[Peace-discuss] Who's Against Divestment?

[David Green]

Israel tries to cut off Tehran from world markets

David Hearst in Herzliya
Friday January 26, 2007

Guardian
  
Israel is launching a campaign to isolate Iran economically and to soften up
world opinion for the option of a military strike aimed at crippling or
delaying Tehran's uranium enrichment programme.

Pressure will be applied to major US pension funds to stop investment in
about 70 companies that trade directly with Iran, and to international banks
that trade with its oil sector, cutting off the country's access to hard
currency. The aim is to isolate Tehran from the world markets in a campaign
similar to that against South Africa at the height of apartheid.

Meanwhile, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be pursued in international
courts for calling the Holocaust a myth, and saying Israel should be wiped
off the map. The case will be launched under the 1948 UN convention on the
prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which outlaws "direct
and public incitement to genocide".

Before flying to London to spearhead the mission to sell the sanctions, the
Likud party leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, said: "A campaign to divest
commercial investment from Iran, beginning with the large pension funds in
the west ... either stops Iran's nuclear programme or it will pave the way
for tougher actions. So it's no- lose for us."

In December the UN ordered a ban on the supply of materials that could
contribute to Iran's nuclear and missile programme, and an asset freeze on
Iranian companies and individuals. But it stopped short of a full travel
ban.

Israeli defence sources claim that Iran is close to the point of no return
in its uranium enrichment programme using gas centrifuges.

A senior official said: "They currently have problems but if the programme
is allowed to continue without interruptions we estimate they will have
mastered the technology this year. We expect a declaration from them in the
next month, possibly on February 21, the day of the Islamic Revolution, that
they have reached significant achievements.

"It will be a bluff, but it will have the potential of marketing Iran as a
regional superpower. If they do it, a nuclear Iran will cast a long shadow
over the whole of the Middle East; we will have Hizbullastan in Lebanon,
Hamastan here, and Shiastan in Iraq."

Military analysts speaking at an annual conference in Herzliya, near Tel
Aviv, claimed that Israel was facing an "existential threat" from the
Iranian uranium enrichment programme, which Tehran has consistently claimed
was for a civilian nuclear fuel cycle. The only division of opinion was over
the imminence of this threat.
  
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007


 
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