The New Nation - Internet Edition

British prime minister Gordon Brown during his two-day visit to Israel early this week asked Iran to suspend its nuclear weapons programme or face global isolation.

If Iran did not accept the incentives, the next step would be to ratchet up sanctions against Tehran, possibly including sanctions on Iran’s oil and gas industry, he was quoted as saying.

Gordon Brown urged the setting up of an international coalition against Iran to increase the pressure to stop enriching uranium, according to messages carried by wire services from Israel.

The first British prime minister ever to address the Israeli parliament, Brown reportedly vowed that Tehran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons would not be allowed to pass.

Gordon Brown depicted Iran as a global threat for its enrichment of uranium ironically while visiting a country which for a long time is known for its possession of nuclear arms. He has not mentioned even for once the security threat that Israel’s nuclear armament pose to the Muslim countries of the Middle East and the Gulf. And that the arms buildup in the region arose essentially for shift of the balance of power against these countries.

One may note the threat sometimes uttered of a strike against Iran from Israel. The Israelis had in June 1981, in the world’s first air strike against a nuclear plant, bombed and destroyed a French-built nuclear plant near Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, saying they believed it was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. The 70-megawatt uranium-powered reactor was near completion but had not been stocked with nuclear fuel.

In a striking similarity to the 27-year-old stand Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert told Gordon Brown that they could not reconcile with a nuclear Iran. He said that Iran was not just a menace for Israel, but a “global threat.”

Brown’s visit was reportedly centred around talks on the peace process with Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas. He was also in the region to take part in a British-Israeli business conference.

Brown’s spokesman has been quoted to have said the prime minister wanted to “discuss the way forward in the peace process” with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and to focus on economic reconstruction and development in the region.

Brown voiced his support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, relaunched at a U.S.-hosted summit in Annapolis, Maryland, last year. He said he felt “a historic and lasting peace is within your grasp.” Brown said that he favored a two-state solution with a Palestinian state that “accepts Israel as a friend and a neighbour.”

It is now well known that all countries in the Middle East are for a peaceful settlement of the Palestine problem and have directly or indirectly supported the US-sponsored roadmap to peace. But nothing has so far been said or done to remove or allay threats from their minds of security that nuclear Israel repeatedly has proved to be posing.

Countries in the Middle East or elsewhere in the globe do not like to see nuclear arms proliferation in Iran. But they also are not for one country to be the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the region to keep the Muslim countries of the region under constant fear. Gordon Brown should thus have asked Israel to dismantle its nuclear weapons and called for a nuclear weapon free Middle East.