Washington Report, January/February 2006, pages 20-21

Special Report

Mordechai Vanunu Rings a Bell for Justice And Freedom

By Delinda C. Hanley

	Since nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu’s release from Ashkelon prison on April 24, 2004, the Israeli government has prevented him leaving the country and emigrating to the United States (Photo by Michael Keating).

AFTER years of following his tale of heroism and hardship in the pages of the Washington Report, and writing about his release (see April 2004 Washington Report, p. 10), actually meeting Mordechai Vanunu at the Christmas Hotel in East Jerusalem on Oct. 7 was like getting together with an old friend. The former nuclear technician, who revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to Britain’s Sunday Times in 1986, spoke to us across the street from the courthouse where, after a secret trial, Vanunu was sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 and a half of them in solitary confinement.

Pointing toward the floodlit building surrounded by huge walls, Vanunu said, “That’s where I drove up in a closed car so no one could see me and showed the words I’d written on my hand about being kidnapped from Rome.”

Even though the Israeli whistleblower has served every day of his harsh sentence, the government continues to hold him in Israel against his will, denying him his freedom to speak to reporters as well as his right to travel. Vanunu has been arrested briefly several times for multiple violations of those restrictions, including for giving interviews to various foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel. Vanunu is awaiting trial on Jan. 15, 2006 to address those charges (see box on facing page).

“I served my full sentence. They have no right to hold me now,” he told the Washington Report. “After surviving all those years, can you imagine how it feels to be told I can’t leave? They’ve given me the ‘Palestinian treatment,’ and I believe the main reason is because I became a Christian,” said Vanunu, who converted from Judaism. “I want to be free. If I am here I don’t feel free. I can’t enjoy my freedom under Israeli power.”

Since his release on April 21, 2004, Vanunu has found sanctuary around the corner from the Christmas Hotel, at the St. George’s Cathedral Guest House. He once asked why no one ever rings the bells at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral. Then he started going to the bell tower and ringing the bells himself. “The court that sentenced me is across the street,” he noted. “Now today I’m ringing the bell every day at noon to show I’m free. Every day I will speak in a voice of nonviolence and ring that bell.”

And suddenly it hits me, Vanunu is actually living the words of the song made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary: If I had a bell, I’d ring it in the morning, I’d ring it in the evening, All over this land.

I’d ring out danger, I’d ring out a warning. I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters, All over this land.

It’s the hammer of Justice, It’s the bell of Freedom, It’s the song about love between my brothers and my sisters, All over this land.

But no one is listening.

Vanunu is a passionate supporter of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel has refused to sign. In 1986, Vanunu said, he had no choice but to talk to the Sunday Times in order to warn the world about Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. He was convinced then—and nothing has occurred since to change his mind—that Israel has a Masada complex and that, if push came to shove, the Jewish state would use those weapons, even if Israelis were killed in the process.

Vanunu subsequently was lured to Rome by a female American Mossad agent, smuggled into Israel, and tried and convicted behind closed doors. The world left him to his unjust fate. He is still saddened that U.S. members of Congress, the media, and Americans who support the abolition of nuclear weapons did not help him gain his freedom.

Even now, he said, there is little protest as Israel restricts his human rights. “Where is the outcry that helped free Soviet Jews,” he asked, “like former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky,” who spent from 1977 to 1986 in a Soviet gulag?

Vanunu is quick to answer his own question: “Standards change when it comes to Israel.” He also is quick to warn, however, that “Following Israel is not good for the United States and damages the U.S. image in the world. It shows a double standard. The United States threatens Iran and Iraq when they don’t have nuclear weapons but never talks about Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. Iran signed the nuclear proliferation treaty. Israel never did.

“Israel was crazy to build 200 atomic weapons which can kill millions and destroy the world,” Vanunu insisted. “For warning the world I was sentenced to prison as if I was a killer. I didn’t kill anyone. I played by the rules. I wasn’t a spy. I went to a newspaper, not a foreign government.”

Two Israeli Knesset members recently said that Dimona, the country’s decrepit nuclear reactor and plutonium production facility built in the late 1950s, was still in good shape. But in a Sunday Times article published in 2000, Professor Uzi Eben, a former senior official in Israel’s nuclear program, called for the immediate closure of Dimona. According to Eben, Dimona, located 50 miles from the Jordanian border, poses serious dangers and may lead to another Chernobyl. In Vanunu’s opinion, Jordan should ask that Dimona be opened to international nuclear inspectors. “If there is a disaster in Dimona,” he warned, “Jordan will be the first to be affected.”

In response to our concern that this interview could endanger Vanunu’s freedom, he declared, “One of the most important human rights I have is my freedom of speech. I am talking to the press in order to make Israel see it’s better to just let me go. If I stayed silent in Jerusalem they would continue to keep me here. I demand my right to speak.

“I don’t have any new secrets,” he added. “I can only repeat what I’ve already told, and those secrets are 19 years old. Hasn’t Israel’s technology made those secrets obsolete by now?”

Recalling his years in prison, Vanunu described the intense psychological cruelty to which he was subjected. “In the first five years I thought I’d die,” he said.

“I read a lot of U.S. history books and books about nuclear proliferation in prison, he added. He also read books on health and good diets, quit smoking and began watching what he ate. “I wanted to be strong in body and mind and keep my health so I could survive to speak,” he explained.

“Religion was my way to fight Israel in prison,” Vanunu said. “I’m a Christian and Jesus Christ loves us. I just kept making my point until I got out.” He wrote countless letters and papers, but two months before his release his guards took everything he’d ever written. In June he asked for his work to be returned. The courts refused, saying they couldn’t afford censors to read it all.

Now Mordechai Vanunu appreciates trees, colors, smells and sounds. “At St. George’s guest house I meet foreigners every day,” he said. “I feel like I’m traveling around the world. The Christians and Palestinians I meet all recognize me and regard me as a hero.”

He gets some hate mail, he acknowledged, but doesn’t usually answer it. “Sometimes I’ve sent letters back saying ‘Jesus Christ loves you. He died for you.’

“All I want is to be treated like a human being with human rights, free. I don’t want revenge,” Vanunu emphasized. “I just want to live my life and contribute to the world. If I leave Israel I’d like to write a history book.”

Five weeks after our interview, on Nov. 18, Vanunu once again was arrested, questioned, and held in a cell with only a mattress and a blanket for two days, forcing him to “remember all the cruelty and hard life of 18 years in isolation.” His crime this time? Vanunu had taken a bus to Aram, a small Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, to see the route the annexation wall may take. His camera and mobile phone were confiscated, but returned later.

“So that was another incident of harassment in this new series of cruelty since my release,” Vanunu notes. “They will not give up and let me go—let me leave Israel. If they could put me back in prison they would.

“The world continues to ignore my situation and is not doing anything to help me gain my freedom, in the same way it did during the 18 years of my imprisonment,” he lamented. “Nobody will intervene to demand my release. The world stands by and allows Israel to do as it pleases.”

Vanunu awaits his upcoming January trial date, hoping the Israeli courts will end the government’s persecution of him, but fearful of the prosecution’s efforts to return him to prison. Meanwhile, every day, Vanunu rings the church bells at noon, and continues to speak out for justice, freedom and love between his brothers and his sisters. Is any one listening?

For more information visit Vanunu’s Web site, <http://www.serve.com/vanunu/>, e-mail him at <vmjc1954@gmail.com>, or write him in care of St. George’s Cathedral, 20 Nablus Rd., East Jerusalem, PO Box 19122, Israel. You can also write U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to demand his release.

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.