Vanunu suffers yet another sentence

The whistleblower is hit by a new legal blow
Peter Hounam - The Sunday Times - July 8, 2007
Is there ever to be any hope of justice for Mordechai Vanunu in an Israeli court? Last week’s unexpected decision by a Jerusalem magistrate to jail him for six months is another bitter defeat for the nuclear whistleblower after more than 20 years of clashes with the Israeli authorities.

His crime this time was to have given a number of interviews to the foreign press, including The Sunday Times, not one of which had the slightest security implications. His simple act of talking to foreign journalists was a transgression too far for a system bent on making him bow to its will.

The first and most serious charge Vanunu faced related to an interview I arranged with him when he came out of prison three years ago.

He had spent nearly 18 years in jail, 11½ in solitary confinement, for revealing the secrets of his country’s nuclear weapons production plant to this newspaper. While the story was being compiled he had been kidnapped after being lured from London to Rome by a woman Mossad agent, and was then found guilty of treason and espionage.

Vanunu intended to leave Israel for a new life in the United States on his release but the authorities forbade it and ordered him to report his movements, stay away from ports and airports, and have no communication with foreigners.

Through his family I arranged his first interview so that there would be no breach of the regulations. We asked Yael Lotan, an Israeli journalist, to conduct it and we used an Israeli camera crew.

Vanunu talked in detail about his motive for revealing the secrets, his kidnapping and his ordeal in prison but said nothing sensitive about his work at the Dimona nuclear plant. Nevertheless the Israeli government banned me from returning to Israel and two years later the interview was one of 21 cited by the prosecution as violations of his orders. His lawyers obtained a temporary suspension of my banning order and I arrived in court eager to show the charge naming me as interviewer was false.

I was surprised when the prosecution lawyer made only a lackadaisical attempt to cross-examine me. Judge Yoel Tzur even allowed me a few minutes to talk to Vanunu, who seemed confident about the outcome. I urged the judge to send a signal to the authorities that the restrictions placed on Vanunu were not only inhumane but unnecessary as he had no more secrets to disclose.

In April Vanunu was found guilty of 14 violations, including the interview I had been accused of conducting. Even then it was widely supposed he would receive a suspended sentence.

Tzur’s decision last Monday to send him back to prison therefore came as a shock to defence and prosecution alike. He is free pending a decision on whether to appeal.