Israel and the bomb

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Movie
Original title Israel and the bomb
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2012
length 52 minutes
Rod
Director Dirk Pohlmann
script Dirk Pohlmann
production Anja Kühne ,
Florian Hartung
music Mona Mur
camera Michael Khano ,
Jean Schablin ,
Peter Reuther ,
Stefan Wiesen
cut Sebastian Schmidt ,
Elsa Kampen

Israel and the Bomb , Long Title Israel and the Bomb - A radioactive taboo , is a television - documentary from the year 2012 by Dirk Pohlmann and Florian Hartung on Israeli nuclear weapons . It was produced jointly by Februar Film , Arte and ZDF .

content

The film introduces Avner Cohen's thesis of an Israeli "policy of opacity" ("עֲמִימוּת" Amimut "ambiguity") based on the case of Mordechai Vanunu . He has the taboo in Israel that he does not speak about nuclear armament in his own country allegedly injured by making material about Israel's secret nuclear weapons program available to the Sunday Times and sentenced to a long prison sentence of 18 years for espionage and high treason. Israel officially denies having nuclear weapons to this day, and on this basis does not see itself as obliged to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty .

The film reconstructs the genesis of the program of atomic armament in Israel from the experiences of the Jews in World War II . The Holocaust and the passive attitude of the Allies, who did not want to wage a war to save European Jews from the Holocaust, led to the conclusion that in an emergency only Jews would be responsible for the safety of the Jewish people. Deterrence through its own nuclear weapons has therefore become the goal of Israel's policy for security reasons. This goal was pursued with all necessary means, fair and unfair.

Until the Kennedy government , according to military historian Martin van Creveld , the US deliberately ignored the nuclear program and assumed that Israel would keep its nuclear program secret. Kennedy was no longer prepared to tolerate an Israeli nuclear weapons program and the associated danger that other states could obtain the necessary know-how for the construction of nuclear weapons. This has changed US policy drastically.

Before the first Israeli atomic bomb was ready on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967 , the Soviet Union, which was primarily concerned with preventing an Israeli bomb, and the Arab states had allied themselves. However, no one expected the Israeli preventive attack on the Arab air force to be successful, so the Soviet Union ultimately behaved passively during the war. In 1969 a secret agreement was signed between Golda Meir and Richard Nixon , in which the USA allowed Israel to be a nuclear power.

When Saddam Hussein had Israel bombed with Scud rockets in revenge for the attacks on Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War , the Israeli politicians took this as an opportunity to put Germany under moral pressure. The success of the strategy was the delivery of three German submarines to Israel, only half of which had to be paid for. The submarines were immediately equipped with nuclear cruise missile missiles . Avi Primor describes that despite all the knowledge about Israeli atomic bombs, the respective German governments always pretended that they did not exist.

The film proposes that Israeli nuclear weapons are taboo in Germany too. The politician Karsten Voigt , who was the SPD's foreign policy spokesman at the time , states that the worst would have been if one had asked Israel and received an honest answer - which is why the questions were not asked. Nevertheless, it was clear to every politician involved in the matter that the German delivery from Israel would immediately be used for the purposes of nuclear armament, but that was a point that nobody wanted to think about.

production

The working title of the film was The Cold War in the Middle East . On-site shoots took place from September 11 to November 5, 2011 in the United States, Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. The film was directed by Dirk Pohlmann , who also wrote the script.

The first broadcast of the 52-minute long film took place on July 7, 2012 on Arte . Martin Pieper (ARTE) and Annette Tewes (ZDF) were the editors .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See title in the announcement of the Arte program of July 7, 2012 on ARD.de ( online ; accessed on October 7, 2012).
  2. ^ Israel and the bomb - A radioactive taboo , ZDF Enterprises
  3. ^ Israel and the bomb - A radioactive taboo , februarfilm.de
  4. ↑ Israel and the bomb. (No longer available online.) Arte, archived from the original on August 12, 2012 ; Retrieved July 22, 2012 .
  5. ↑ Israel and the bomb. A radioactive taboo. February Film GmbH , Berlin, accessed on August 25, 2012 .