Indeed - Vanunu Has Won
Indeed - Vanunu Has Won

In the years since  Mordechai Vanunu was sent to the clink in 1986, Communism has collapsed, two Intifadas have been launched, ten Israeli prime ministers have been sworn in and the Twin Towers have been reduced to ashes.

But Vanunu, the Dimona plant's technician who had been hawking Israel's nuclear secrets to the highest bidder all over the globe, is still making the news. He has just demanded that Minister of Interior strip him of his Israeli citizenship.

But above all Vanunu has become the global hero of the human rights industry and anti-Israel hysteria. The Guardian editorialized that "in exposing a secret which needed to be told he has shown a higher duty to wider humanity".

The Financial Times wrote that the remaining restrictions on Vanunu's freedom "border on the sadistic". 

The International League for Human Rights, one of the old glories of European pacifism, has just awarded Vanunu the medal that bears the name of Carl von Ossietzky, the German journalist who died in prison during the Nazi regime. The idea behind the prize is simple: as Ossietzky paid for the articles on the Nazi rearmament by Hitler, so Vanunu is paying for revealing the secrets of Israel's atomic bomb. Both have made "an honorable service to peace".

Vanunu, who has put at risk the safety and secrecy of the only democracy in the Middle East which is also under siege, became the symbol of the struggle for "No nukes". He is revered by the foreign correspondents in Jerusalem.

He is even a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Many Nobel laureates are asking Oslo to award him, such as the chemist Harold Kroto or the physicist Jack Steinberger, who compared the Israeli ban on Vanunu's travel to the communist Poland which prevented Lech Wałęsa from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

In support of Vanunu, who has called for the dismantling of Israel, there is also a group of women Nobel laureates. They are guided by Mairead Maguire, the Irish activist who compared Israel's nuclear program to the gas chambers. Maguire was also honored by the terrorist leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh. In the plaque in Maguire's honor, Israel is wiped off the map.

The Nobel Committee for Vanunu also includes Kenyan Wangari Maathai, who is best known for the fantasy that Aids is a weapon invented by the whites to kill blacks. 

Daniel Ellsberg, the former State Department official who released the "Pentagon Papers" to the press in 1971, declared that Vanunu is "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era".

So indeed, Vanunu has won. After 18 years, he walked out of the prison in Ashkelon into the arms of international supporters, including Nobel Laureates and members of the Western parliaments. 

So it goes in the industry of human rights: a convicted spy has been compared to a journalist held in a Nazi concentration camp and murdered. If an Israeli traitor is a hero to "wider humanity" and therefore in a category with Carl von Ossietzky and Claus von Stauffenberg, then Israel has no right to exist.

That's why Vanunu became the human rights cheerleader.