[News] The Man Who Knew Too Much - By Robert Fisk

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Robert Fisk: The Man Who Knew Too Much

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk03262004.html
March 26, 2004

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Ordeal of Mordechai Vanunu
The Independent(London) By ROBERT FISK



Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily
newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly
wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each
time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would
celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate--once a keeper
of Israel's nuclear secrets--wants to endanger his country
further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was
quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he
will reveal secrets..." Should it be a surprise, then, that the
very same prisoner, supposedly celebrating the slaughter of
innocents while preparing to betray his country yet again, holds
a clutch of awards from European peace groups, the Sean McBride
Peace prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of
Tromso? In 2000, the Church of Humanism told him: "You are
honest, courageous and morally highly motivated, and may the
great sacrifice you have made serve to protect not only those
living in Israel but all the peoples of the Middle East and
perhaps the world." The same man has also been put forward as a
nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mordechai Vanunu, it seems, can only be loved or loathed.
Indifference to the former Israeli nuclear technician is
impossible. For he is the man who, in 1986, took evidence to The
Sunday Times of the full story behind Israel's secret nuclear
weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev desert, complete with the
total number of advanced fission bombs there--200 at the
time--and, even more disturbingly, complete with pictures. He
said that Israel had mastered a thermonuclear design and appeared
to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. He was
subsequently lured by a girl from London to Rome and then
kidnapped, drugged and freighted back to Israel by Israeli secret
policemen. But in just six weeks' time, after 18 years of
imprisonment--12 of them in solitary confinement--the world's
most famous whistleblower is scheduled for release. Israel--not
to mention the world--is holding its breath.Will he divulge
further secrets of Dimona--always supposing he has any after 18
years of incarceration--or curse the country of which he is a
citizen, albeit a citizen who converted to Christianity before
his arrest and who wants to emigrate to the United States? Will
he emerge a cowed man, anxious only to apologise for the terrible
betrayal he inflicted upon his country? Or will he, as his
friends and supporters and his adopted American parents hope,
become an apostle of peace, one of the greatest of this
generation's prisoners of conscience, the man who tried to rid
the world of the threat of nuclear annihilation?

The Israeli government is still uncertain how to confront
Vanunu's release on 21 April. They are known to be considering --
perhaps have already decided upon -- "certain supervisory means"
and "appropriate measures" to shut Vanunu up. In the second half
of January, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
met with Menachem Mazuz, Israel's attorney general, and the
defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, and discussed whether Vanunu
should be refused a passport. Vanunu would be free to sunbathe on
the beaches of Tel Aviv but could not tour the world advertising
Israel's nuclear power. It's a sign of how fearful the Israeli
administration has become at the prospect of this one man's
release that Sharon also summoned to this conference Yehiel
Horev's so-called "Defence Ministry Security Unit", the country's
internal and external intelligence services--Shin Beth and the
equally overestimated Mossad--and a representative of the Israeli
Atomic Energy Committee. Horev, it is now known, wanted to go
much further than Sharon. He proposed clapping an administrative
detention order on Vanunu -- Israel's usual way of dealing with
Palestinians whom they regard as "terrorists"--although the
meeting apparently came to the conclusion that this would only
enhance Vanunu's reputation as a martyr for world peace. There's
another way of shutting Vanunu up, of course. He can be publicly
freed and then--the moment he starts talking about his work as a
nuclear technician--he can be tried again and thrown back into
Ashkelon jail--or Shikma prison, as the Israelis call it now.

But the real problem that Vanunu represents is that he will
remind the world at a critically important moment in the history
of the Middle East that Israel is a nuclear power and that its
warheads stand ready to be fired from the Negev desert. He will
also remind the world that the Americans, despite battering their
way into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction, continue to give their political, moral and
economic support to a country that has secretly amassed a
treasure trove of weapons of mass destruction.

How can President Bush remain silent on Israel's nuclear power
when he has not only illegally invaded an Arab state for
allegedly harbouring nuclear weapons and condemned Iran for the
same ambitions, but also praised--along with Tony Blair's
government--Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for abandoning his nuclear
pretensions? If the Arab states are being "defanged"--always
supposing they had any real fangs in the first place--why should
Israel not be "de-nuclearised"? Why can't the United States apply
the same standards to Israel as it does to the Arabs? Or why, for
that matter, can't Israel apply the same standards to itself that
it demands of its Arab enemies?

This is the debate that the Israeli and the American governments
wish to stifle. In the United States, where any discussion of the
Israeli-American relationship that deviates from the benign is
routinely condemned as subversive or "anti-Semitic", discussion
of Israel's nuclear power is not something that Washington will
want to hear on the Sunday talk shows. Vanunu, it should be said
at once, is well aware of all this, of his own
importance--infinitely greater than it was when he was a mere
minor technician at Dimona--and of the role that tens of
thousands of anti- nuclear campaigners expect him to play in the
world. Many times, through friends and through his own brothers,
Vanunu has said that he has no new nuclear secrets but has the
right to oppose nuclear weapons in Israel or anywhere else. "All
I want to do is to go to America, get married and start a new
life," he says.

No one can doubt Vanunu's conviction. Born in 1954 to a religious
Jewish family in Morocco, he immigrated to Israel at the age of
nine, performed his military service in the mid-Seventies and
began work at Dimona in November 1976 while completing a graduate
course in philosophy and geography. Perhaps it was during his
travels in Thailand, Burma, Nepal and Australia in early 1986
that he decided he had a moral duty to talk about Israel's
nuclear weaponst an Anglican church i n Sydney. Vanunu had
clearly become deeply distressed at Israel's growing nuclear
power when he walked into British newspaper offices in September
of 1986 in the hope of telling the world the truth about Dimona.
He had dropped by Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror at first, handed
over his photographs of the nuclear plant and waited for a reply.
Unknown to Vanu cell, but he is restricted within the prison. I
myself, as a working prisoner, painted a red line that he is
forbidden to cross. I was ordered to do that, and afterwards our
relationship cooled off." Vanunu has been regularly visited by an
Anglican clergyman, Dean Michael Sellors. It was Sellors who
pointed out to him that his release date coincided with the
Queen's birthday. "He said that in that case, he'd better get a
ticket and greet her himself."

Vanunu has also taken heart in the actions of the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel, a normally conservative organisation,
which has stated that, "any sanctions against Mordechai after
release would be illegal and immoral." A chatline on the Hebrew
website of the Israeli daily Maariv
shows that a number of young Israelis regard Vanunu as a hero
rather than a threat. Mary Eoloff, a retired American school
teacher who, with her husband, adopted Vanunu in the hope that he
could be given US citizenship and released, was the first to
reveal that when Israeli security men offered to release him a
year before the expiry of his 18 years in jail, Vanunu turned
them down. "He believes in freedom of speech," she said.It
remains to be seen if Israel will allow Vanunu the free speech he
loves. Horev, the defence ministry security official who attended
Sharon's meeting, has spoken of the threat that he believes the
nuclear technician represents, which seems to be about ambiguity
rather than state secrets.
Horev compares this ambiguity to water in a glass. "My job is to
ensure that the water doesn't spill over the glass," he said
recently. "Up until the Vanunu affair, the water was at a very
low level. The affair caused the water level to rise
significantly and caused Israel great damage, but the water still
didn't overflow. If we let certain people act in the matter, the
water will spill."

The Israeli journalist Raanan Shaked was a good deal more cynical
when he spoke on the subject on Israel's Channel 10 TV. "Who is
the main threat to Israel?" he asked. "Of course, Mordechai
Vanunu! He is the big danger. Israeli democracy simply cannot
withstand the impact of this one man
saying what every child knows: we have nuclear weapons." On 21
April, when Vanunu is released, we shall find out if the water is
going to overflow--and whether Vanunu will cross the red line
painted so ominously on the floor at the instruction of the
authorities.


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