Lausanne, Switzerland (AP) – In the wake of forensic evidence that the radioactive element Polonium-210 was present in some of the personal effects that late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had with him when he died, his widow Suha Arafat sees the hand of Israel in this and other deaths of prominent icons as far back as 2,000 years ago.

Arafat died in 2005 at age 75, after a period of physical deterioration and a set of mysterious symptoms that sent him to a French military hospital. Speculation and rumors surrounding the cause of death eventually led to the exhumation of Arafat’s body from its Ramallah resting place for further testing. The University of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland, tested a number of the personal effects he had with him when he died and found elevated levels of the radioactive isotope of Polonium, infamously instrumental in the assassination of former KGB agent Alexander V. Litvinenko.

Mrs. Arafat and many other prominent Palestinians were quick to point a finger at Israel, who had been surrounding the leader at his Ramallah presidential compound when his health took its final turn for the worse. Various accusations have named Israel as the perpetrator by various means, including infecting Arafat with AIDS, killing him with a laser, or aerating the presidential compound’s air with various lethal pollutants.

Complicating the forensic picture is the fact that the quantity of Polonium-210 necessary to kill someone in 2005 would decay too fast to be detectable in 2012 or 2013, and that Arafat’s physical symptoms prior to death were not consistent with radiation poisoning. That information, says Mrs. Arafat, makes the accusation all the more nefarious: that Israel covered up its involvement in the assassination by masking her late husband’s symptoms as something else.

But Suha Arafat went even further, charging that Israel was also behind a number of other assassinations by similar means through the centuries, beginning with a Palestinian leader named Jesus in the first century CE. Jesus was framed by the Jewish authorities in occupied Palestine at the time, resulting in a death sentence. However, Mrs. Arafat claims that the commonly accepted accounts of Jesus’s death by crucifixion are simply a cover story for the more sinister truth: that Israel killed him with Polonium-210 and disposed of the body to destroy the evidence. In fact, when they went searching for the body mere days after Jesus’s death, possibly to perform a forensic examination, investigators found that it had been removed.

If true, such a theory would bolster Mrs. Arafat’s other contentions regarding Israeli involvement in the deaths of such prominent figures as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination sparked the First World War. Conventional wisdom has it that Ferdinand was gunned own by a Serbian nationalist, but conventional wisdom has been unaware of Polonium-210 until recently. Additionally, that war accelerated the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and facilitated the eventual establishment of the state of Israel, a fact that casts a suspicious light on Israeli behavior and motives leading up to that point. Polonium was discovered in 1898, the same year as the Second Zionist Congress.

What’s more, the Israeli leader who agreed to hand over some occupied territory to create the autonomous Palestinian Authority under Arafat in 1993, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli named Yigal Amir, the last two letters of whose name in Hebrew have the numerical value of 210. Official accounts and widely circulated video of the murder show Amir using a handgun to shoot Rabin, but as in other historical examples, the conventional version of events must be dismissed when an accusation of sinister Jewish or Israeli involvement arises.