Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History Deterrence and Arms Control

Dr. Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb, is Senior Research Fellow at the National Security Archive. Formerly, Dr. Cohen was co-director of the Project on Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle East at the Security Studies program at MIT (1990-95). In 1997-98 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), where he was working on issues related to arms control and the peace process in the Middle East.

After undergraduate study at Tel Aviv University in Philosophy (1975), Cohen earned his M.A. in Philosophy at York University (1977) and Ph.D. from the Committee on History of Culture of the University of Chicago (1981). He was a member of the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University from 1983 to 1991 and has been a visiting professor at various American universities and colleges.

For more than a decade, Dr. Cohen has written on issues related to nuclear weapons, primarily on the questions of nuclear deterrence and morality as well as issues related to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In 1987-88 he was a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he developed the notion of "opaque" nuclear proliferation. He is the co-editor of Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity (Rowman & Allanheld, 1986), The Institution of Philosophy (Open Court, 1989), and the author of The Nuclear Age as Moral History (in Hebrew, 1989). In 1989 Dr. Cohen was awarded a MacArthur Research and Writing Fellowship to work on the question of nuclear weapons and democracy, focusing on the Israeli case.

Dr. Cohen has published numerous articles in Ethics, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Israel Studies, Security Studies, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nonproliferation Review, The Washington Quarterly, The Journal of Israeli History, the Middle East Journal, as well as op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also an occasional contributor to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.


In this pdf document, Dr. Avner Cohen illustrates Israel's used of chemical/biological warfare against indegenious populations of Palestinian Arabs...in order to displace them from their ancestral lands, here are a few excerpts:

It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17, 1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF - the contamination of Acre's water supply.

In 1999, a palestinian physician, Dr. Salaman Abu Sitta, speaking before the British house of commons, claimed that in 1948, "even bacteriological warfare was used by poisoning wells and infecting drinking water with malaria and typhus. That was the case in Gaza in the summer of 1948, as Ben-Gurion admitted in his diary." Interestingly, however no known Palestinian sources allege that the epidemics in Acre resulted from Israeli sabotage.