Biden: Keep alive two-state solution

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, said the US should press Israel not to take any actions that jeopardize a two-state solution, a reference to reports that Israel may try to annex part of the West Bank.

Biden, in a statement Tuesday to JTA, also said that as president he would resume US assistance to the Palestinians, reopen the US consulate in east Jerusalem that administers primarily to the Palestinians and would seek to reopen the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington.

“A priority now for the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace should be resuming our dialogue with the Palestinians and pressing Israel not to take actions that make a twostate solution impossible,” Biden said. “I will reopen the US consulate in east Jerusalem, find a way to reopen the PLO’s diplomatic mission in Washington and resume the decades-long economic and security assistance efforts to the Palestinians that [US President Donald] Trump’s administration stopped.”

The new Israeli government is grappling with whether to annex parts of the West Bank, and as Biden has secured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, he has come under pressure from the Democratic Party’s Left to

speak out against any such move, which would be seen as highly controversial in the international community.

Biden has said in the past it is also incumbent on the Palestinians to preserve two-state options. A campaign spokesman noted to JTA Biden’s past calls on both sides to refrain from unilateralism.

“Palestinian leaders should end the incitement and glorification of violence, and they must begin to level with their people about the legitimacy and permanence of Israel as a Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations last August. “Israeli leaders should stop the expansion of West Bank settlements and talk of annexation that would make two states impossible to achieve.”

The statement from Tuesday also takes a cudgel to the Trump administration’s peace plan, which sanctions annexation under certain conditions. It is Biden’s most robust criticism of the recent policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who campaigned in the most recent elections on a pledge to move toward annexation.

Biden has separately said he would not reverse Trump’s decision in 2018 to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

of the State of Israel.”

Ernst David Bergmann is best known as the father of Israel’s nuclear program. He founded the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. But his contribution to Israel’s chemical/biological capabilities was crucial.

During the War of Independence, Bergmann used the Weizmann Institute of Science (known then as the Seiff Institute) as a research base for HEMED. Bergmann, who in 1951 was appointed by Ben-Gurion as chief of research at the Defense Ministry and scientific adviser to the prime minister, then set up government-sponsored research centers that focused on nuclear and chemical-biological science.

The IIBR, a continuation of HEMED BEIT, was formally established in 1952 in the same Ness Ziona orange grove by a group of scientists from the IDF Science Corps and from academic organizations. Like its predecessor, from the start it was regarded as a highly classified research center.

“Given the climate of the times, it is doubtful that Bergmann and his IIBR colleagues made a distinction between defensive and offensive research development,” Cohen wrote. “In those days, national CBW programs were not illegal or even at odds with international norms.”

But unlike HEMED BEIT, Bergmann wanted the IIBR to have a civilian identity. Therefore, it did not focus solely on military CBW programs, but rather a broad range of scientific research projects that would help the young state.

Over the years, the IIBR has been involved in a series of groundbreaking scientific research, including a project to develop a vaccine against polio, developing kits for detecting explosive materials, a drug to treat Sjogren’s syndrome and more.

Still located in Ness Ziona, the IIBR is surrounded by a large wall with a gate that blocks its entrance. But it is no longer housed in a small building, but rather in a spacious building that once belonged to an Arab effendi and a large modern research complex that contains dozens of laboratories.

Prof. Shmuel C. Shapira, an anesthesiologist by training, has headed it since 2013. The IIBR employs some 350 people, including about 160 scientists with doctorates in biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, pharmacology, mathematics, physics and environmental science. There are another 160 technicians and administrative staff.

It continues to be viewed by the defense establishment as one of the country’s most secretive defense installations. The public rarely knows what goes on behind the highly guarded walls of the institute.

Though it has expanded its research, according to foreign publications, the institute is still involved in developing biological and chemical weapons.

It has also had its fair share of controversies.

In 1983, the deputy director of the IIBR, Marcus Klingberg, was arrested along with his wife for passing the institute’s secrets to the Soviets. Klingberg, who was regarded as one of the world’s most-respected epidemiologists and an expert on top-secret biological and chemical research, was one of the founding members of the IIBR after he served in HEMED BEIT.

During his 30 years at the institute, he was questioned

twice by security officials (in 1965 and 1976) but was only arrested close to a decade later. His arrest was kept secret until 1993. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, including 10 years in solitary confinement, before he was released in 2003. He died in 2015 in Paris.

While the majority of the case remains classified, according to foreign reports, it is believed that he gave the Soviets some of Israel’s most sensitive military secrets in the field of CBW.

In 1992, an El Al transport plane carrying some 189 liters of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), a dual-use chemical used in the production of Sarin nerve gas, crashed in Amsterdam, killing more than 40 people. The DMMP was designated for the IIBR, according to The New York Times.

“Since 1995, the institute has operated as a government-affiliated unit that researches all areas of defense against chemical and biological weapons, including the operation of national laboratories for detection and identification of such threats,” the institute says on its website.

During the “Omer-2” project, some 760 soldiers served as guinea pigs over the course of eight years in the 1990s as the country worked to develop a vaccine against anthrax. The project, headed by Dr. Avigdor Shafferman (who later became the director general of the IIBR), was carried out in cooperation with the Defense Ministry and the IDF Medical Corps.

Troops were injected with up to seven doses of the vaccine but were not informed of the risks of being infected with the deadly disease.

In 2007, dozens of soldiers were interviewed by Israel’s

Uvda television show. They suffered from medical conditions such as skin tumors, intestinal and digestive issues, severe lung infections, serious migraines, bronchitis, epilepsy and feelings of constant tiredness and weakness.

According to a 2011 report in

Haaretz, the soldiers from the military’s elite Unit 8200, paratroopers and others “participated in these experiments, in complete contravention of the Helsinki Accords, which established rules for medical experiments on human subjects.”

While the exposure of the project sparked a massive public uproar and saw army regulations for conducting trials on human subjects tightened, Shafferman and others involved were not prosecuted, Haaretz

reported.

The institute also was reported to be behind the poison injected into senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal in Amman, Jordan, in 1997. Israel admitted to the failed assassination attempt and provided the serum that saved his life in return for the Mossad agents who had been captured. The antidote, which was originally meant for Israeli operatives should they come into contact with the poison, was allegedly developed at the IIBR.

But despite the controversies, the IIBR continues to carry out dozens of civilian research projects and works on pharmaceuticals, vaccines, treatments and antibodies to protect Israeli civilians from CBWs.

According to open sources, in addition to its defense-related research, scientists at the center are also involved in developing means for diagnosing contagious diseases, solutions for environmental problems and medications.

The IIBR was also involved in trying to develop a vaccine for the SARS disease when the outbreak

occurred in 2003, but it never panned out.

Close to two decades later, the scientists at the IIBR, surrounded by orange groves in Ness Ziona, may be the ones to bring the coronavirus to its knees. •