Nuclear Whistle Blower Mordechai Vanunu’s July 4th trial reconvenes on 22 December
Vanunu has been growing his legend at FaceBook where he wrote:
After 30 years in Israel prison the new trial started [on 4 July 2016] from the big trial of exposing Israel Atomic weapons secrets [in 1986-87] to new chargers about moving apartment without reporting, for meeting foreigners, and for speaking to Israel media about Dimona Nuclear secrets. So the trial started and will continue in next months…
Ever since I met Vanunu in 2005, during my first of 8 investigative journeys to both sides of The Wall in the Holy Land I have spoken to groups, written articles and books documenting Vanunu’s saga in the struggle to end USA collusion in Israel’s nuclear deceptions and military occupation of Palestine.
I have been attacked, blocked, censored, maligned, slandered, misunderstood or ignored—and all goes with the territory whenever one is being honest!
True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed allowing the world to do what it will and say what it will say, so you will know who you are beyond all ideas. –Matthew Kahn
Honestly, I was always a writer but NOT a reporter until 2005 when Vanunu inspired me to realize my childhood dream of being one just because he told me:
Did you know that 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…
On 13 October 2007, I delivered the following speech in California and many -if not all except me- were white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.
They turned out for a “No More Wars for Israel Conference” which had been dedicated to Vanunu and was held on his 53rd birthday [he is now 62].
I attended because I had been invited to speak about Vanunu because of my writings about Vanunu and video interviews with Vanunu. The following is what I read from the podium after announcing:
I am NOT now nor have I ever been Mordechai Vanunu’s spokesperson.
I am here today- because Vanunu, as with everyone in this room and everyone in the world; all possess inalienable rights, God given rights-such as the right of free thought and the right to speak those thoughts.
States and nations have obligations. People have rights.
The year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of Al Nabka, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the statehood of Israel, which was contingent upon their honoring inalienable rights such as in Article 13 of the Declaration of Human Rights,
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country, [her homeland.]
These are rights that states and nations have obligations to uphold.
American democracy is based on the self evident truth that all people are created equal; all are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and to secure these rights, governments are instituted and derive their powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes unjust and destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people alter or abolish it. –[Paraphrase from “The Declaration of Independence”]
I am here today as a global citizen, a patriotic American and Christian of The Sermon on the Mount, which is where Jesus promised that it is the Peacemakers who are the children of God and NOT those that bomb, torture or occupy any other!
I am here today to tell you that in Jerusalem on April 30, 2007, Vanunu was convicted on 14 [out of 21] counts of violating a court order which denied his right to speak to foreigners in 2004 after his release from 18 years in jail for telling the world the truth that Israel was already nuclear in 1986.
Vanunu was also convicted for traveling the few miles from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to attend Christmas Eve mass at the Church of the Nativity, his first Christmas after being released from 18 years in jail [most of it in solitary] on 21 April 2004.
Vanunu told me, “This administration tells me I am not allowed to speak to foreigners, the Media, and the world. But I do because that is how I prove my true humanity.”
Article 19 of the UN Universal declaration of Human Rights asserts that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
In that spirit Vanunu and I began a series of interviews, such as “30 Minutes with Vanunu” taped in 2006 in which Vanunu says:
The Dimona is 46 years old; reactors last 25 to 30 years. The Dimona has never been inspected and Israel has never signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but all the Arab states have… Twenty years ago when I worked there they only produced when the air was blowing towards Jordan ten miles away. No one knows what is happening now.
The Israelis have 200 atomic weapons and they accuse the Palestinians and Muslims of terrorism. The world needs to wake up and see the real terrorism is the occupation and the Palestinians have lived under that terror regime for 40 years…
It’s very sad that Hilary Clinton went to the Jewish Wailing Wall and forgot the real crying wall is the Palestinian wall; the apartheid wall. The wall is not for defense, but to keep this conflict permanent…
Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew…
On 28 May 1993, Ariel Sharon was quoted by Israeli Press explaining: “The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.”
Professor Jeff Halper in an American Israeli and a Noble Peace Prize Nominee explained: “Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.”
I am here today to tell you that on July 2, 2007, Vanunu’s freedom of speech trial that began in January 2006 ended with a sentence of six months in jail.
Vanunu was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Marrakech, Morrocco in 1954. When he was 9 years old the Zionists came and promised his father “the stars, the moon and the land of milk and honey” but the Vanunu’s were banished to the desert of Beersheba, “a place with no Coke or Pepsi and the ice cream was just ice” as Vanunu said.
Vanunu attended a Jewish orthodox boarding school in the Old City where the mosque was empty of Palestinians who had been banished from Beersheba.
Vanunu passed his high school classes except for English and Hebrew studies. At eighteen years old, he had his “mind and health checked” and he wanted to be a pilot. However, he failed the hand-eye coordination test and was assigned to the Engineering Unit, where he learned about land mines, bridges, and explosives.
Vanunu traveled freely as a soldier, and served in the occupied territories near Bethlehem. Vanunu told me:
I felt how poor the people were under occupation and how they suffered without reason, except for the reason of injustice.
In the 1970s, Israel built many fortresses and spent lots of money on equipment, but nothing on the people who were oppressed and under occupation.
I got really mad and upset every time I thought about how much money they wasted, but I kept my mouth shut and kept it all to myself.
After a year, I finished my training and was assigned to train more soldiers. For me it was all futility and waste; I saw these children become soldiers and thought, what a complete waste.
When the Yom Kippur War broke out, soldiers with less than a month of training got called to go with me to the Jordan Valley.
There weren’t enough trained troops, and we were lucky we didn’t see any fighting and got to return to base after three days.
After a few months, we all went to Syria and the Golan Heights. When Kissinger coordinated the cease-fire, the Israeli army destroyed the area before leaving there.
I was promoted to First Sergeant, and they wanted me to re-up. I said no.
I began my studies at Tel Aviv University when I was twenty-one and this was the first time I met Palestinians as human beings.
I began attending political demonstrations inside the university. I was all about equal human rights and respecting all others.
By the time I was twenty-three, I began working at the Dimona. It was suppose to be a textile plant, but I was hired for the control room. At the time, I had no idea what it was in control of…
Vanunu soon became bored with the routine job at Dimona but stayed for the pay while he studied economics, became involved in university politics and helped establish a group of Palestinian and Jewish students for justice and peace.
Security at the Dimona informed, warned and then threatened Vanunu with fifteen years in prison if he didn’t stop his pro-Palestinian human rights university activities.
Vanunu didn’t stop, but he graduated with a BA in philosophy and geography, and began to make plans to leave Israel.
Vanunu had been cross-trained in many departments and when he figured out what was really going on seven-stories underground he shot two rolls of film from Top-secret locations, but did not develop the film until months later while in Sydney, Australia.
Vanunu was a secular Jew, atheist and existentialist when he wandered into a Sydney social justice Anglican Church and immediately felt at home. He eventually shared his story of the Dimona with priests, parishioners and a church painter who claimed to be a freelance journalist –but all he wanted was to make money on Vanunu’s story.
Vanunu insisted that all he wanted to do was prevent a nuclear holocaust.
A few weeks prior to being abducted by the Mossad in Rome, Vanunu was baptized a Christian. However, it was not until after his closed-door trial began that he began to read the New Testament.
For a half hour, twice a day, Vanunu would read the New Testament out loud and told me:
I did this for myself, as well as for my captors–not so much the prison guards, but the ones who watched me on camera twenty-four hours a day.
Once I covered up the camera that spied on me and was punished with one month in total solitary; no books no radio; there was never any contact with anyone anywhere.
It was just them, watching me, constantly watching me. The Shen Beet, you know, like the FBI and the Mossad, like your CIA— they were watching me.
They tortured me by keeping a light on in my cell constantly for two years. They told me it was because they were afraid I would commit suicide, and the oppressive camera was for my safety.
They recruited the guards and other prisoners to irritate me and deprive me of sleep by making loud noises near my cell all night and all day. I chose to read them 1 Corinthians 13 instead:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with THE TRUTH! It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails…”
I am here today to tell you that since freed from behind bars on 21 April 2004, Mordecahi Vanunu’s speech and movement have been restricted under the British Mandate Emergency Regulations -a relic from the British Mandate period in Palestine-before the state of Israel was founded and replaced British rule. Nothing like it exists in any democracy in the world.
I am here today to tell you that Bishop Desmond Tutu, who in 1984 received the Nobel for his courageous and fearless opposition against the South African apartheid system, nominated Vanunu for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I am here today to remind the world of what Israel promised in 1948:
On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.– The Declaration of the establishment of Israel
I am here today with hope and a prayer that Israel and America will hear the prophets of Israel, such as Micah who reminded the people of what God requires: “He has told you o’man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord.” [End of my speech]
The Final Chapter
On November 25, I submitted the following NEWS TIP to the OBSERVER, because Donald Trump’s son-in-law owns it:
“Dear Darling Jared Kushner and Observer Media” is the first in a series by this Senior Non-Arab Correspondent for USA’s TheArabDailyNews.
I was born 62 yrs. ago in NYC, live in Florida and became an online reporter in 2005 during my first of so far 8 investigative journeys to both sides of The Wall in Israel Palestine.
I have been streaming uncensored video interviews with Israel’s nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu at YouTube, such as “30 MINUTES with Vanunu” taped a few weeks after his freedom of speech trial began in Jan. 2006
In the late ’70’s until 1985, Vanunu was a mid level technician at Dimona Nuclear Facility who was freed from 18 years behind bars in 2004 convicted of treason and espionage for providing London’s SUNDAY TIMES 2 rolls of film shot in top secret locations within the 7 story underground facility in the Negev.
Since 2004, Vanunu has been free in Israel but lives under draconian restrictions denying his right to leave the state and to not speak to foreigners— which he immediately did when he emerged from behind bars in 2004.
I met Vanunu in 2005 a few weeks after he was charged with the 2004 interviews.
I was writing an historical fiction at the time but became a reporter after meeting Vanunu and we began a series of interviews which are now enshrined in “Beyond Nuclear: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker 2005-2010”
I published it after Israel sent Vanunu back to solitary confinement for 78 days in 2010. Israel has arrested Vanunu numerous times since and his latest trial resumes on 22 December.
In 2015 Vanunu married a Norwegian Professor of Hebrew studies and Norway approved his asylum BUT Israel first must allow him to leave the state.
I will be reporting on Vanunu’s December court date in my second Open Letter to Dear Darling Jared Kushner and Observer Media;
Unless the OBSERVER is interested in an exclusive.
Thank you for any consideration,
As of this writing silence is the reply from Dear Darling Jared Kushner and the editor at the OBSERVER and so this article also serves as my second Letter to Dear Darling Jared Kushner and the editor at the OBSERVER.
When Vanunu is freed from Israel The Media will finally be interested in Vanunu and decades of USA collusion in Israel’s nuclear deceptions will finally be Common Knowledge!
What we the people really need is Common Sense and to heed the warning of a dead president.
The most revolutionary minded of all of America’s founding fathers was Thomas Paine whose self published forty page pamphlet, “Common Sense” united disconnected groups of colonists to become compatriots, to rise up in rebellion against an occupying empire and then form a united nation. Paine said:
Soon after I had published the pamphlet “Common Sense” [on Feb. 14, 1776] in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion… The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
At his Farewell Address in 1796, President George Washington warned:
Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.
I write today to say this article is also ‘The Final Chapter’ that ends my 11-½ years of advocating for a FREE Vanunu:
But it will NOT be the last I write about USA policies that collude in Israel’s Nuclear Deceptions and military Occupation of Palestine.
I write today to say the only way Vanunu can harm Israel is with Bad PR.
I write today to say Israel can only end the Legend of Vanunu by allowing Vanunu his freedom from the State, and that could happen after Vanunu returns to court on December 22.
I write today to admit my culpability without apology in growing the legend of Vanunu in articles and books:
Vanunu Archive at TheArabDailyNews
Vanunu at Amazon
- Vanunu still has more nuclear secrets to spill, Israeli court declares - December 29, 2021
- 9/11 and a 20th Reflection of That Day - September 5, 2021
- Mordechai Vanunu: Final Annual Update and this Writers Next Steps - June 19, 2021