The latter operation was unquestionably inopportune, coming in the midst of a continuing uprising by the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose moral strength has lain in part in the fact that they are confronting Israeli forces armed to the teeth with nothing but stones. But the murder of Abu Jihad was as great, if not a greater error by the Zionist leaders.
MIDDLE EAST • ISRAELI STATE A savage sentence for warning against Zionist bomb ONE OF ISRAEL's more ONE OF ISRAEL's more recent international terrorist operations before the assassination of Abu Jihad was the entrapment and kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu, who had exposed the Zionist state's building up of a nuclear arsenal. This case focused attention on the ruthlessness of Zionist rulers both in Israel and internationally. The following article, written by a leader of the anti-Zionist left, describes the impact of the case and what it revealed about Israeli policies and politics. MICHEL WARSCHAWSKI
SENTENCE of 18 years in prison for treason and espionage was handed down against Mordechai Vanunu by the Jerusalem district court. His lawyer, Avidgor Feldman, declared that he was surprised by the severity of the sentence. The surprising thing is rather the naivete of one of the best lawyers in the country. What did he expect?
Either you accept the point of view of the state, supported in this case by a major part of the left opposition, that Vanunu is really a traitor. Or you recognize that he has done a very great service to humanity by warning international public opinion about a danger, and in that case the former technician at the 3 Dimona nuclear plant deserves the Nobel May 2, 1988 • #140 International Viewpoint
NABIL HAITHAM B Y KILLING Fateh's main military leader and the chief of the PLO's department of the occupied territories, the Israeli state terrorists thought that they were striking a major blow to the Palestinians involved in struggle. The result was the opposite. The murder of Abu Jihad only provoked a new upsurge of the Palestinians, helping to revive the momentum of the uprising and to further radicalize it.
The Zionist leaders' notion that this uprising is "manipulated from the outside" reflects a blindness that comes from their failure to suppress it by forceful means. You have to be blinded by a police conception of history not to realize that the power of the uprising lies mainly in the forms of mass self-organization that it has generated, the celebrated "people's committees." Uprising's effects on PLO leadership
The uprising is beginning to affect the political behavior of the traditional PLO leadership. Up until 1982, this was determined by an equilibrium between the pressure of the organization's money suppliers, the reactionary Arab oil monarchies and the pressure of the Palestinian masses. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, by forcing the evacuation of the Palestinian fighters from their autonomous power bases in South Lebanon and Beirut, qualitatively shifted this balance to the advantage of the reactionary states.
By creating a powerful mass movement, which for the first time in the history of the Palestinian struggle generated autonomous rank-and-file organizations, the uprising has naturally considerably reinforced the radical nationalist weight in the political balance the PLO leadership depends on.
### Murder increased radicalization
The murder of Abu Jihad both increased this pressure and provided an opportunity for making a shift. On the one hand, it increased the radicalization of the Palestinian people as a whole On the other, the fact that Abu Jihad's body was going to be buried in Damascus was an opportunity for renewing relations with the Syrian regime, the sponsors of the radical nationalist opposition to the PLO leadership. This move was crowned by Arafat's personal visit on April 24. It is too early to try to assess the perspectives of this new reconciliation and its consequences. They will certainly be reflected on the ground in Lebanon, where the uprising already put an end to the siege of the Palestinian camp by the Lebanese Shi'ite organization, Amal, which is allied to Syria. We cannot predict what attitude the PLO leadership will take over the long term. It is probable, however, that as long as the uprising lasts, the PLO leadership will return to a course similar to the one that it followed up until 1982.
This means that the intransigent Zionists who reject a "negotiated settlement" will find cause for satisfaction.
What conclusion should be drawn from that? Certainly not that it is necessary to return to a course of capitulation but, on the contrary, that the illusory perspective of achieving a settlement through the good offices of Washington must be definitively rejected.
ISRAELI STATE Peace Prize. From the outset, it was a sure bet that the Israeli judges would not opt for the second option.
The Vanunu case upset a lot of preconceived notions and has gone beyond what the great majority of Israeli society can accept, or even understand.
The son of very poor Moroccan immigrants, Mordechai Vanunu succeeded where most in similar circumstances failed. He managed to escape from his "fate" as a Moroccan Jew condemned to remain in the shadows of Israeli society. After working eight years at the Dimona center, he was able to begin studying at the University of Beersheba. In the course of his studies, he was able to meet progressive students. He made contact in particular with Arab students, with whom he had intense discussions.
Little by little, Vanunu departed from the national consensus. For a few weeks, he belonged to the Israeli Communist Party. He left it because of political differences. After his arrest, the Communist Party did its utmost to eradicate any trace of his short stay in the party's ranks, including destroying his card.
However, for Mordechai the answers offered by the reformist left became increasingly unsatisfactory and, as he wrote later from his cell, he did not have the opportunity to meet the anti-Zionist left. For him, the state of Israel is not reformable, either as regards the oppression and exploitation of oriental Jews or in its relations with the Palestinian people.
Vanunu decided to make
La complete break
A revolutionary change seemed far off to him, if not impossible. So, he decided to leave the country, and even converted to Christianity. His decision shocked people, even on the far left, for whom his conversion seemed to indicate at least mental imbalance. However, in a letter to Professor Emmanuel Faraajun published in News From Within, Vanunu explained himself.
His decision to convert was not motivated by mystical aspirations but rather by the need to express a total break. "Leaving Judaism is not only leaving a religion," explained Yael Lotan, a representative of the Committee to Defend Vanunu's Rights, 'it is leaving the tribe, abandoning your membership in the collectivity. " This was Vanunu's real treason, which the Israeli state will never forgive.
When Vanunu decided to make public everything that he knew about Israeli nuclear power, he completed his break with "national solidarity," putting the interest of the peoples, including the Israeli people, above any national consideration. In Israel, no one could imagine such a thing happening.
The publication of the Dimona secrets by 4 the Sunday Times created a certain disarray in Israeli society. [See /V 108, November International Viewpoint #140 • May 2, 1988
10, 1986.] For the great majority of Israelis, this was a vulgar case of spying rewarded by juicy sums from a prestigious British weekly - there was talk of hundreds of thousands of pounds! This supposition, carefully fostered by the Zionist press, was also accepted by the left. A Moroccan! Who could believe that he was motivated by a progressive ideal? If he broke with national solidarity, it could only be for the money!
No spying or premeditation involved
Even a superficial analysis of the way that Vanunu divulged what he knew about Dimona makes it easy to see that there was no spying or premeditation. It was with a certain naivete that Vanunu revealed the secrets that were in his possession, backed up by pictures, in a study circle that he joined in Australia. Hence the second supposition taken up by some Israeli progressives, that Vanunu was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret services.
The fact is that the Israeli secret services were already following Vanunu. This was categorically proved by the Sunday Times even before the British weekly published the Dimona secrets, and apparently nothing was done to stop him. What is more, how could he get pictures of Israel's most secret installations, except with the aid of the secret services? The supposition that Vanunu worked for Mossad depended on the notion that the Israeli authorities wanted to warn the Arab world by making public the real state of the Zionist nuclear forces.
However, unless one were conditioned by the idea that no Israeli, and still more no oriental Jew, would betray their country except for money, everything seems to indicate that Vanunu is what he claims to be — a fighter for peace ready to do anything to warn people against the danger represented by Israeli nuclear weapons.
And this is a very great danger. It was warned against more than 25 years ago by almost all the members of the atomic energy commission that was set up by the government itself when it decided to develop Israeli nuclear power energy with French aid. The members of this commission, moreover, with one exception, resigned to protest against what they considered an adventurist project. Since then, this whole area has been kept under a curtain of secrecy that permits every sort of abuse.
No one knows, for example, who is responsible for the decisions on developing, or even using, Israeli nuclear power. The parliament has never discussed these problems, because the bomb is not supposed to exist, and former ministers asked about this matter say that they have never considered the question! So, there is no monitoring, no committee overseeing things even as concerns security for the population and the environment.
### Refusal to sign non-proliferation treaty
What is more, Israel has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and has always rejected any international inspection of its nuclear power plants, even by such a powerful and generous friend as the United States.
"Those are the territories we have to occupy first!"
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A leaflet distributed by the Vananu defence committee said: "The Israeli government has shown many times that it shrinks from nothing. Nuclear weapons in such hands are a real danger for the entire world."
The only way to tie the hands of people capable of destroying the Iraqi nuclear power plant, of killing more than 150 people in less than four months because they threw stones and burned tires, of invading Lebanon to turn it over the the Phalange and let them massacre thousands of men, women and children in Sabra and Shatila is to reveal its secrets in order to alert local and international public opinion. That was Mordechai Vanunu's choice.
The Vanunu affair has not set off a wave of chauvinist and McCarthyite hysteria of the sort we saw for example at the time of the arrests of the so-called spy network led by Daud Turki and Udi Adiv in 1972. Surprise rapidly gave way to general indifference. This reflects the profound changes that Israeli society has undergone and a clear weakening of the propaganda about security and its effects on society.
Obviously, it is a different story as regards the politicians and the media, who have made a common front against "treason," with the Zionist left taking the forefront once again in the defence of the nuclear industry and the secrecy surrounding it.
However, if Mordechai Vanunu wanted to wake up Israeli society, or at least a part of it, about the dangers represented by Israeli nuclear weapons, he failed in his endeavor. If he has received the prestigious Alternative Nobel Peace Price, he owes that to international solidarity and not to any non-existent anti-nuclear movement.
Hundreds mobilized in
Vanunu's defence
Of course, for the first time in Israel, hundreds of people, including some renowned intellectuals, mobilized in defence of Vanunu, whose kidnapping in Rome and draconian detention were real scandals. The campaign waged by the Committee to Defend Vanunu's Rights, for a public trial and for normal conditions of imprisonment -an end to the total isolation in which he was kept, an end to mistreatment, the right to sce his fiancée — made a certain impact in the media. It make it possible to hear the point of view of the victim, after the authorities had held a monopoly on all information about the case, in disregard for the most elementary rights of a defendant.
However, the cause for which Mordechai Vanunu was ready to take enormous risks and which has cost him 18 years in prison today, the exposure of the Israeli nuclear danger for those who will be its first victims, is yet to be won.
The future of the Israeli nation is at stake, but this weighs little in the choices of the Zionist leaders. *