A chance meeting with Mordechai Vanunu

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

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Israel’s Secret Nuclear Program and Its Bitter Revenge

I was fortunate to meet with Mordechai on my recent visit to Israel and to speak with him not only about his own situation but of the great dangers of a future nuclear war in the Middle East.

Mordechai Vanunu is a former Israeli and a former Jew*. As a man of great courage and integrity, Vanunu decided years ago that he could not tolerate Israel’s many and repeated violations of international law and that because of the work he had done, he had a civic responsibility to tell the world what he knew about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.

Consequently, Vanunu decided to become a Christian and renounce his Israeli citizenship. And, he went to London to reveal his story.

On October 5, 1986, the entire front page of the London Sunday Times was all about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program, complete with pictures.

Mordechai Vanunu had become a “nuclear whistleblower.” Vanunu believes, and rightly so, that Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program was setting the region on a course that would eventually result in nuclear proliferation leading to nuclear war.

Like other major whistleblowers to whom we owe so much (Daniel Ellsberg from the past and Sibel Edmonds more recently come to mind in our own country) Vanunu acted out of conscience and not at all for personal gain. Indeed, he was made to pay a tremendous price and he is still being forced into submission now 22 years later.

The Israelis enticed Vanunu into a “honey trap” with their American-pretending Mossad agent –– Cheryl Hanin Bentov, “Cindy,” now said to be living comfortably thanks to the Israelis and the U.S. in Florida.

After enticing him into an affair, “Cindy” convinced Vanunu to go with her on a “vacation” to Rome.

There, Mossad agents drugged and kidnapped him. In contemptuous violation of international law, they smuggled him secretly on a ship to Israel.**

In a secret trial he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. For 11 of those years Vanunu was kept in solitary confinement in conditions that Amnesty International characterized as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

Finally, after protests throughout the world and Amnesty adopting him as a special “Prisoner of Conscience,” Vanunu was released in 2004.

But the Israelis then did what they seem to relish. They used various new legal tricks to make it a crime for Vanunu to speak with foreign journalists or even to travel a few miles to pray in Bethlehem at Christmas time.

Supposedly, according to the Israelis, this single man whom they kidnapped and imprisoned for 18 years, was even now so dangerous that he had to be further deprived of his basic human rights, and confined in Jerusalem where he is shunned and ostracized by most Israelis. Indeed, new efforts are underway to imprison Vanunu again after all he has already been subjected to.

Mordechai was right and he has certainly earned the right to be listened to for his heroic and continuing acts of conscience. For whatever reasons, the Israelis are the ones who introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

It is Israel that repeatedly violated international law and even today it is Israel that continues to lie about its nuclear weapons program and refuse any and all forms of international inspection. It is Israel, in fact, that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT. Iran has not only signed this treaty and, year after year, allowed and cooperated with international inspections. Iran, in fact, has not even been charged with violating the NPT which it has carefully lived up to.

But more than anything else the NPT is preventing nuclear war in the Middle East, which all of us should be striving to achieve. That is one of the main reasons I decided at this time to see for myself what is happening in Israel and in Occupied Palestine.

Resolving the core conflict in the region, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and then working overtime to make the entire Middle East region one free of weapons of mass destruction is a central theme in the Goals for Americans publication PLAN PALESTINE and A NEW MIDDLE EAST.

*Believing now in the “Golden Rule” … unlike the Mossad and Israel’s government.

**It was more convenient for them to take a boat across the Mediterranean Sea than to take him all the way from London.