http://www.thenation.com/issue/980511/0511hitch.htm
Amnesty for Vanunu
By Christopher Hitchens
Jerusalem, 05/11/1998
Here are three names that ought to be much better known than they
are: Dr. Hussein Shahristani, Dr. Vil Mirzayanov and Mordechai
Vanunu. Dr. Shahristani was senior official of the Iraqi nuclear
research program until 1979, when he was imprisoned for refusing
to obey an order to begin working on the development of nuclear
weapons. Dr. Mirzayanov also went to jail, in Russia, for
disclosing that secret work on chemical warfare was being
conducted by his country. Mordechai Vanunu, who blew the whistle
on Israel's covert manufacture of a nuclear arsenal, was kidnapped
by Mossad agents and sentenced to eighteen years in solitary
confinement in 1986.
Of these three exemplary international citizens, only Vanunu is
still behind bars. (Dr. Shahristani made his escape over the
Iranian border after a decade, and Dr. Mirzayanov was released
following an international campaign that drew attention to his
plight.) There is a chance that Vanunu will benefit from the
meditated amnesty that President Ezer Weizmann is planning for
Israel's fiftieth anniversary, and here are the reasons he should.
Vanunu came to Israel in 1963 as the son of a family of Moroccan
Jewish immigrants. He was raised Orthodox and conservative. After
his military service he began work in the Israeli nuclear research
facility at Dimona, in the Negev desert. He became aware of a
division in the plant that could produce at least forty kilograms
of plutonium a year, which is enough for ten nuclear bombs. Having
gone through some form of political and religious crisis during
General Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Vanunu kept records
and took photographs and in 1986 took his findings to the Sunday
Times of London. The newspaper published a long and detailed
story, which showed not just what everyone had suspected--that
Israel had a nuclear capacity--but that it had become the world's
sixth-largest nuclear power. With its "Jericho" missiles, which
have an intercontinental range, Israel is able to strike targets
well out of its immediate area, and possesses no fewer than a
hundred warheads.
Some recent news-agency accounts have described Vanunu as the
"nuclear spy," but this is not true in any usual sense. He was not
acting as the agent of a foreign power, nor did he sell his
findings to any other intelligence agency. Indeed, he was not even
a mercenary. What he did was "go public," which neither spies nor
mercenaries do. All of a sudden, mere members of the civilian
population became aware of what the intelligence services of every
state already knew.
Revenge was immediate. The Israeli authorities, who were reluctant
to embarrass Mrs. Thatcher by conducting such an operation in
London, managed to lure Vanunu to Rome by the traditional means of
a potential girlfriend--known in the trade as a "honey trap." In
the Eternal City, he was kidnapped and drugged before being flown
home for a secret trial. From 1986 until March of this year he was
held in rigorous solitary confinement in Ashkelon prison, in a
concrete cell measuring six by nine feet. His request to serve his
time among the general prison population was refused, as were all
requests for visits except from his brother. This did not mean
that Vanunu was denied all human contact. Last December, according
to the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, he was verbally abused by the
visiting Minister of Public Security, Avigdor Kahalani, who did a
drop-by on the isolation cell to insult Vanunu as a traitor. He
might, one feels, have been spared that.
In March, Vanunu was suddenly allowed a daily walk and
conversation. This may or may not have to do with an intervention
from the Prime Minister of Norway, Magne Bondevik, who raised the
issue during a visit to Oslo by Benjamin Netanyahu. In town to
discuss the Oslo "accords," which he so much despises, Netanyahu
responded that Vanunu's case was an "internal affair" of the
Israeli state. The Norwegians are more aware than most that
Israel's thermonuclear capacity is anything but an internal
matter. It was a treaty between Israel and Norway on the supply of
heavy water that was unilaterally violated by Israel when it
diverted the material from the promised "peaceful use." (It also
pooled its nuclear secrets with the apartheid regime in South
Africa, tested a nuclear warhead in the South Atlantic and between
1964 and 1965 stole hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium from
the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation [NUMEC] in Apollo,
Pennsylvania. This coup was followed by the November 1968 Israeli
hijacking of a Liberian-registered vessel, the Scheersberg A,
which carried 200 tons of uranium ore. "Internal affair," indeed.)
According to his lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, and to Knesset member
Dedi Zucker, Vanunu is gravely weakened in both body and mind by
his long solitary confinement. The state, in other words, has made
its point. And there is obviously no chance that Vanunu has
anything more to tell. Indeed, as a mental and physical ruin he
might make a better advertisement against dissent than he did as a
courageous prisoner. All nuclear states claim the power of life
and death over all citizens, and they mean what they say, reducing
the rest of us to the making of empty "humanitarian" gestures.
Still, we have no choice but to go on making them, and so I urge
you to contact the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu at 2206
Fox Avenue, Madison, WI 53711; (608) 257-4764.
An old Israeli joke has the military spokesman repeating the
official line that "Israel will not be the first to introduce
nuclear weapons into the Middle East," and then adding under his
breath, imagining the microphone to be switched off, "and we won't
be the second, either." But there is no such thing as a nuclear
deterrent unless others possess the same weaponry, and neither
Vanunu nor Dr. Shahristani was able to stop the arms race that was
inevitable once Israel began it and the United States, that
renowned impartial mediator, decided to look the other way.
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