So, part of the International Solidarity Movement’s Freedom Summer campaign has to do with these things called “solidarity visits.” Essentially, people are encouraged to go and meet Palestinians with severe travel restrictions, those who are stuck in prison or under house arrest.
While he’s not Palestinian — though possibly having undergone punishment more extreme than many Palestinians have come across after running afoul of the Israeli military apparatus — I decided to have a little solidarity lunchtime with Mordechai Vanunu.
I asked him where he wanted to go and he suggested the American Colony Hotel. This was fine. After a spell of solidarity with the good folks putting up with settlers down in dusty and dry Qawawis, I decided I could be just as supportive for an afternoon with a nuclear weapons whistleblower and enjoy a little flan in the process.
There’s no need to go into the whole Vanunu backstory here. It’s well documented elsewhere, and very much worth the read. To offer a Cliffs Notes version: he was a technician at the Dimona nuclear research center in the Negev Desert and looked up one day and noticed that this energy plant was secretly becoming a plutonium separation facility for Israel’s nuclear weapons program. He decided in 1985 to take it on the lam after spending a few weeks snapping pictures of the nuclear weapons operations. He worked his way to Sydney, Australia before releasing the information to the London Sunday Times, thus giving the world proof that Israel was working with enough material to churn out upwards around 200 nuclear warheads.
Rockets and short range missiles are one thing, Vanunu said over lunch. “But why are they building a hydrogen bomb? It’s not for defense. There’s no way it can be used for that.”
I’d heard all about this part of the story before, and it’s remained impressive on repetition. I’ve long thought that there’s something a little off about a newspaper claiming to “get the scoop.” Before any reporter gets wind of a story, a source somewhere has picked up the phone, sent an email or snapped a photo. The real muckrakers of the world often are the whistleblowers. This isn’t to degrade the role of the investigative journalist, but to give a little credit where credit’s due. One role is part of a job; journalists worth their paycheck investigate. There’s often some sort of drive or ethical motivation behind the person doing the work, but it’s a profession. Whistleblowers often are working in direct opposition to their profession. It is seldom economically advantageous for someone to break their company rules or nation’s laws.
But without these people, we wouldn’t have had conclusive proof that Nixon was a crook, that meat processing plants had wildly unsafe practices, that cigarette companies were engineering a product to maximize its addictive qualities, that the CIA meddling in South America helped fuel the crack cocaine boom in Los Angeles and that supposedly little defenseless Israel had become a nuclear threat in the Middle East.
While the journalism awards are doled out, most of these whistleblowers are left on their own. The vast majority of them are fired if they hadn’t already left their jobs. They face an avalanche of lawsuits, potential jailtime and in some ludicrously extreme cases, 16 years in prison, with 11 and a half of them in solitary confinement.
“When you’re in isolation, your mind needs some sort of consolation,” Vanunu said, while wolfing down the lunch special at the American Colony Hotel. “They give you all the sweets you want while you’re in there, but (all that sugar) does things to your head. … I was a vegetarian then, so I when I was eating in isolation it was always a lot of these sweet things.”
Then they’d interrogate. For 11 years, that was the only communication available. “They learn to destroy your head. they’re experts at it.”
Every now and again, in the middle of talking, he’d sort of stare off to the side and go silent for a bit. A short while later, he’d be back, though, picking up where he’d left off. It was the only trace I could pick up of the damage that must have taken place with such treatment.
To me, Mordechai seems a lot more sane than he should. I don’t know how sane I’d be after that. I don’t know how sane I’d want to be. What an excuse it would offer to go off and do just about anything you wanted after that kind of treatment and just right it off as your just desserts after what you’ve been through.
So this is the other part that’s impressive to no end to me. That this long after, as the Israeli government has decided to bury the man, he’s just turned around and kept at it. Being kept in a room by himself for more than a decade has obviously offered some training. “Every day you get up you have to come up with a plan about what you’re going to do for that day. It’s the only way.”
He’d be thinking about retirement right now if he’d still had that job near his home town of Beersheba. When he started all this, he was just 32 years old. Once at the beginning of what was to be a comfortable career, he’s now living in a dorm room at St. George’s Cathedral in East Jerusalem. The church has mostly donated the space. Donations pay for some of it. Other donations cover food. People donate clothes on occasion. Someone paid for five months of pool access at the American Colony Hotel so he can get some exercise.
Most the stories I’ve read about Mordechai have seemed to imply he came late to many of his views about Israel. But really, one doesn’t often wake up with a whole new mindset over night. According to him, it’s something he’d been working toward for some time. He said he’d started looking into the Palestinian struggle back in college and had his first interrogation by Israeli intelligence when he helped organize demonstrations then. Though he did his mandatory service in the army, he refused to do reserve duty during the war with Lebanon in 1982. By the time he was leaving with his photos, he said, “I was ready to leave. I wasn’t coming back.”
Big plans. We’ve all had those. At 32, Mordechai said he had that notion many people carry of having nothing to lose. But dude had a mind to have a family by now. Whatever kids that would have emerged from that plan would likely be adults now.
1985 is 20 years ago. To me, that’s quite a while. And in that time span that it takes for an infant grow into a college loan, no one else around here has done anything approaching what he’s done. At least not this openly. I asked him about that: Surely, the technology, the issues, the secrets have significantly changed since 1985. Where’s the next Vanunu? I mean, it’s been two decades already. Surely, somebody out there is having an ethical dilemma and access to something hot.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” he said. We sat, ate dessert and pondered who it would be, what the topic would be surrounding it, etc. Technically, he couldn’t answer the question. No one can. Will it have to do with ultimate goals around the annexation wall? New settlement plans for Gaza kept hidden somewhere? Some new fangled way of killing loads of people? A hidden file on the Jenin massacre? Secret designs for that big gold dome in the old city, etc.
The answer is in what’s happening to Mordechai. After the many years in a room by himself and a few more years in the general prison population, He was “released” in 2004. It wasn’t much of a release, though, and in fact, he’s just entered a slightly wider prison population. His movement is regularly watched. He’s not allowed to speak with foreigners, Palestinians and journalists. He is forbidden from leaving the country or traveling to the Palestinian territories, even those places regular Israelis are allowed to travel, such as Bethlehem.
He was detained on Christmas Eve in 2004 for attempting to worship at the Church of the Nativity. After several hours of detention and five days of house arrest, he face charges of attempting to flee the country, but there was one snag with the allegations. A judge dismissed, since, had he been convicted, it would have been a precedent-setting Israeli court ruling on where the border was in the area.
Obviously, he hasn’t complied. Mordechai readily agrees to any and all interviews or meetings with people he isn’t supposed to talk with. He regularly and openly meets with Palestinians all around his neighborhood in East Jerusalem. After lunch, as we stroll back toward St. George’s, it’s feels like walking in a neighborhood a longtime resident. People drive by, offering a honk or a wave. Brief, trite conversations start amongst everyone he passes. But the drivers are all in UN cars or journalists in Range Rovers with the letters “TV” taped to them. Passers by on the sidewalk are embassy workers or NGO types. These people revolve through. Mordechai is stuck.
All this is being done under the auspices that Mordechai has more to tell. That he knows something. He says he doesn’t. I tend to go along with this, but to each their own. But consider this: The last time he had access to any data regarding Israel’s nuclear weapons program or anyone working on it The Bangles were the big new thing on MTV and Marty had just hopped into Doc Brown’s DeLorean for a quick trip back to 1955.
More likely, it’s the “others” that the Israeli government is worried about. Most people in these lines of work are people who see themselves as having something to lose. Professionals have mortgages, families, kids, reputations, bank accounts, retirement plans, etc. They might not want to end up running from the law or wind up in a church dormitory subsisting on handouts.
While not having any idea on whistleblowers, there are other Israelis Mordechai seems to find some commonality with. A growing number of Israelis are showing up at demonstrations in Palestinian towns. He was fascinated by the number of Israelis who take buses into the West Bank village of Bil’in to be tear gassed, shot at and kicked around by soldiers. He asked on a couple of occasions about how Neta Golan — one of the founders of ISM now living in Ramallah — is doing and had been reading about Tali Fahima, an Israeli woman who struck up a correspondence and friendship with Zacharia Zubeidi, head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in Jenin. About these people and incidents, Mordechai doesn’t offer much in the way of conclusions. Instead, he offers open ended questions such as “Why do you think more people doing this?
Outside of repeating what he knows about Israel’s nuclear program as it stood in 1985 and fighting for his freedom, Mordechai’s battle is winding down. It’s entirely geared around leaving. When asked about it, he essentially is still aiming for the life he thought about back in 1985: Live somewhere outside Israel., preferably the U.S., he said, teach in a university, work on writing a book. Until then, he’s staying in East Jerusalem, repeating what he knows about Israeli nuclear weapons as they were 20 years ago. “I came moved here as soon as I got out of prison. It makes it difficult for them.”
• Mordechai’s blog
• The U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu
• Vanunu UK site
Browse Timeline
Related Entries
-
A letter from Vanunu...Secret sale of UK plutonium put nuclear weapons in hands of middle east government...Weird corporate spybot makes the rounds...No more shiny things...
Recently commented