The Iranian government’s effort to obtain nuclear weapons is a world problem, not just Israel’s problem, said Israel’s chief diplomat to the Midwest region of the U.S.
“Iran doesn’t feel ashamed to say that it is after the Western world” as well as Israel, said Israeli Consul General to the Midwest Orli Gil.
Moreover, Iran has advanced to the point that it will likely have enough suitable uranium to make a bomb in 200 days, Gil said.
(The New York Times reported on Nov. 20 that some experts believe Iran has enough low-enriched uranium now to make one atomic bomb, but would need to refine that uranium further and put it into a warhead before it would be usable.)
But there is no need yet to consider seriously military action against that country, Gil said in an interview at The Chronicle’s offices on Nov. 19. Instead, there are “simple steps” that the U.S. and the world can take “before we think about violent acts.”
Gil said that economic sanctions have worked well and “placed intolerable pressure” on Iran, giving it a 30 percent inflation rate and a “shortage of basic products.”
These basic products include refined oil — though Iran is a crude oil exporter, it has no refineries of its own, she said — and grain, which it has had to import from the United States (what its Muslim fundamentalist government calls the “the Great Satan”), Gil said.
“The economic burden is becoming harder and harder” on Iran’s people, said Gil. “Eventually, we hope that [Iran’s Israel-baiting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] will not be reelected if things go on this way.”
The world could also prevent tankers bringing refined oil to Iran from entering the ports they commonly use — Singapore, Shanghai, the Arab Emirates and Antwerp — and get the “big insurance companies” in London to stop insuring these tankers, Gil said.
But “the Western world needs to wake up” and take these actions, Gil said. A nuclear-armed Iran would “accelerate the arms race” in the Middle East, as “no other moderate Arab countries would allow Iran to have nuclear weapons without them having the same weapons.”
Iran could also threaten the flow of crude oil from the Persian Gulf; and its government is “starting to talk about closing the Strait of Hormuz to tankers,” she said.
When asked about what she would like to see from the administration of President-elect Barack Obama, Gil recalled Obama saying during his campaign that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. “We do hope he will stick to his words,” she said.
Diplomat by chance
Gil assumed her post this past July. As Midwest Consul General, she oversees from her Chicago office efforts to promote good relations with, and positive views of, Israel in 11 states, including Wisconsin.
She made her first visit to Milwaukee last week to meet with the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and speak to the board of directors of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
A native of Rishon L’tzion, she served in the Israeli air force as an office worker, then studied English and Hebrew literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“I am not the classic person who wanted early on to become a diplomat,” Gil said. It was “mere chance” that she saw an advertisement from Israel’s foreign ministry, applied and was accepted, she said.
But the field proved so satisfying to her that she has stayed with it for 22 years. “I enjoy moving from place to place,” she said, “seeing new cultures, new places.” Moreover, “every mission is so completely different from the previous one,” she said.
Her missions have included consul for academic affairs for the U.S. at the Consulate General in New York, where she worked from 1999 to 2003 on issues relating to Israel’s image on college and university campuses throughout the U.S.
Gil said that time coincided with “the first days of the second intifada [Palestinian uprising in the Israel-administered territories]” when campuses were “really on fire” against Israel.
The situation today is “better than it used to be, but today what I do feel is that [most U.S. students] have no idea what Israel is. They do not know anything about Israel” but have an “image that it is an occupying country.
“That is one of the things I would like to change; to show them another face of Israel, what Israel is really about. It is not only about conflicts.”
Before coming to Chicago, Gil worked in the foreign ministry’s Division of International Organizations, where she dealt with United Nations’ specialized organizations and non-governmental organizations.
The U.N. overall and many of its sub-organizations remain “the only place[s] that still try to de-legitimize Israel,” Gil said.
“As long as the Arabs are determined to use their automatic majority on the one hand and the European Union does nothing to stop it, I don’t think [Israel’s situation at the U.N.] will get better.”
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