharon's planned

"disengagement" will do absolutely nothing to blunt Palestinian hatreds.

Rather, this latest Jewish surrender will substantially hasten a new wave

of Palestinian crimes against humanity.

      Let us consider more precisely the nuclear threat of 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

Albert Einstein transmitted these critical 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 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 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."

      Recently, as UN-member states convened self-righteously in New York

to re-examine the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty of 1970, Israel came

under predictable 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, insistently

demanded that Washington push Israel to accept a regional "nuclear weapon

free-zone." Any future Israeli move to comply with such sinister pressure

would effectively assure Israel's apocalyptic disappearance. In this

connection, it must be noted that calls for Israel's unilateral nuclear

disarmament have come not only from enemy states and peoples, but also

from some of Israel's own university professors. In a Fall 2003 article in

the distinguished American journal INTERNATIONAL SECURITY (Harvard), Tel-

Aviv University Professor Zeev Maoz called for Israel to disband its

nuclear weapons program and join with Arab states in the region to create

a "nuclear weapons-free zone." (My own rejoinder to this curious article

was published in the Summer 2004 issue of the same journal.)

      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 total war.

It is incontestably 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. Further, the use of nuclear weapons

for national survival could be permissible in certain specific residual

circumstances that were announced and identified by the International

Court of Justice on July 8, 1996. In that Advisory Opinion ("The Legality of

the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons"), the Court ruled as follows: "The

threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules

of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the

principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current

state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the

Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear

weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-

defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake."

      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. There 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 that 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. Today, as before, justice and the

prevention of new crimes are two sides of the same coin.

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Special to THE JEWISH PRESS

29 June 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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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. Professor Beres is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist

for THE JEWISH PRESS.