American Activist Launches Petition To Free Mordechai Vanunu

Delinda C. Hanley

Eileen Fleming has written countless articles and letters describing whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu’s plight, as well as a book, Imagine Vanunu’s Wait for Liberty, available from the AET Bookstore (middleeastbooks.com). Inspired by Dorothy Day, the devout Catholic social justice activist and journalist, and in response to Fleming’s June 2005 trip to Israel/Palestine—the first of eight—Fleming founded WeAreWideAwake.org.

Mordechai Vanunu. In the back, a satellite image
of the Dimona plutonium production centre.

Fleming has written powerful letters about Vanunu to Pope Francis, Archbishop Carlos Maria Vigano, Israeli President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama, Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report,” and “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart, to name just a few. Many of Flemings letters note that in 1986 Vanunu told London’s Sunday Times everything he knew from his work as a technician in Israel’s secret Dimona nuclear weapons facility. His revelations were published just as Israeli Mossad agents kidnapped Vanunu in Rome. A few weeks earlier Vanunu, a former Orthodox Jew turned atheist, was baptized at a social justice Anglican church in Sydney, Australia.

Vanunu, who spent 18 years behind bars in Israel, many of them in solitary confinement, told Fleming, “In prison, I really began to feel like Jesus and Paul. When Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple, it was like me in Dimona, exposing the Israelis’ dirty secrets. I felt like Paul, being thrown in prison for speaking the truth.”

Flemings letters explain that while Vanunu was released from prison on April 21, 2004, he has spent the past decade far from free, living under 24/7 surveillance, and has been prevented from leaving Israel. “It was not ever easy,” Vanunu told Fleming, adding that he finds it especially astounding because “in Israel, a life sentence [for Jewish Israelis] is 25 years. Even murderers go free after 17.”

But Vanunu has had the Palestinian treatment: “They imposed the same restrictions on me that Palestinians receive: no human rights at all; no phone; no visitors, except family, and only through an iron grill; no vacation; no holidays; and no gifts. Even murderers get out for vacations! I was locked up for 18 years and still cannot go on vacation; I cannot leave, and that is all I am asking for—just to leave here.

“The United States needs to wake up and see the truth that Israel is not a democracy, unless you are a Jew,” Vanunu said. “Israel is the only country in the Middle East where America can right now find nuclear weapons. America can also find where basic human rights have been denied to Christians: right here in Israel.”

Fleming has launched a petition to ask Israel to free Vanunu. Her petition begins with an update: “On Dec. 25, Mordechai Vanunu’s 7th Israeli Supreme Court appeal for his right to leave ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ was heard. On Dec. 29, Supreme Court Justice Asher Grunis denied Vanunu’s appeal, stating, ‘The restrictions are intended to prevent future dissemination of classified material.’”

In addition to the unusual restrictions placed upon Vanunu’s movements, Israeli courts have restricted his right to interact with other people, particularly foreigners and the press. Vanunu’s lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, has argued that his client’s secret information is so dated it could no longer threaten the state, adding, “This man is not allowed to leave a country that does not want him in it and in which he does not want to be.” Feldman told the Jerusalem Post that Vanunu merely wanted to leave Israel to marry his girlfriend and live out his life quietly.

All Vanunu’s secrets were published in 1989 in a book by nuclear physicist Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: The Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East. In 1986, Barnaby was hired by the Sunday Times to vet Vanunu’s story, and he testified at Vanunu’s closed-door Israeli trial. Fleming records Barnaby’s words:

“I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel’s secrecy laws. He explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically.

“Israel’s political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about Israel’s nuclear-weapons program, and he found this unacceptable in a democracy. The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel’s nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985.”

Fleming’s ongoing petition aims to shame Israel with bad PR until the state allows Vanunu to leave. More than 3,000 internationals signed the petition in its first week. With enough pressure from Fleming and other supporters, on April 21, 2014, the 10th anniversary of Vanunu’s “open-air captivity,” the Israeli state might just relent and permit Vanunu to leave, returning to a life interrupted 27 years ago.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Source: WRMEA. Image: VoltaireNet.org
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2014/04/23/american-activist-launches-petition-to