Vanunu’s Family Affair and US-Israeli Reality-Check: Nukes and ‘Peace Talks’

Vanunu’s Family Affair and US-Israeli Reality-Check: Nukes and ‘Peace Talks’

By Eileen Fleming

Exclusive to The Arab Daily News

 

Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday the U.S. is questioning its role in the Israeli-Palestine peace talks, noting it was “reality-check time” for negotiators from both parties.

In the past week, Israel cancelled the planned release of a group of Palestinian prisoners and Palestine applied to the United Nations to join 15 international conventions and treaties.

Kerry said that the U.S.’s role in the peace process is not “open-ended,” the AP reports, and that the U.S. will “evaluate very carefully exactly where this is and where it might possibly be able to go.”

Kerry is heading back to D.C. today after working in Europe and the Middle East “to bolster peace in the region.”

The Way ends this article:

The news regarding Jonathon Pollard’s connection to extending the “peace talks” thus furthering pieces of Palestine being ‘wiped off the map’ prompted, Mordechai Vanunu’s US adoptive parents, Nick and Mary Eoloff to email me that they:

“Will be writing to our Zionist reps in the senate and house to ask that they free Mordechai and allow him to join his new family in Minnesota. Perhaps, you could ask your constituency to write or contact Kerry to ask the Israelis to free Mordechai.”

The Eoloff’s learned about Vanunu in a 1995 edition of The Progressive.

In a 2003 interview the Eoloff’s explained how they came to be Vanunu’s new family

 

I read his story, and I thought it was out of the Dark Ages. I mean, to keep someone in this day of age in a six-foot by nine-foot cell. It’s unreal.

He’s been in isolation longer than any person in the western world. Just the brutality of that is very moving.
He told us, ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to see grass after ten years.’

 

The Eoloffs began writing to Vanunu and joined the US Campaign to free Vanunu united by their mutual anti-nuclear views.

Mary noted the obvious; “Here we have this beautiful world [and] the idea of destroying it in an afternoon is insane.”

Nick explained that their efforts were focused on petitioning American politicians to put pressure on the Israeli government to free Vanunu and  “that all proved fruitless- a dead end. We wanted to help this human being. How do you help?”

They considered adoption and when Vanunu agreed [his biological parents disowned him more for becoming a Christian more than for telling the truth about Israel’s nukes] the adoption proceedings began in October 1987.

But the law required that Vanunu be present at the adoption hearing (impossible because he was in prison) and that a valid birth certificate be provided for him (impossible because Vanunu was born in Morocco, which did not have the records)!

Miraculously, the Eoloffs managed to get the court to waive these two requirements, but Vanunu remains captive in east Jerusalem.

After the Eoloffs testified before Congress, in April 1999, thirty-six members of the US House of Representatives signed a letter calling for Mordechai Vanunu’s release from prison because they believed “we have a duty to stand up for men and women like Mordechai Vanunu who dare to articulate a brighter vision for humanity.”

President Clinton responded with a public statement expressing concern for Vanunu and the need for Israel and other non-parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to adhere to it and accept IAEA safeguards.

 

On 2 October 2009, The Washington Times reported that Obama agreed to keep Israel’s nukes ‘secret’ and reaffirmed a 4-decade-old understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.
Three officials spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, but all said Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May 2009.

Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.

 

This nuclear deception was reached at a summit between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on 25 September 1969, when the United States passively accepted Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel does not unveil publicly its capability or test a weapon.
Three days after Vanunu emerged from 18 years behind bars on 24 April 2004, Uri Avnery wrote:

Everybody understands that Vanunu has no more secrets. What can a technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has advanced with giant steps?

But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with the United States in the development of Israel’s nuclear armaments.

This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State Department for ‘arms control’, Under-Secretary John Bolton, has come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe damage to the mighty super-power.

The Americans, it seems, are very worried.

The world must be prevented by all available means from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness, that the Americans are full partners in Israel’s nuclear arms program, while pretending to be the world’s sheriff for the prevention of nuclear proliferation. [1]

 

Also in 2004, Yossi Melman wrote for Haaretz:

This is the secret that hasn’t yet been told in the affair: the story of the security fiasco that made it possible for Vanunu to do what he did, and the story of the subsequent attempts at cover-up, whitewashing and protection of senior figures in the defense establishment, who were bent on divesting themselves of responsibility for the failure, the security blunders and their cover-ups. [Ibid]

 

More recently, the Eoloff’s cosigned with others who greeted Vanunu after he emerged from 18 years behind bars the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s statement Ten years after his release from prison, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is still not free  inviting “people around the world to join us as we call on Israel to do the right thing, morally and legally, and finally lift Vanunu’s restrictions without further delay.”

On April 3^rd I left a phone message for Secretary of State John Kerry (202) 647-1512

On April 4th I emailed [email protected]
Dear Secretary of State John Kerry,

I am the only non-Arab on staff at the US based The Arab Daily News.

The news of Jonathon Pollard’s connection to the “peace talks” prompted Mordechai Vanunu’s U.S. adoptive parents, Nick and Mary Eoloff to email me that they:

“Will be writing to our Zionist reps in the senate and house to ask that they free Mordechai and allow him to join his new family in Minnesota. Perhaps, you could ask your constituency to write or contact Kerry to ask the Israelis to free Mordechai.”

I ran for US HOUSE in 2012 in District 5, Fl. but I became a reporter in June 2005, after my first of eight trips to both sides of The Wall because Vanunu told me:

The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out.



President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant.

The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’



When Johnson became president; he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.



Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.

Yesterday, the National Union of Journalists cross-posted TNT’s Petition We are not free until Vanunu is FREE.

TNT/Telling Nuclear Truths is dedicated to fully free Vanunu and end Israel’s nuclear deceptions.

Despite Vanunu deactivating his Facebook and Causes accounts in 2012, TNT and FREE Vanunu at Facebook continue to grow the Legend of Vanunu.

Will this Administration end Israel’s nuclear deceptions and pursue peace by working for justice?

Most Sincerely,

Eileen Fleming,
Author, Reporter
Leader TNT
PHOTO POSTER ATTACHED

1. BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010