I'm David Waring, I research here, research British foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the Gulf, I teach Middle East politics, international political economy, and I'm the author of a recent report on UK arms sales to Israel, which is published by war and won Palestine Solidarity campaign and campaign against arms trade on whose steering committee I sit. Arms nuclear weapons very much in the news at the moment in the UK and I'm sure most of you are well as what will hopefully be a very large march against trying renewal plans in London tomorrow, 12 o'clock Marble Arch. So it's a good time to be talking about this and us being SOAS, we are all about giving space to dissenting voices and we have a great dissenting voice here today. I'll introduce the panel briefly and then we'll get on. Right next to me is Rebecca Sharkey, she's the UK coordinator for the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, of which the Israeli disarmament movement is a partner organisation. Next to her is Dan Plesch from the Centre of International Studies and Diplomacy here at SOAS. Dan has published extensively for many years on international security issues on WMD and the creation of WMD-free zones and the far end of the table is our star guest, Sharon Delev, the founder and director of the Israeli disarmament movement, former director of Greenpeace in Israel and experienced peace and human rights activists. So I'm going to first hand over to Rebecca and she's going to give you a fuller introduction to today's talk. Hi, so I'm going to just tell you a bit about ICANN, the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, of which Sharon and I both campaigners and a few of the people here as well. So in 2010 the international Red Cross made a statement at the UN saying that there was no possible scenario in which they could provide an adequate response to a nuclear weapon detonation and nor could any organisation or government. And this statement triggered a whole new way of approaching the issue of nuclear weapons, looking at it through a humanitarian lens and that's developed into what we're now calling the humanitarian initiative. It's about taking the nuclear weapons out of their box of being something that only is talked about by security experts in nuclear weapon states and making it something that is an issue for everybody and that's all countries, all governments and all people around the world should have a say in. So there have been three major government-level conferences, fact-based conferences, looking at the humanitarian and environmental impact of nuclear weapons hosted by the governments of Norway, Mexico and more recently Austria. And that has been developing more recently by resolutions at the United Nations in December, which voted majority to hold not negotiations yet, talks that are taking place this week at the UN in Geneva, open-ended working group and to take forward really some concrete measures to fill the legal gap. That's the phrase that people are using. The NPT, which is the major treaty looking at nuclear disarmament, mainly nuclear non-proliferation, is quite vague in its language and that's resulted in countries like the UK and Israel's a bit more opaque about it. But being able to say that we somehow have a right to keep nuclear weapons and that they're essential for our security, we're proposing an ICANN and this is being taken up by more and more countries a new nuclear weapon ban treaty. So this negotiations for this treaty now in the pipeline. The UK is boycotting these UN mandated talks, as is Israel, but they're going to go ahead anyway because the new approach is to go ahead with all of the countries without nuclear weapons, which are the vast majority of countries in the world, and make nuclear weapons clearly illegal under international humanitarian law. They're the only WMD which are not currently explicitly illegal. So we think that this new treaty is going to have a really big impact across the world on nuclear weapon states as well, even if they don't sign up to stigmatize nuclear weapons and delegitimize them. And ICANN has been around since about 2007. We have campaigners in 100 countries. The vast majority of these are in non-nuclear weapon states and then some of us are in nuclear-armed states. And the strategy has been mainly aimed at the non-nuclear weapon states and encouraging them to speak out and actually open negotiations. So Siobhan and I have been in the handful of campaigners really who are in nuclear weapon states. So when we've been at the UN, for example, doing lobbying diplomats and things, we've been, a couple of times, all the campaigners get different countries to lobby, and we've been given the nuclear-armed states, which has been quite interesting. So we've had little chats with the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans and the Brits, and on occasion with the Israelis as well. They don't obviously go to the NPT meetings because they're not a signatory state to the NPT treaty, but they are there at the First Committee of the United Nations, but they're not used to being talked to. So they were kind of a bit shocked and surprised when we went to talk to them and encouraging them to take part in this new initiative. It was an unusual sort of situation. So we share this sort of approach of pushing for a nuclear-weapon-band treaty that's going to happen without the nuclear-weapon states. And whenever I think that it's difficult campaigning in this country, which it is, because we grow up thinking that having nuclear weapons is normal and that we need them for our security, and then whenever I think how hard that is, I think about show-on campaigning in Israel, and it's just a completely taboo subject. You're not allowed to talk about it.  So a huge admiration for show-on's determination at opening up debate, getting people even just to talk about this subject is fantastically difficult. And I'm really impressed with how show-on's taken the humanitarian approach and applied it to her country, reminding people what these weapons really are and what they actually do and their impact on people's lives and on their environments. So one thing which I think we'll be able to show you a clip from, show-on arranged for a group of hibakusia survivors of the bombs in Japan to visit Israel and meet with a group of Holocaust survivors, which when I first found out about this, I was really moved. Well, I still am very moved by it. I think it sends an extraordinarily powerful humanitarian message about how all of these people were victims of the Second World War and of the dark, dark times that humanity went through. And we don't tolerate Nazism anymore. Actually, we shouldn't tolerate weapons of mass destruction. So I think that made a very powerful connection. And she also brought an expert on the environmental and climatic impact of nuclear weapons, Dr Helfund, over from America. In an absolutely groundbreaking discussion at the Israeli parliament, it was the first time the nuclear weapons had ever been discussed in the Knesset. And it was because it was this fact-based approach looking at the impact on environment and people. So this approach is really helping to engage people and overcome political, party political machinations and national concerns and remind people about the global concerns and think about this in an international way. So I really take my hat off to Sharon. Maybe we can show the film from the survivors' meetings. Thanks, Richard. During those few years, terrible things happened. My father was beaten up for three days because for nothing. His hands were swollen and his feet for nothing. So the Jewish laws, for instance, took away my father's license to operate the businesses from one end to the other. There was no income in the family. They threw me out at age 12 from the school. All Jewish kids out. And I didn't have any education from then on. In 1945, at the time of the explosion, I was in Iraq, in Hiroshima. I was between 16. Suddenly, I read the letter, and I was close to the building of the building, and I was able to get out of it by hand. And suddenly, the explosion broke out, and I was left alone. When we passed through the building of the building of the building of the building, we saw the signs of the people in the buildings where their parents were all dead. And we see people who are not human, and their body shape is different, and they all look like creatures that are not human. I came out of these problems, but today I can't control what I saw. We are here not to just tell you how sad the Japanese people experience. We want to make a universal plea and commitment to make a better world without nuclear weapons and peaceful world. Thank you. That's a good introduction to just one of the aspects of Sharon's work, and I'm sure we'll hear more about the rest. Before handing over to Sharon Dollaf, I just want to say a few words. My name's Dan Pleche. I'm the director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy here at SAAS. Please, at the end, don't forget to pick up the various bits of educational material from our different projects and campaigns. I just want to say two or three words about our own work on this topic in the center, and how I've come across and had small opportunities in the past to work with Sharon. When I first came to SAAS having worked for a long time on weapons and mass destruction issues, but without particularly a regional focus, I thought what project might we open up, and the project which I started then was the first in any western public institution to have a public debate about weapons and mass destruction of free zone because, broadly speaking, the State of Israel was hardly hostile to having this discussed in public fora, although, in private, there had long been what in the jargon people call informal or twin-track discussions. We just started with some presumption to invite all the ambassadors from the Arab states in Israel and the P5 from the UN to come and speak about the topic. After some surprise, the Arab states, Egypt, started coming and started speaking at deputy foreign minister level. After a couple of years of that, the British and Americans decided that it was too embarrassing not to show up. Although the Israelis never came, the P5 came increasingly, and then after we'd had these discussions, suddenly Chatham House and the European Union decided that they too could have a public discussion about the idea of a WMD free zone. While we certainly haven't got one, the work that we did here at SOAS I think is worth noting, not simply because how wonderful we were to do this, but actually how very easy it was that we just had to make the political decision as an institution that we would talk about a topic and things started to change politically. In the end, President Obama's special representative on proliferation issues came from the White House and then Susan Burke from the White House to speak at the conference in the run-up to the 2010 meeting of the Nonproliferation Treaty. So that's to give some sense of the institutional background in the centre on the topic and also to illustrate that actually by breaking taboo topics, which is a lot easier for us to do in London than in Israel, but nevertheless, this is a topic that at the time King's College and Chatham House and Oxford and Cambridge could not bring themselves to have a discussion about in public, although they would have it in private. Of course, I got a taste of the day-to-day experience that Sharon has when with the Palestine Israel Journal we published, which is based in East Jerusalem, we published a special issue on the Zone and they organised a conference and only afterwards did I realise that having secured the offices in the Vatican papal complex in Jerusalem, that this was actually an insurance policy against having the Israeli security police storm the conference or at least stop it. And we had one of the first public discussions in Israel on the topic. But in the course of these various meetings, I got to know Sharon and have always hugely admired her work for its intellectual integrity and depth when so many people are just sort of content to wave banners and shout slogans, even if they have a good point, but don't take it into the policy engagement depth with officials and others that needs to happen. And Sharon does all of that and more in very difficult political and personal circumstances. So I'm delighted that we can welcome her here. We have a larger and even, one might say less, even more unlikely project called Scrap Weapons. There are leaflets at the back about a revived general approach to disarmament. And this came partly because, although it now has an august group of former ambassadors engaged with it and strong support within the UN system, one of the reasons that led us to start that program was the in discussions with countries in the region in the Middle East about the bomb in the Middle East. It was, well, why pick on us? You know, the Israelis would say, well, you know, no one's talking about the France getting rid of its weapons or French weapons of mass destruction. Why are you talking to us? And then they'd say, well, because you're a particularly dangerous region and we're concerned about proliferation. But this isn't really wash. If there isn't a global discussion about control, as Rebecca also represents and we talked not just about the bomb but about the sort of conventional weapons we see devastating Syria at the moment, there isn't a global conversation. Then it's very hard to have regional and local, or even harder to have the local and regional conversations. So that's why we developed the wider project. But with that advertising stick over, can I hand over to Sharon to talk to us about her projects, her work and perceptions on what has to be definitively one of the most difficult issues in global politics in the present time? Sharon. Thank you, Dan. And thank you all for having me and you for coming. I really appreciate it. You know, it's usually I have to push to say something and here I was actually welcomed. It's not a usual experience. To complain about nuclear weapons is a hard job everywhere, unless maybe you're in Scandinavia. And even then sometimes it's hard. The thing is, and what makes it a bit harder in Israel is that if you all know that Israel is a nuclear armed state in Israel, we're not supposed to say it. Now the funny thing is it's not illegal, but everybody thinks it's illegal. If it was legal or illegal to say it, we could have just fought the law, but we don't have to fight the law. We have to fight a taboo, a belief. And the belief is that by having this thing, that because we have this thing we're not talking about, this black spot we're not talking about, we still exist. That's the common belief. But even stronger than this is the belief that by not thinking about it, not talking about it, not criticising, not thinking about it at all, we're keeping Israel safe. By not asking questions, we're keeping Israel safe about this thing we're not talking about. So how do you campaign against that? Another problem is that there are some nuclear experts in Israel. How do we have bombs if we don't have experts? We have some experts on nuclear policies, but they're all within the establishment or working very closely with the establishment. How do we start a campaign when we really don't know anything? We're not experts. I'm definitely not an expert. And when I started, I knew nothing. I knew that nuclear bombs have this mushroom cloud that they are horrible, immoral, and that's more or less what I knew. I also knew that I want to do whatever I can to abolish them. I thought it's impossible. Lucky for me, Greenpeace International decided that they want to spread their campaign to Israel. I was lucky enough to hear about it, and I offered myself and they hired me, not because there was so much competition. Not many other people in Israel wanted to work in this position. Greenpeace Israel definitely didn't want that campaign in their offices. My first mission, it was what the international crew called an objective, was in half a year to make the office accept the campaign. It was totally by accident that they accepted the campaign. It's just that we had such a fun first activity that just because they had real fun, they accepted it. The activity was something that you probably heard about. Maybe you heard me talk about it three times already, and Rebecca heard it about ten times, but we just had a great break. The University of Tel Aviv, with the support of all the military industries, was organising a series of events, of conferences about nuclear weapons. You just said that you're not talking about it. That's not entirely true. You're not talking about it a lot if it has the name Iran attached to it. So there were two main conferences, one called the Nuclear Challenge in the Middle East, and the one following it called Survival. The first one was from 9am to 6pm, with not even one woman speaker, and not one speaker that challenged the perception that when you talk about Iran, maybe you can add Israel into the talks, and maybe you can talk about disarmament, and not just about armament and disarmament.  I was terrified of doing that, because I didn't know anything, but we offered that I'll come and speak to show that in a university when you have a whole day of a discussion, you can show the other perspective. The first speaker of that conference was President Peres, also known as the father of the nuclear programme in Israel, outside of Israel mainly, but he's the one that started it, and he was the president. We knew that the media will be inside, because the president is speaking. We decided that since our kindly offered that I'll come and speak was rejected, with laughter, by the way, that we will come, and that we will do something that will get on TV because they won't be able not to show it. We had all kinds of ideas, but we knew that we have to get close to the president so we can be in front of the cameras without looking as a threat, because if you run towards a sitting president, his guards might shoot you, and we didn't want to get shot.  So what we did, we snucked into the conference room, it was 400, 500 people, all ex-military, ex-foreign ministry, defense ministry, and so on, and we scattered around the room with banners that we concealed very nicely because they did look very carefully in our possessions, but we managed to conceal them. The idea was that since we don't know how it's going to be, when the time is right, as the campaigner I'll stand up and I'll start yelling our message, while all the guards run to me, and that's what happened, while all the guards run to me, our activists around the room took off their clothes. They had messages on their stomachs, and other activists and them opened the banners, saying stripping the Middle East of nuclear weapons and stripping the Middle East from weapons of mass destruction. Of course all the guards run to me, dragged me out, and the campaigner stood, another activist stood from the other side of the hall, continued exactly from where I left, when he was taken out, another campaigner standing even closer to the president finished what she had to say. We did it so well, she even had to improvise a bit, but what happened after that was, of course they dragged all of us outside, what happened after that, that we were standing outside and we thought it didn't work. No one came outside, no reporter, we did this big action, first time in Israel there's such an action, and no one came outside. However, AP and Reuters were inside and they were talking about it, they were sending photographs and images from within. In this one hour what we didn't know, that it was on Iranian TV, New Zealand TV, Argentinian TV, the Argentinian TV we knew because one of the activists was from Argentina and suddenly his mother calling him from Argentina and said, Ariel, can it be that I just saw you naked? It was on BBC, on Fox News, on CNN, and that was in one hour. In this hour the Israeli media realised that they cannot ignore it and after one hour suddenly they wanted to talk to us. They were not kind, they were not happy about it, but they did talk to us. We went on TV, we could for the first time speak about it. For the next conference, survival, they did invite me to speak. They were not kind. It wasn't the nicest experience to speak there. I was talking about the humanitarian catastrophe, what happened if there is a limited nuclear bomb and about nuclear famine, about the research that shows the amount of death from starvation, the catastrophic results about the international campaign, about states now demanding a nuclear ban and so on. The guy that was speaking in the panel next with me was talking about digging how if Tel Aviv will have under Tel Aviv underneath it, like digging down, that's the way to survive a nuclear war. He was the same one, I was the insane one. I was totally discarded and the questions to him were, how deep shall we dig and how wide? This is how we started and really we still didn't have a clue of where we want to go with this. We knew we wanted nuclear abolition, but we didn't know how to start talking about it. How do you persuade? Mayors for Peace asked us to represent them in Israel. We said yes of course. We wrote letters to all the mayors in Israel and we just basically sent the formal mayors for peace invitations for mayors to join. We translated it to Hebrew and we got maybe two letters back. It was the first trial. The second trial we tried again. What happened if 100 bombs the size of Hiroshima will detonate? In 2007 that's how the ICANN campaign started, the international campaign. It was even called then 100 Hiroshima's. What happens if just 100 bombs the size of Hiroshima will detonate in a bomb between India and Pakistan? We finished it with cities should never be targets and we got about 60 mayors from Israel joining mayors for peace. We knew that that's the way. Now we knew that was an experiment on a small group of people, but it worked. We knew that the international approach is the one that we should continue with. We didn't have experts of our own to speak and to sit with us, so we imported them. I have to say that we had one year with budget and with this year with budget we did amazing things. We brought the Hibakusha to Israel and they've been in the media, they've been meeting members of parliament, they've been meeting just a closed media for the press and so on and they were meeting activists, activists that then join us at least on some events. We had also a good opportunity to bring, as Rebecca said before, Dr Arahelfand, the co-chair of international physicians for the prevention of nuclear war to the Israeli parliament and he was speaking with parliamentarians deeply into, with many details, it was a very good discussion about what happens when there's nuclear war, how nuclear wars can happen. You can watch some of the discussion that he had afterwards with one of the really more right-winger members of parliament in a YouTube video called Good versus Evil. That was the right-winger MP approach, Good versus Evil. We of course called the video Good versus Evil because we thought that good was, the prevention of war or evil was to think that nuclear weapons are okay. But realizing that there are no experts and realizing that we cannot just keep importing them, especially because we went into funds, we realized that we have to start behaving like a think tank ourselves. To do so, we started a series of round tables and it wasn't easy but at the end and Elizabeth Waterstone here was in one of them, right? In these round tables we managed to bring people that we never thought that would come to our invitation but people from the foreign ministries, people from the committee, I'm talking about the atomic agency committee, people from think tanks, those who are advising the government to sit with us together so we can map the obstacles for a weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East. That started a slow process that is now picking and that's to talk about what our plans and the peak now is that we're actually writing a draft treaty. It's a slow process because we want to own the process and by owning the process, I mean, this time we want people from the Middle East writing a treaty that the states say is impossible. The states haven't decided on an agenda yet. The states haven't, that doesn't have the good will to go there. We want to bypass these obstacles and to write a treaty and once we have a draft treaty, we have a product and this product will be the centre of our campaign. We hope it will be a tool for other international or national campaigners around the world. I talked to Dan about it and we're going to do some of the round tables following this draft treaty here with us. Our biggest adventure to come, apart from writing a draft treaty, is that we decided to challenge ambiguity but also to challenge the legislation status in Israel. We do have a nuclear energy commission like the IAEA, the local IAEA. Only I don't know if you know that Israel doesn't have nuclear energy. This commission is the one in charge of all nuclear facilities in Israel. The only place you find it in the Israeli legislation is, for example, in laws like the radioactive law, material law, dangerous material law, which say after the end, at the end of each law, all of the above doesn't apply to any of the facilities of the Atomic Agency Commission. We wanted to do our own inspections. We wanted to do our own radiation inspection around Dimona. There are people living there, you know. We found out that if we will do so, the person that do it might sit in jail, might for 15 years. So we decided to let it go for now. But now we're taking, for the first time, we're taking the state to the Supreme Court. That will happen. That's actually now in process. Now we finished writing the Supreme Court appeal and now we already published the Supreme Court appeal and now we are gathering the signatures, people to sign. We're also trying to gather some funds because we don't have the funds to submit it. But that will happen soon. We're doing a radio show on the only Israeli-Palestinian radio, but this radio also became illegal, called All For Peace Radio. So now we are just doing it on the internet. We found an internet TV that is willing to host us and we're giving lectures. And if you think that this is a small crowd, this is one of the biggest crowds because for our little lectures, it's so important to let people understand that they're allowed to talk about it and to understand the dangers of possessing nuclear weapon without talking about nuclear weapon that we're doing our meetings and lectures for two people, three people, and sometimes even 20. But it's a slow process. One of the questions that I was asked is what is the role or how can people that are interested in this topic from outside the region can help us in Israel. There are two or three main ways that I think we can get your help. One, pressure. Just because we don't talk about it doesn't mean that you can't talk about it. We found out that using social media is highly effective. When we started to post about it in Facebook, Facebook is huge in Israel, nobody else talked about it. We started to post more and more and encouraged other and asked other people to post and write and joke and really joking about things is amazing. You should have seen what happened when I published just a little picture of a tiny, tiny kitten that was just born and said, doesn't this kitty deserve a world without weapons? And someone saw it and opened a new Facebook page called Kittens Against Nuclear Weapons. I mean, this... Yeah, it's funny, but it works. And other people started to make memes about nuclear weapons. But it all came because we generated it again and again and again until it started to catch. Or else nobody will talk about them in Israel. But if you'll talk about Israel nuclear weapons and not just in spite but in a responsible way, again, no states should have them. It doesn't really help saving Israel. Against exactly what are we deterring with our nuclear weapons? ISIS? They are a non-state actor. This is the new game now. But if we will not disarm and this is very important to say, if the Middle East will continue to hold weapons of mass destruction, they will fall into non-states actors' hands. And they can do whatever they like. You cannot deter against them. This is something that you should keep talking about. It is immoral to hold these weapons, but that's maybe not what will change Israel's minds. People that are working inside the UK or other states that possess nuclear weapons, mainly the P5. The P5 and mainly Russia, England and the US are the depository states for the WMD-free zone in the Middle East. What have they done to push it? And the answer is nothing. They didn't even have an agreement among the three of them. Push your diplomats to have an agreement to push for the talks. How do you want the states in the Middle East to talk about something and agree about something when these three states can't agree on anything? Another way to help us? We're out of funds. Totally out of funds. Every year we think that we're about to close the NGO and this year it is it because we don't have any way to survive anymore. We have a Facebook page. In our Facebook page there's a button that says donate. We understand now that we won't get any money from states, even those who promised us. We understand that no one wants to piss Israel that much. However, people like you that can give small donations and spread the message can help us survive another month. Thank you very much. Thank you for a very inspiring presentation. I'd like to open the floor up to questions to Sharon and I'm sure those of us in the panel won't be able to resist. My beautiful assistant has the microphone and will be able to come to your assistance. Who would like to get us started? Gentleman there. If you feel like saying who you are, you're very welcome. Norman. What are the boundaries of the Middle East in your scheme? Obviously it will include Israel, Iran, and probably all the countries around there. But I think it should also include Pakistan. Pakistan won't agree unless India agrees. Of course India won't agree unless China agrees and China won't agree unless America agrees. So it's a domino effect. But it could at least include, as far as possible, Pakistan, possibly Indonesia, Malaysia, countries which by the most extreme stretch of one's imagination and really defence ministry might conceivably want to act against Israel. Only if all those countries are included, it seems to me could you get agreement of all the countries including Israel to do something about it. I'm smiling because that's my line usually. When I speak in front of international, especially at the NPT and the people from nuclear arms states that think that they can talk about the Middle East as if it's under a bubble, I say it will not happen in a void. You have to do, you have to work on nuclear disalment. That's it. Either it's a nuclear ban or nothing will also move in the Middle East. The thing is, people prefer to talk about the Middle East and the Middle East right now has to disalment as fast as possible. We are at war, we are un-stabilised and we have weapons of mass destruction. This is a threat. I also think it's a global threat but I might be too dramatic here. You're totally right. Iran and other states will always look at Pakistan. Saudi Arabia probably has a deal with Pakistan. Everybody denies it but we know there was a deal between Saudi and Pakistan. Not that Pakistan will assist Saudi Arabia with building but actually with giving them control over some of the ready nuclear weapons. At the beginning it seemed that it will only happen if Iran will have nuclear weapons and now Saudi says that they're not happy with the deal so they want to continue. It's almost like they're taking Netanyahu's lines to be happy with the deal but you cannot just talk to Pakistan without talking to India. India, you cannot talk to India if you're not talking to China, if you're not talking to the US and to Russia and there's no excuse for England and France but you're totally right. What we want to offer is that we will start in the Middle East and you know that it's just the beginning of a process but the beginning will have to be the states there's no real definition for the Middle East so we choose. We chose all the states that are in the Arab League plus Iran plus Israel as the first round but on the second round and when the process continues we won't just need Pakistan, we'll also need Turkey. Turkey also possess nuclear weapons. It's not their own, it's American, it's Netanyahu's but we all know that they can take hold of them and that's how they designed that these bases design that the locals can take hold of them. Gentleman there, while the microphone's going I would just say we need to be careful not to argue that because we can't do everything we should do nothing. I remember Geoffrey Howe, Mrs Thatcher's then foreign minister in the high days of Reagan Gorbyshoff disarmament in a very Freudian moment saying that we shouldn't engage in nuclear striptease that we had to hang on to our weapons or whatever they were. So don't discount the ability of momentum to take us a long way and don't think necessarily that we can do nothing because we can't do everything. Gentleman there. My name is Farzin. I want to just do a little bit of reality check. We live in an age of failed paradigms. The military's paradigm has obviously failed. They spent trillions of dollars and they can't even win a war. They lost in Afghanistan, they lost in Iraq, the emergence of Daish is the ultimate evidence of the failed paradigm of military power. But I think we should also recognize that the activist peace paradigm has equally failed. We failed to stop the first Gulf War, we failed to stop the second Gulf War. We have failed and failed again and we refuse to recognize that the problem is structural, that demonstrations aren't going to produce any meaningful results. And we have to go to the drawing board. The scale that is required for winning, and as Nixon said, winning is not everything, winning is the only thing, is so different than our limited imagination allows because we grow up in a system and academia is a big part of this problem that crushes imagination. And we have to move out of this box that is the fundamental reason for our failure. I love the Israeli peace movement, all 20 of them, but please. Sorry, I don't know if to say sadly or lucky, I'm not coming from the academia. As I said, I'm totally ignorant. But it's very easy to say there's no way. And there's definitely no goodwill, no goodwill. I thought once when I just started the campaign that there's no goodwill from Israel, but the Egyptian wants it and that the Saudi wants it and that at least we can start working with the Arab state because they really want it, and I realised that no. The Arab states want to bash Israel. Israel wants to bash everybody and Israel loves the status quo. I realised that the depository state, the UN, all those who thought wanted peace, wanted disarmament, kind of like it just the way it is and that they're not going to change anything. But I'll tell you what I do believe in. Maybe not in the Israeli peace movement, although the 20 that are still there are quite good and I'm part of them, so. But I do believe in civil society and I do believe in fighting for what you believe. What shall we do? Say that nothing can happen, then we are definitely part of the system. Do you want to turn it in? Yeah, just to respond to this guy's point, I think in terms of winning, I wonder if it's ever a good idea and in terms of winning, it doesn't have to be absolute. You can have marginal incremental victories as well. So I think this point is a little bit, try and give a kind of more sophisticated response to it. I mean, you can increase the political cost to governments of doing certain things, waging war in certain ways, waging certain wars. I think the peace movement and anti-war movement can do that. So for example, the way the Americans fought in Vietnam, different to the way they fought in Iraq, that was devastation, that was carpet bombing, completely indiscriminate use of weapons, killing tens, hundreds of thousands of people. The way they fought in Iraq was pretty ugly, but it wasn't that bad. And it's partly to do with the fact that there's a concerned engaged public out there, that there was an anti-war movement in the case of Vietnam in America, which started with tiny, tiny meetings and ended up with massive marches. So you can have these little incremental victories and add up to something. And it's not absolutely everything, but we don't have to choose between total victory and total defeat. We can fight for something that's difficult to fight for, win a few victories, and that's something that saves a few lives, hopefully. Happy note of optimism. I'll hand it back to the floor. Let's see if we've got another gentleman. Tony from Med Act in the UK and also IPPNW. And one of the things that's changed recently in Britain is the involvement of students, or at least in Europe particularly, in campaigns against nuclear weapons. And it's been one of the exciting, really revolutionary things to bring in this new young blood. Now I realise in Israel that there's huge pressure against speaking out and how difficult it is to speak out on anything. But I wondered whether you found any inroads into the students and particularly medical students on the ones that will really understand the humanitarian issues much better to be allies for this. Not yet. One of the things that keep amazing me when Ira Helffin, Dr Ira Helffin, came to Israel is from the international physicians. I thought the first thing I should do was to make sure I have him meeting the physicians for human rights. They are great. They are doing amazing job in Gaza and in the West Bank. They wouldn't meet him. They wouldn't meet him, they wouldn't meet me. The Israeli left, all 20 of them, don't want to deal with nuclear weapons. It's either they think it's too big, impossible and scary. But out of the 20, well, actually the 20 that are left are now kind of joining us. Even mainly because of the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court is mobilising people. But the physicians didn't come to join us. Now, there's IPPW Israel that has two doctors that go to conventions. I'm sorry, I don't want to say bad things, but they don't believe that you can campaign in Israel. So that's a problem. And we simply don't have the time to do everything. I mean, it's really something that we want to do, but not yet. One day. Okay, well it's just a couple more and then we'll wrap up, I think. Let's see if we've got one here. Anybody else? Last call? Last orders? Right, that's brought people out. One question here and two more there and then we'll close.  But I wonder what your comments on the fact that it's also a taboo outside of Israel. And it's certainly a taboo here. And it certainly was a taboo during the Iraq war. And it's a taboo within the BBC because you'll be aware of the programme about Israel's nuclear weapons some years ago, which following that the BBC was carpeted by Israel and told that they would have no more journalistic access if they made any other programmes in that way. And I was very aware during the Iraq war that there were no discussions. When there were discussions about WMDs they were strangely truncated just when people started to talk about Israel. So what do you think we could do to explode this policy of ambiguity? Let's take a couple more for you. Thank you very much for your talk. What would you say to someone who thinks that WMDs played a positive role in the world? For example, by stopping, by maybe preventing war between the United States and the USSR and between Pakistan and India? And one more, last one. Thank you. My question follows on from the chap there just from beforehand which is the reasons as to why Israel is unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons. So geostrategic position being surrounded you said Saudi Arabia and Sharon now have access to nuclear weapons will have the monopolisation of nuclear weapons in Pakistan. There's the fear of Iran. There is insidious nature of other states saying yes, yes, we'll get rid of our weapons but actually continuing to produce them under the cover of darkness. So there's this whole lack of trust and although lots of people are very keen to say that Israel has committed crimes against humanity in terms of the bombing last year or even the threat of using nuclear weapons if they felt threatened enough. Israel may argue that Palestine have outright said since 1948 that they don't agree with their actually being a Zionist state. They live in fear, fear that at any moment they could be destroyed. So how do you propose that we overcome that fear and actually get them to the point where they will actually consider giving up their arms as opposed to you know just going it blind and hoping for the best? That's a good range of questions to end on. I'll ask Sharon to speak and then see if David and Rebecca want to give us their two cents before we wrap up. Okay, about blowing the bubble. You know the first, the best way to blow the bubble is if one state will probably by accident blow up the bubble. I promise you that will end the ambiguity and go directly into a nuclear disarmament but let's hope that that's not what happened. What we did is to just ignore the ambiguity. We're not even questioning the ambiguity.  So go directly there, ignore it. I was shocked to hear that people don't want to talk about it in other places in the world. I was shocked when I met with the foreign minister from the Netherlands when I asked him something about his nuclear weapons he looked at me and he said we do not confirm nor deny. I said hey, that's our sentence. I was really shocked. Really democratic states don't talk about it. Just don't agree. Talk about it. Put a huge poster. You have a huge demonstration tomorrow. It's like a dream come true. The 80s are back. In the 60s, amazing. I hope you're all coming, right? Even the 80s, yeah. You're all coming, right? Great. What about the Cold War? Weapons of mass destruction played. You asked me what would I say. Well, obviously I would say that you're wrong. That it's wrong. And I'll tell you why. It's true that there was no big wars at least no nuclear wars between the two big powers. But they did fight each other through proxies.  That's one thing. I also think that just because there were WMDs and mainly nuclear weapons, it's one fact. No big wars between the two. Another fact, and that you can't really combine these two and say that it's a fact, that this fact and that fact are working together for 100%. You had the Cuba crisis. But apart from the Cuba crisis, you had at least 20 to 30 times where nuclear war between these two states almost started and was stopped by a miracle or by a brave person or by another incident. Just look up near misses and you'll get chills because too many times it's almost started. Just because of mistake. Because the US and Norway were doing a missile trial and they sent effects to the Kremlin but nobody read the facts but suddenly they saw a nuclear attack or what they perceived as a nuclear attack. Things like that. So, you know what? Let's say that you are right. And because of what WMDs during the Cold War, they didn't fight. Let's forget everything I said. Is it still true today? I don't think so. For several reasons. A, now we know that you cannot have a small scale war but we know that by accident a small scale nuclear war might start. Second, you know that now in the new politics with the new non-state actors too many non-state actors can put their hands on these weapons unless we abolish them and that with them there is no deterrence. You do not deter against non-state actors and that's the new politics. That's the new game. I hope I convinced you. Fear and Israel. It's a great question. Thank you. Israel is afraid. It's not something that people from outside can understand but we are terrified society. You hear our Prime Minister talking about Iran and the Holocaust. You do, right? Have you heard about the Mufti? Anyone here don't know about the Mufti? The news tends now is that the Holocaust was incited by the Mufti.  He just wanted to transfer them. But the Mufti came to him and said, but if you transfer them they all come to us. What shall I do with them? Asked Hitler according to Netanyahu. Burned them said the Mufti again according to Netanyahu. I'm quoting here. Angela Merkel actually had to go the other day the day after and reclaim the Holocaust. So we're surrounded by those who want to kill us. Netanyahu tells us all the time that's the only reason he gets elected because we're scared. Nobody trusts him. Nobody believes him. But we keep voting for him because he scares us as a society. And we believe in all these threats. But let's think. I like to do in Israel. I talk to people that come from the south where for eight years they have daily threats of bombs. My ex lives there. My son lives there. It's frightening that you have 15 seconds to run for shelter. It's frightening. Our nuclear weapons helped somehow to the people that live under this threat. I don't think so. The same in the north. I know kids that grew most of their lives in the shelters, in the Kibbutzim up north. Did our nuclear program help them somehow? We're afraid of ISIS. We can't do anything against ISIS. We're afraid of Iran, maybe there. But Iran doesn't have a nuclear program. Iran didn't have a nuclear program or at least not a nuclear bomb. And Iran already signed a deal that says it will never have a nuclear bomb. Else can we deter with weapons we can't use that cost us a lot and take money from conventional assistance that we so need because we are under threat. If we need to protect ourselves, it's not with nuclear weapons. And that's what people have to talk about, but there's no discussion. There are a lot of points to respond to. But I just wanted to talk about Tabu and using the power of Tabu to our advantage. And that's really what the nuclear weapon ban treaty will bring. So it's about creating a Tabu about the weapons. So after the First World War, for example, even though the machine gun had killed way more soldiers, people were genuinely horrified about the mustard gas and the way it left so many soldiers debilitated for years afterwards. And the way it killed, sort of indiscriminately, would waft back onto your own lines if you sent it to the enemy. And the similar thing with nuclear weapons, they're indiscriminate. You can't contain them within borders, within time. So it's about the international humanitarian law, basically, and strengthening the laws that everybody, all countries, have to abide by. And if you think about mustard gas and chemical and biological weapons, they have not been used on the battlefield in the 20th century, despite really some, you know, times when all moral boundaries seem to have been banished, really, in some of the dark times. But even then, chemical weapons were not used. They were used, obviously, by the Nazis in death camps, but they were not used on the battlefield because of the stigma attached to them. And when they were used in Syria, not even Assad's regime was prepared to acknowledge, admit that they'd used them. So we need to have that kind of taboo around nuclear weapons. They're even more destructive and cause even more horrific humanitarian damage. So, yeah, it's about turning that taboo and even countries like Israel are not immune to the power of collective kind of moral understanding. They're not going to be the first to disarm, but we have to think about the global picture and the international regime and vast majority of countries that find these weapons completely abhorrent. And we in the UK have to, you know, be on the right side of history on this. And I think we have a civil society. We have information. We have, you know, the ability to campaign in much more easy surroundings than they do in Israel. So we really have to lead by example, especially if we want, you know, the weapons of mass destruction down in the Middle East to work, we have to put our money where our mouth is and say, well, you know, there are global... You've got to put lots of money. We're going to put lots of money. But there are nuclear ban treaties regionally across large swathes of the world. And actually let's just build on those and make a global nuclear weapon ban treaty. So that's good. And David, I think you wanted to say a word of thanks to Sean. Yeah, thanks very much to Sean. And that was a, you know, really good insight into the difficulties that people have in Israel and discussion issues and, you know, quite an inspiring example of the bravery of these people and their dedication despite some considerable odds. And hopefully we've given a small platform and a bit of help in their continued work. Tomorrow, as I mentioned, there is a big demonstration in London about tried and it would urge you to go to that. The stance of the British government, and this is true under the Tories, it was true under Labour as well whenever they were asked about nuclear weapons, is we must have nuclear weapons because we live in an uncertain world. We don't know what the threats are going to be in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years time. That is a recipe for never disarming ever because we're never going to live in a certain world. So what does that say about Britain's commitment to the nuclear proliferation treaty? And what message does that send to countries, other countries that have signed it, on the other side of the bargain, which means that they don't acquire nuclear weapons, we're telling them that we're tearing it up from our point of view, we're not prepared to fulfill our side of the bargain. So that march is really, really important. But thank you very much to everyone on the panel, to Dan, to Rebecca, and especially to Siwan. Thank you for coming. Thanks.


We got a distress call from the Barlavento. The vessel was taking on water from the seas, coming over the side of the vessel, and they were disabled, and they also had one crew member who had a broken arm and possible head injury. So that was important to respond as quickly as possible. So as aircraft creator, it was definitely an intimidating call to get, especially with that range. 90 miles is pretty far away from home station for the 65. And really it was one of those cases where everything had to go right. By the time we got out there, it was about 50 knot winds, 20 foot seas, and the 79 foot schooner looked pretty small out there, and they had several lines dragging behind them. And these lines were going behind the boat, up out of the water to the stern, went down, disconnected from the hook, sprinted to the vessel as fast as I could, barely made it, and grabbed onto the ropes behind them, hanging on, barely hanging on. And I was thinking to myself, I can't let go. We don't have time for that. So I knew I only had a few minutes to get the patient, get in the water, swim to the basket and get out of there. The flight make did a great job of getting the basket where I needed it in the seas, scooped her in, and I hopped into the basket with her, gave her ready for pickup signal. We went up into the helicopter, I got out of the basket and treated the patient on the flight back and transferred her to EMS. We were unsure if we would have the time based off of our fuel constraints to hoist all five of the remaining crew members. So Secretary Northman's helicopter was able to respond as well. Going out the second time with those guys out there really gave us a good feeling, knowing that we were out there alone and we had some teammates out there to help us out. We arrived back on scene. We knew that we'd be able to get them to jump off the vessel one at a time into the water. And I would be ready waiting on the hook for direct hoist with the quickstrap and we'd be able to go up with them each one at a time to safely recover them inside of the helicopter. Can't thank my team enough for making everything go right on that first go and we were able to pick up all six of those people. So this was my first rescue as a AST. They make it hard for a reason. They only let the people who they know aren't gonna give up get through because you're gonna be in situations where you can't give up. You have to make it happen.