‘Knesset warning on Assad seeking nukes was ignored’
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee warned that Syria had a nuclear-weapons program years before Israel bombed it, according to a Channel 2 News report broadcast on Tuesday.
In 2004, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Subcommittee on Intelligence gave Sharon a top-secret report saying Syria was working on a nuclear reactor.
Earlier this year, Israel officially admitted to the 2007 air strike on a nuclear facility being built in Syria.
“There is a high likelihood that there is a military nuclear project in Syria,” the report read. “This is a first-rate existential threat.”
Sharon mocked then-chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, now-Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz, who has a doctorate in philosophy, as “the philosopher” and told him to let the security professionals to do their job, former Labor MK Haim Ramon recounted to Channel 2.
Similarly, then-IDF intelligence chief Aharon Ze’evi Farkash told Steinitz in a subcommittee meeting on the report: “Mr. Philosopher, you don’t understand the subject, and there is no reason to waste resources on a Syrian nuclear priest that I think does not exist.”
“Mr. Lieutenant-General,” Steinitz responded, “I am only a sergeant, but as a philosopher, I know to cast doubt, and I cast doubt on your insistence.”
“What do you do when you are convinced that what you believe is right, and they say it’s not possible?” Steinitz said in the report, recalling how he felt.
The report also indicated the committee’s frustration: “Can it be that the intelligence coverage of Syria is good in the area of conventional military, but in the nuclear area it is a completely separate world from Israel’s intelligence sources?”
“We’re shocked at the intelligence blindness about whether or not a Syrian military nuclear program exists,” the report reads.
The Knesset report also said over 200 North Korean officials visited Syria.
Channel 2 also reported that