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	Workers Vanguard No. 950	15 January 2010

Exposed Extent of Zionist Nuclear Arsenal

Vanunu Arrested: Let Him Leave Israel

On December 29, Israeli police arrested Mordechai Vanunu, the brave whistle-blower of Israel’s hidden massive nuclear arsenal, as he was meeting with a Norwegian woman at a Jerusalem hotel. He was hauled into court and reportedly placed under house arrest. Despite Vanunu having served every minute of his 18-year prison sentence, the government—using a State of Emergency statute passed in 1945 when Palestine was under British Mandate—has committed him to imprisonment within Israel’s borders. He is barred from leaving the country, talking to non-Israelis, going near airports, ports, embassies, and is under 24-hour surveillance. Vanunu’s attorney has protested that Vanunu was “arrested for a relationship between a man and a woman…. He is not being accused of giving any secrets.”

The vindictive Zionist state will not rest until Vanunu is permanently silenced for having revealed 24 years ago that Israel’s capitalist rulers had enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to not only incinerate every Arab capital but to bomb major cities in the Soviet Union as well. In 1986, Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear weapons facility in Dimona, was kidnapped in Italy by the Mossad secret police, thrown into a desert prison in Ashkelon and sentenced to 18 years by a secret military court for revealing to the London Sunday Times that Israel had amassed upwards of 200 nuclear warheads. Vanunu’s disclosures were a service to all humanity.

Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons had been an open secret for years, but these were believed to be a small arsenal of bombs. In fact, Israel had stockpiled the world’s sixth-largest nuclear arsenal. This arsenal was built up with the active support of the French and then the U.S. imperialist powers, as part of their war drive against the Soviet degenerated workers state.

Vanunu was born to a Sephardic Jewish family that emigrated from Morocco to Israel, where he experienced discrimination at the hands of the European-derived Ashkenazi establishment. As a student at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University, Vanunu joined protests against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and actively fought for the rights of Palestinian and Bedouin students. Fed up with the Zionist garrison state, Vanunu left Israel in January 1986 and later converted to Christianity while he was in Australia. In a 1990 decision affirming Vanunu’s guilt, three Supreme Court judges of the Israeli semi-theocratic state pronounced him “a loner…[who] could not find his place in Israeli society.”

Vanunu has been given the kind of treatment the Zionist rulers reserve for those they deem “subhuman”—the Palestinians imprisoned within the electric fences that surround Gaza, those confined behind the three-story-high concrete walls and checkpoints of the West Bank and the thousands who languish in Israel’s prison torture chambers. Vanunu spent over eleven years in solitary confinement in a six by nine cell in a high-security complex built for Palestinians.

When he walked out of his desert dungeon in 2004, Vanunu was not a free man, but he was resolute. Upon his release, he said he was “proud and happy to do what I did.” He said that despite the “very cruel and barbaric treatment” meted out by the Israeli security authorities they “didn’t succeed to break me, you didn’t succeed to make me crazy.”

Vanunu continued to defiantly denounce the Israeli doomsday machine. In an August 2004 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he said: “I’m very happy and glad that I…let all the world and the Israeli people see the true face of Israel who used to remind the world ‘holocaust, holocaust’ every hour, every day, but in fact Israel [has] a holocaust factory.” Three months later, Vanunu was arrested again.

The International Communist League and the Partisan Defense Committee have actively fought for Vanunu’s freedom, and against the continued attacks and onerous restrictions placed on him. He should not have spent even one day behind bars. Mordechai Vanunu warned the world that the Zionist rulers are not only willing to plunge the world into a thermonuclear holocaust, but have the means to do so. Hands off Mordechai Vanunu! Let him leave Israel!