Israel Developing ‘Ethnic BioWeapon

This Wired report goes back to 11/16/1998

Israel is reportedly developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, according to a report in London's Sunday Times.

The report, citing Israeli military and western intelligence sources, says that scientists are trying to identify distinctive genes carried by Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.

The "ethno-bomb" is reportedly Israel's response to the threat that Iraq may be just weeks away from completing its own biological weapons.

The "ethno-bomb" program is based at Israel's Nes Tziyona research facility. Scientists are trying to use viruses and bacteria to alter DNA inside living cells and attack only those cells bearing Arabic genes.

The task is very complex because both Arabs and Jews are Semitic peoples. But according to the report, the Israelis have succeeded in isolating particular characteristics of certain Arabs, "particularly the Iraqi people."

Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli parliament, denounced the research in the Sunday Times. "Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied."

Last month, Foreign Report claimed that Israel was following in the ignominious footsteps of apartheid-era research, in their supposed efforts to develop an "ethnic bullet." 

Wikipedia has a piece on Genetic Weapons:

History Of Ethnic BioWeapons:

Usage of natural disease as a weapon in conflicts has a long history. While in Nepal, its rulers maintained a malaria-infected Terai forest as natural barrier against invader from Ganges plains. Natives of Terai have natural resistance of malaria, while the invaders didn't.

One of the first modern fictional discussions of ethnic weapons is in Robert A. Heinlein's 1942 novel Sixth Column (republished as The Day After Tomorrow) in which a race-specific radiationweapon is used against a so-called "Pan-Asian" invader.

Genetic Weapons:

In 1997, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen referred to the concept as a possible risk. In 1998 some biological weapon experts considered such a "genetic weapon" a plausible possibility, and believed the former Soviet Union had undertaken some research on the influence of various substances on human genes.

The possibility of a "genetic bomb" is presented in Vincent Sarich's and Frank Miele's book, Race: The Reality of Human Differences, published in 2004. The authors believe that information from the Human Genome Project will be used in just such a manner.

In 2004, The Guardian reported that the British Medical Association (BMA) considered bioweapons designed to target certain ethnic groups as a possibility, and highlighted problems that advances in science for such things as "treatment to Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases" could also be used for malign purposes.

In 2005 the official view of the International Committee of the Red Cross was "The potential to target a particular ethnic group with a biological agent is probably not far off. 

These scenarios are not the product of the ICRC's imagination but have either occurred or been identified by countless independent and governmental experts."

In 2012, The Atlantic wrote that a specific virus that targets individuals with a specific DNA sequence is within possibility in the near future. The magazine put forward a hypothetical scenario of a virus which caused mild flu to the general population but deadly symptoms to the President of the United States. They cite advances in personalized gene therapy as evidence.