Numéro 60--- ÉTÉ 2007 - Vho

GAZETTE DU GOLFE ET DES BANLIEUES / 60 / ÉTÉ 2007
Israel's nuclear project was borne out of the tremendous fear of another Holocaust, which
was a guiding light for the project's father, David Ben-Gurion, and that week in May may have
been its most dramatic.
Many of those involved saw themselves as partners in the making of a unique history.
They were convinced that their activity signified a historic moment, and no politician, not
even the prime minister, would be able to turn back the clock. Many of the recently published
studies of the Six-Day War hinted at the fact that the Israeli nuclear dimension played an
important but hidden role in the events leading up to the war, but none of the books has
focused on this aspect. Layers of ambiguity, secrecy and taboo, in addition to censorship,
prevented the story from coming to light. In my book Israel and the Bomb (1999), I tried to
examine the crucial place of the Six-Day War in Israel's nuclear history. On the basis of
commentary in Israeli and foreign publications, as well as additional documentary material, I
suggested that it was on the eve of the war that Israel realized its nuclear option. Here, I will
update that research. It should be noted that in the absence of official, authorized Israeli
material, all of the assessments and conclusions made here are mine alone.
According to all the estimates, Israel had almost completed the research and
development stage of its nuclear plan during the year that preceded the Six-Day War. The
main partners in the plan's development had acted separately from each other both
organizationally and technologically, but now they were approaching the point of
convergence. To oversee coordination of their work, halfway through 1966, the Atomic Energy
Commission was reconstituted as an administration responsible for dealing with nuclear
activity, under the management baton of Professor Israel Dostrovsky of the Weizmann Institute.
Prime minister Levi Eshkol decided that he himself would chair the committee and hold the
ministerial responsibility for its sensitive work. Despite the establishment of the commission, the
political establishment still found it difficult to provide clear answers to the dilemmas that
multiplied during the period preceding the Six-Day War. For the initial five nuclear countries
(the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China), a successful nuclear test
marked the transition from the infrastructure and R&D stage to the stage of building force and
strategy. While such a test revealed the capabilities, it also publicly symbolized that the
country had a nuclear political commitment. A test meant lifting the ambiguity surrounding
the country's intentions. According to expert opinion, from a technological perspective, Israel
could have followed this procedure in full during the second half of 1966. At that point, Israel
could have joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear country in every
respect.
Delicate political consensus
But Israel was different. As I wrote in Israel and the Bomb, as far as Eshkol was
concerned, such a step was not a possibility. "What do you think, that the world will
congratulate us for our achievements?" Eshkol would sarcastically demand of those who
brought up the subject. And he had good reasons for thinking this way. Eshkol knew that the act
of revelation would be a gross violation of the commitment he had made to the American
administration that Israel would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the
Middle East. Ben-Gurion had used this formula back in 1962, and afterward Shimon Peres
used it as well, at an improvised meeting with president John F. Kennedy at the White House
in April 1963. But the memorandum of understanding Eshkol signed in March 1965 with
White House representative Robert Kommer turned this formula into an official Israeli
commitment. Its precise meaning was vague, and Israel refrained from clarifying it. Eshkol,
who fell in love with the formulation for exactly that reason, would, with a half-smile, ask the
native English speakers around him (Abba Eban and Ya'akov Herzog) what exactly he was
promising not to do in saying this.
Everyone understood that a revelatory act would signify a gross violation of the Israeli
commitment. Beyond that, Eshkol knew that the great powers were in an advanced stage of
discussing an international nuclear nonproliferation pact. An Israeli revelatory act would
therefore be tantamount to a challenge to those powers, which would result in a diplomatic
catastrophe in the relations with the United States on which he had worked so hard.
Furthermore, this commitment also had political significance inside Israel. The policy
expressed a delicate internal Israeli consensus that the leaders of Ahdut Ha'avodah, one of the
predecessors of Labor, especially Yisrael Galili and Yigal Allon, saw as a part of the sensitive
coalition agreements still in place with Ben-Gurion. As far as they were concerned, this
formula reflected a strategic Israeli interest and was no mere convenient and vague
formulation. They believed that Israel had to develop a nuclear "capability," but not proceed
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