Israel's nuclear program was started in secret by the country's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, in the early to late 1950's. Later, just before the Six-Day War, it is believed that they assembled their first crude nuclear weapons. The US government has known about the Israeli nuclear program since the 1960 in the last few months of the Eisenhower presidency, but it wasn't until 1986 when a former technician from the Negev Nuclear Research Center named Mordechai Vanunu told the British press what he knew about the nuclear weapons being manufactured in Israel. He would later spend 18 years in Israeli prison, 11 of which he spent in solitary confinement, for treason among other charges against the state. Today, Israel is thought to have over 200 nuclear warheads and still refuses to sign the Non Proliferation Treaty.
Fast forward to today. Benjamin Netanyahu recently delivered a PowerPoint presentation claiming that Iran lied and that they do in fact have nuclear weapons. All of the material he presented, however, was publicly available by 2007 and all parties involved in the Iran nuclear deal were aware of all the information he presented before the deal was signed. Shortly after, Trump announces that he is backing out of the Iran nuclear deal and only a little more than a day after that, Israel launches an attack on Iranian military targets in Syria. There is a serious double standard that has been present in the media for many years now when it comes to rhetoric about Iran and Israel. Iran has been complying with the deal since it was signed and that has been verified each year since then. They stopped their nuclear energy program and have held up their end of the deal. Why then are we only talking about Iran and the possibility of them attaining nuclear weapons? Israel has a lot of them, continues to be hostile towards its Arab neighbors and has no problem trying to wipe a whole country off of the map. I think that we should join the rest of the world in seeing Israel for the genocidal nuclear apartheid state that it is and not as some bastion of democracy and freedom.