HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- Real lives
Our son, the rebel As he approaches the end of his 18-year jail sentence for exposing Israel's nuclear secrets, Mordechai Vanunu is still full of rage and refusing to be silenced. Suzanne Goldenberg meets the American couple who adopted him so they could meet him in prison Suzanne
Goldenberg He won't sit down to lunch on time.
He won't shake the hand of an old legal acquaintance. And he won't let his dad
admonish him for that rudeness. It is, at times, exasperating to be the adoptive
parents of a 47-year-old rebel, particularly when your son is Mordechai Vanunu,
now in his 16th year of imprisonment for exposing Israel's secret nuclear
programme.
The years have seen a world of changes since Vanunu was convicted of treason
and sentenced to 18 years in Israel's highest-security prison. In 1986, the
former technician at the desert plant near the town of Dimona leaked photographs
of and information about Israel's nuclear facilities to the Sunday Times,
destroying Israel's policy of "nuclear ambiguity". Using his pictures and
testimony, nuclear experts estimated that Israel had the world's sixth-largest
stockpile of nuclear weapons - about 200 warheads.
Israel's revenge was swift. Vanunu was lured from Britain to Italy by a
female Mossad agent, kidnapped, drugged, put on a ship to Israel, and tried in a
secret court. His first 11 years were spent in solitary confinement in a tiny
cell, with a canvas cover over the window to shut out the tiniest glimpse of
grass or trees.
Since then, the Soviet empire has withered and died. The cold war has ended,
and America and Russia agreed this month to scrap thousands of nuclear warheads.
Israel has seen one Palestinian uprising and seven years of peace, and is now in
the midst of a second intifada. The Dimona nuclear plant is still not open to
international inspection.
Vanunu remains locked inside the squat, dull yellow blocks of the Shikma
prison at Ashkelon, with two more years to go until his release in April 2004.
Most Israelis had probably forgotten his existence until a photograph, the first
newly recorded image of Vanunu in three years, appeared in newspapers last
month. But while public anger towards Vanunu has been lost in the passions of
the intifada, his blood relatives cannot forgive him. Vanunu's parents, who
brought their family to Israel from Marrakech in 1961, are orthodox Jews, as are
most of his seven brothers and sisters, and the family disowned him for
converting to Christianity. He became an Anglican in Australia in 1985. That is
where Nick and Mary Eoloff stepped in.
At 12.30pm on a hot summer day, the couple appear at the entrance of Shikma,
peering through the bars of the electronic gate before a guard arrives with the
key to set them free. The Eoloffs, a tall, angular couple in their 70s from the
American midwest, are on a small list of people who are allowed to visit Vanunu,
which consists of his lawyer and members of his immediate family. Improbable as
it may seem, the Eoloffs count as family members as they legally adopted Vanunu
in 1997. Radical Catholics from St Paul, Minnesota, they had read about Vanunu
and joined the international campaign to win his release, writing to their
congressmen and senators. When that did not work, the Eoloffs - who already had
six grown-up children - seized on the idea of adoption, imagining that it would
allow Vanunu to be transferred to a prison in the US. It did not, and so, twice
a year, the elderly couple make the long journey to Israel for their prison
visits.
On their May 14 visit, they found Vanunu in good form. He was tanned, had put
some weight on his rangy form, and had shed his usual guardedness, producing two
bags of candy for the Eoloffs' grandchildren.
The couple were warned that the visit would be cancelled if they raised any
taboo topics: the kidnapping, nuclear weapons, the Dimona plant. A prison social
worker took notes of the entire conversation, but Vanunu remained calm. Two
hours later, he walked the Eoloffs down the corridor, stopping at the red line
on the floor that prisoners are not allowed to cross. "He was very upbeat," says
Mary. "He felt very positive." For the first time in their four years of
acquaintance, he made a point of thanking the Eoloffs for visiting, and asked
about the rest of the family.
Otherwise, Vanunu's whole being as he enters the home stretch of his
confinement is devoted to small acts of defiance, fuelled by a powerful rage. I
put some questions to the Eoloffs for Vanunu, and the answers come back, full of
conviction and anger. He tells them that he still believes it was worth 18 years
of his life to expose Israel's nuclear secrets, and that he will resist Israel's
efforts to muzzle him.
That bitterness informs even the smallest of decisions inside Shikma,
confining Vanunu in another prison of his own making. He refuses to initiate
conversations with guards, insists on reading newspapers in English - not Hebrew
- and will only listen to the BBC. He refuses to work or have a social worker,
and won't eat lunch when it is served, the Eoloffs say, because he wants to
maintain at least a tiny portion of his life that is not under Israeli control.
Vanunu was denied parole because he refused to promise that he would never
speak about his kidnapping and jail ordeal, or the desert reactor. "He is the
most stubborn, principled and tough person I have ever met," says his lawyer,
Avigdor Feldman.
Vanunu watches his diet carefully, refusing eggs because he is worried about
cholesterol. He walks the corridors of the jail for up to four hours a day,
retiring to his cell in the afternoon to write letters, listen to opera, or
watch movies on video, most recently the film Entrapment. He does not have a
computer because he refused to agree to turn over the hard drive to the
authorities on his release.
"He is bored out of his tree," says Mary. He used to read and read and read,
and that was how he maintained his sanity. Now he just walks and walks and
listens to the radio. The days are very long. He is very very angry with the
Israeli government and says he is not going to be a part of this system in any
way."
Then there are the running legal battles, and Vanunu's plans for the future.
Last month he attended a closed hearing at the supreme court in Jerusalem to
stop two Israeli journalists including him in their book about Israeli
espionage. He has been denied permission to view the entire transcript of his
trial on security grounds, although sections have been published in the Israeli
press. And he has been denied permission to meet two British lawyers who have
been trying for five years to visit him - to pursue a case against the British
government for its failure to protect him from the Mossad agent who lured him to
Italy.
But most pressing of all, as far as Vanunu is concerned, are the preparations
for his release. He is finally due to walk out of Shikma in April 2004, and
Feldman has started applying for a passport so that he can travel, perhaps to
settle in the US or to begin a new life lecturing on the dangers of nuclear
weapons.
Although his release cannot be legally prevented, there are fears that he
will never be permitted to leave Israel, a country he now despises. "When I
asked him what he thought he had accomplished," says Mary, "he said the major
thing was the need for freedom of speech, and he insisted he would not promise
not to speak about anything once he got out."
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