The demonization of Iran serves as a distraction from violence against the Palestinians

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never tires of subordinating Iran to the planned construction of an atomic bomb, Israelis are committing the worst human rights crimes against the Palestinians. Juan Cole points out in the following article that Netanyahu's allegations are without foundation and only distract from their own wrongdoing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a notorious warmonger, liar and racist who once led a party that could almost be called a fascist before even more extreme parties were elected to the Israeli parliament, is trying to engage the unsuspecting Trump in a war against Iran ,

Netanyahu's excited assertion that Iran's nuclear program is actually a nuclear weapons program has been known for a decade and a half.

Netanyahu seems to have even brought the White House to the hoax, Iran is currently maintaining a nuclear weapons program, but it had to withdraw immediately. The incident is so scary because it shows how easy it is to manipulate the unpredictable Trump and his less competent staff. Such a mistake, wrote David Frum on Twitter, can cause a war. And David Frum knows what he's talking about.

However, the corrected White House message (according to which Iran has maintained a secret nuclear weapons program in the past, translator's note) is equally wrong. Iran had done a lot in the distant past, which would have helped if it had started a well-developed nuclear weapons program. He never started such a program.

His accusation that Iranian missiles are designed to be equipped with warheads is simply wrong.

So why try to put Iran at the center of American warfare? It is Netanyahu's desperate attempt to distract the attention of the world public from the ongoing discriminatory Israeli apartheid policy against the stateless Palestinians whose territories he occupies militarily (directly with military boots and colonial settlers in the West Bank, indirectly with military ones Encirclement and the shooting down of innocent demonstrators in Gaza).

In recent weeks, Israeli snipers have killed about 40 Palestinians and wounded hundreds while they were unarmed and peacefully protesting their imprisonment in the Gaza Strip (70 percent of their families were driven out of their homes in Israel and now live in poor conditions in refugee camps) European Israelis have taken over their homes and farmland). The victims of the sniper attacks include children, journalists and demonstrators who have been in some distance from the Israeli border fence, as well as praying believers in dialogue with God.
To shoot unarmed people who are not a threat is a war crime, and if you do it systematically, it's a crime against humanity. The same is true of the apartheid crime defined in the Rome Statute as a "crime against humanity," and Israel's obvious military oppression of the Palestinians is no different.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) 2015 (Common Name: Iranian Nuclear Agreement, Translator's Note) was designed to prevent Iran from using its civil nuclear program to produce nuclear weapons.

Any form of centrifugal nuclear enrichment runs the risk of being used militarily. As a reactor fuel, uranium is enriched up to 5 percent, but if scientists feed it further into the centrifuges, they can accumulate up to 95 percent for a bomb. The Iran deal should prevent Iran from producing highly enriched uranium (HEU).

Iran has approved random checks by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). A country actively controlled by the IAEA has never built a nuclear bomb.

Iran has greatly reduced the number of its centrifuges. Therefore, he would need at least one or even several years to produce HEU, even if he could, without the inspectors finding clues - which is impossible.

Iran has abandoned and bricked up its planned heavy water reactor in Arak. Fissile material can be built much faster in such a reactor than in a light water reactor, and thus heavy water reactors could theoretically help in the production of a nuclear bomb. Iran is not even planning to build a heavy water reactor.

Iran has destroyed its 19.5 percent enriched uranium stockpiled for its medical research reactor. He has no higher enriched uranium than the 5 percent enriched for his three nuclear power plants in Bushehr. Iran benefits from nuclear energy because it is now able to sell the oil that it normally needs for power generation to the open market.

South Korea, Japan and France are already using nuclear reactors for power generation, and Iran is now starting to do so. France enriches uranium for this purpose as well as for the production of nuclear weapons. If you do not believe that Japan could build a nuclear bomb in three weeks, you do not know Japanese technology (and Japan's large supply of plutonium).
So Netanyahu and the American Right would have had to sigh with relief, right?

The US is also bursting with nuclear warheads. The Iranians have some old F4 jets that Nixon gave them.

In 2007, the CIA in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded that Iran had carried out some military-related trials in 2003, but stopped them and not resumed them. The NIE 2011 repeated the conclusion that Iran currently has no weapons program and does not plan to host one.

Even though the trials and programs that Iran has undertaken as part of its civilian energy program have always had potential weapons implications, and occasional attempts by Iranian scientists to pursue military purposes.

Since nuclear enrichment can be used both peacefully and militarily, Iran could have pursued the risky plan by 2015 to build a bomb with the know-how of the civilian program. That's all the CIA said. She also said that such a plan was never followed, a conclusion shared by Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak and Israeli intelligence.

However, the JCPOA prevented such an idea from being considered. Iran could have just made a bomb by kicking out the inspectors and making thousands of centrifuges. In other words, he would have had to erect a huge neon sign with the slogan "I'm building a nuclear bomb here".

The Iranian nuclear enrichment program was also thought to have a deterrent effect on anyone thinking of doing to the country what Bush did to Iraq. It was clear to any potential attacker that if Iran invaded Iran, it would try to use the civilian military defense program.

Of course, with right-wing forces in the United States and the Israeli government eager to invade Iran and overthrow its government, this nuclear defense option (as was the case in Japan at the time of World War II) is of course an annoying obstacle that people would like to eliminate.

But Iran, of course, has essentially already disarmed, voluntarily. What is going on now is to try and get people in the eyes and make them spend $ 6 trillion for another disastrous war in the Middle East.

This question will keep us all busy. Meanwhile, Netanyahu succeeds in achieving his ultimate ultimate goal of bringing the ethnic cleansing of the remaining Palestinians to a successful conclusion.

John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American intellectual and historian of modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle East affairs, he appeared in print media and on television and spoke to the United States Senate.