UK’s Jack Straw says Israel has nuclear weapons, steals Palestinian land

A tradition has developed in the West whereby politicians speak common sense and the truth, but only when they are no longer in power. Witness, for example, the former US president, Jimmy Carter.

Now Jack Straw, who was Britain’s foreign secretary at the time of the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq, has stepped forward to keep the tradition alive.

During a debate with Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and advisor to Binyamin Netanyahu, broadcast on BBC Radio Radio 4’s flagship “Today” programme on 14 June, Straw said explicitly what every honest and decent person had always know: that Israel, in contrast to Iran, has “a most extensive nuclear weapons capability” and is “stealing the land of the Palestinians”.

The interview is worth listening to – use the audio player below to hear the relevant part.

Here is the transcript:

Jack Straw: Well, hang on a second, Israel has a most extensive nuclear weapons capability, it has no territorial ambitions apart from stealing the land of the Palestinians and it’s not going to use nuclear weapons for that but it has (a) very extensive nuclear weapons programme, and along with India and Pakistan are the three countries in the world, plus North Korea more recently, which have refused any kind of International supervision of their nuclear programme.

John Humphrys: Well let me put that to Dr Gold; you can’t argue with that Dr Gold?

Dore Gold: Well we can have a whole debate on Israel in a separate programme.

John Humphrys: Well it’s entirely relevant isn’t it? The fact is you’re saying they want nuclear weapons; the fact is you have nuclear weapons.

Dore Gold: Look, Israel has made statements in the past. Israeli ambassadors to the UN like myself have said that Israel won’t be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

Jack Straw: You’ve got nuclear weapons.

John Humphrys: You’ve got them.

Jack Straw: You’ve got them. Everyone knows that.

Dore Gold: We have a very clear stand, but we’re not the issue.

Jack Straw: No, no, come on, you have nuclear weapons, let’s be clear about this.

To listen to the full interview with Straw and Dore, click here.

If only Straw was that truthful when he was foreign secretary, history might have taken a different course and many lives that have been ruined might have been saved!

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