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.

A Golden Opportunity: Turning Bitter Fruit into Gold

I have great admiration for the Israeli people and for Jewish people as a whole. Their accomplishments are many, their talents abundant, their past suffering truly horrible beyond description.  And yet the policies of the Israeli government toward the Palestinian people are terrible, cruel, and uncivilized and, as such, unacceptable. They are abhorrent and must be changed.  Facing such injustices, [...]

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Yahav Zohar – Settlement Peace Activist Volunteer

 

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

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During our trip, we met Yahav Zohar, an Israeli who has worked as a journalist and translator but also commits at least one day a week to volunteering his time to work toward a just peace –– to end the Israeli occupation. Yahav was the official guide for the antidemolition group The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD), an organization that
opposes the demolition of Palestinian homes and unjust tactics taken by the military and housing authority for demolishing homes and granting permits.
 

On the day we met, we had attended a presentation by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territory. We were briefed on the humanitarian crisis and consequences that need to be addressed:

The United Nations deserves the World’s Support –– it has had little help and has had many obstructions from Israel!

• Lack of protection for civilians and continuing violence
• Closure, movement restrictions and lack of access
• Political geographical and institutional fragmentation
• High Food Insecurity
• Continuous Decline in the Economy and Socio-Economic Conditions
• Agricultural Livelihoods Threatened
• Health-Care Quality Deteriorating; Mental-Health-Disorder Symptoms on Rise
• Access to Quality Water and Sanitation Problematic
• Basic education standards Deteriorating
• Palestinian Civilians at Risk and in Need of Protection
• Children Exposed to Violence and Rights Violations on a Daily Basis
• Increased Humanitarian Coordination Needed
• Gender-Based Impact of the Crisis

Following the meeting, Zohar took us to some key areas where Israelis have demolished Palestinian homes and expropriated land to build new Jewish-only settlements. Despite announced agreements otherwise, this practice continues to make the prospect of a two-state solution less possible.

The UN holds the West Bank and Gaza Strip together –– almost Single-Handedly!

ISRAEL AND ITS OUTRAGEOUS TREATMENT OF FULBRIGHT SCHOLARS

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Champion of the Week: Gali Agnon

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

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A Young Israeli Who Refuses to Be Silent and Insists She Must Personally Help Palestinians

Among the many wonderful young Israelis I met during my trip to Israel and occupied Palestine, Gali Agnon stands out as a bright spot on many levels. After serving in the Israeli army, this 20-year-old Israeli felt it her obligation to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian people and to do what she could to help them.

A dedicated peace activist committed to forging a solution in her conflicted part of the world, she takes a multi-faceted approach to her mission – bringing people together for cooperative assistance and support on farms, building awareness for the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank, and organizing meetings and gatherings that bring Israelis and Palestinians together in common purpose.

Clearly one of the most tangible contributions she
makes is in her role in helping Palestinian farmers take their produce to market. The Israeli Government does not allow Palestinians to come into Israel to sell their produce, so she has devised a system, where she creates a market for them – offering their vegetables and fruits for sale to the people in Israel, and then transferring the money from her sales to the Palestinian farmers.

In fact, the extensive Israeli military roadblocks and restrictions that I saw for myself make it next to impossible to effectively get from one place to another.

Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, facing constant threats and interrogations at every turn — apartheid revisited.*

On Saturday, June 21, Gali asked some of her Israeli and Palestinian friends to spend that Sabbath day helping those Palestinians whose homes were being demolished by the Israeli Government.

Just 10 days later – July 2, a Palestinian worker went on what has been called a killing rampage in Jerusalem. Not affiliated with any Palestinian organization and acting completely on his own, this 30-year old Palestinian, who fathered a child with a Jewish Israeli woman, and drove the tractor he normally used for his job constructing Israeli projects, to kill Israeli Jews – A PERPETUATING TRAGEDY THAT SPRINGS FROM HOPELESSNESS AND DESPERATION.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

(Text from Gali’s Invitation Below)

What would you do if you found a note posted on your door that
Within the next ten days your house will be destroyed?
To build and expand a house, it is required to have a building permit.
These permits are virtually never granted to Palestinians on the basis of various pretexts.
The result is that most Palestinian homes are illegally built, and have standing
Demolition orders against them.

Abed Raba from Wallaje is one of these thousands of people who have received
An order stating that the house he is living in is illegal, and he must present himself
Before the Office of Interior in order to explain why he has built illegally.
Otherwise, judicial and/or administrative measures will be taken against him –
Read: they will demolish his house. The cave where he lives is hundreds of years
Older and is located on his own lands in Wallaje, above the checkpoint near Ein Yal.

The place is a beautiful orchard of fruit trees, also used as
A meeting point for Israeli and Palestinians who have resolved
to meet in spite of racist and segregationist policies.

Obviously, this place does serve the political and economical interest of Israel –
Lands in Jewish hands – and so they are exploiting legal measures as if desiring
to build a neighborhood in order to force him out.

*again – no true religion here – only pure selfishness.

Champion of the Week: Yehuda Shaul

Yehuda Shaul is a 25-year-old Israeli who, like nearly all Israeli men, has served three years on active duty in the Army and is now an Israeli Army Reserve. Shaul is also a former Israeli settler who lived on a settlement in the occupied West Bank. He is a religious Jew and continues to wear [...]

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GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

During his visit to the Middle East, Citizen Paul had the opportunity to meet and speak with many young dedicated Israelis that are determined to correct the errors of their Government.

In the following weeks, we will feature each of these individuals for you, in addition to wonderful Palestinian citizens, who are all dedicating their best efforts to bring peace and hope to their homelands.

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

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OUR CHAMPION OF THE WEEK:

HAGIT OFRAN – Settlement Watch

Despite damning details of Israel’s ever-expanding Israeli settlements, this valiant young woman brings us Hope for the Future.

Hagit Ofran is a young Israeli who feels it is vital to expose what the Israelis are really doing to the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank.

Hagit’s work is a kind of mission she has set for herself. Even as she realizes that the “Two State Solution” may be dissolving from possibility because of the Israeli “facts on the ground,” she nevertheless continually works to expose the facts and offer an alternative future.

She always carefully documents her case: “Israel has tragically continued to break agreement after agreement building more and more Israeli settlements, taking more and more Palestinian lands and resources, perpetrating more and more repression and violence – and now there is the damning nearly 800-kilometer-long ‘Wall’ snaking everywhere unlike anything anywhere else in the world.”

At this point in time, Hagit is in essence a one-woman “Settlement Watch” truth-squad. Her association is with the Israeli group known as Peace Now; but often times it’s clear that she is far out front and pretty much on her own. She provides Israelis and people throughout the world truthful information about how the Israeli Government continues unrelentingly – despite repeated promises otherwise – to expand Israeli settlements, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, and to apparently work toward creating “facts on the ground” that may soon make the “Two State Settlement” no longer viable.

At the time I met Hagit, I wasn’t aware of this important cover article that appeared in the National Journal about her in March 2008. Here are some of the telling excerpts – as Hagit puts it:

“The de facto policy of Israel is a quiet transfer of land to settlers and the expulsion of Palestinians. They don’t accomplish that by force, nor do they roll up with trucks to take Palestinians away. 

“They just don’t allow them to rebuild their villages or repair their homes … 

“In Israel, you can’t call things by their real name. So instead of settlement expansion, we call it ‘natural growth’ or ‘thickening.’ Instead of ‘illegal outposts,’ we say ‘unauthorized outposts.’ 

“The central problem is you cannot really reconcile occupation with the rule of law. If we were serious about obeying the law, we wouldn’t lay so much as a brick in this land. So we go through all these linguistic acrobatics to avoid an unpopular truth.”

Asked why she braves the shouting soldiers, the irate settlers, and the suspicious Palestinians to bring back to Israel news that the public would just as soon not know, Ofran considers the question. Then she answers with a world-weariness heard in the voices of many Israelis: 

 
“I was born into occupation in 1975, so it is the only reality I know,” Ofran says. 

“But I also know that it’s the main obstacle to Israelis having a good and normal state with full equality for everyone, and I want to believe that’s still possible. 

“I don’t want to live anyplace else, but if we pass the point where a peaceful solution is still possible, I would personally find that devastating. 

“At that point, I might have to find a better place in the world to be a Jew, because it would mean we lost the state of Israel.*

The central problem is you cannot really reconcile occupation with the rule of law. If we were serious about obeying the law, we wouldn’t lay so much as a brick in this land. So we go through all these linguistic acrobats to avoid an unpopular truth.

*Again – the “Golden Rule”

 

Find more Hagit Ofran content below:

• Her telling article, “Hope out of Despair”
• An in-depth interview with Ofran about the efforts and project of Peace Now
• Video of Ofran as a featured speaker at the New America Foundation
• An Audio Interview from Peace Now, detailing a trip she took to the Gaza Trip to educate Israelis on the spiraling settlement activity.