We must defend Vanunu and the humanitarian values he stands for
As he said himself outside the jail, he received "very cruel and barbaric treatment".
For almost 12 years he was held in solitary confinement, essentially to ensure that he could not tell the truth. And now that he is out, he has been ordered not to speak to journalists or foreigners, to stay away from foreign embassies and airports, and not to go near any of Israel's borders.
Vanunu had served three years in the Israeli army before he went to work for nine years as a nuclear technician at the Dimona plant, in the Negev dessert. This was the site of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, which the country had managed to keep secret for a decade.
During that time he studied philosophy at Ben Gurion University, where contact with Arab students seemed to change his outlook so much so that he attracted the attention of the secret service. In 1982 Vanunu refused to do reserve duty during the Lebanon War, and he was eventually dismissed from Dimona in 1985.
With his severance money he took off on a trip around the world, with two rolls of film shot within the Dimona plant in his backpack. While in Australia the following year he converted to Christianity and told a freelance journalist about what was going on in Dimona.
Vanunu was then approached by the Sunday Times, which flew him to London, where he was questioned over a five-week period by a number of scientists. Then he naively allowed himself to be caught in honey trap on September 30, 1986. A Mossad agent posing as an American tourist befriended him and presented him with an airline ticket to Italy. They were supposed to visit her sister in Rome.
"As I entered the flat, I was attacked by two men, who then drugged me by means of injections," Vanunu recalled.
He came to in a car and tried to cause an accident, but was drugged again. Next thing, he remembered, they were at the seaside.
"They carried me on a stretcher in a commando boat to a yacht," he added.
"On the yacht I was held in a cabin, shackled by handcuffs and a chain to the bed for seven days until we reached the coast of Israel."
It was while he was on his way to Israel that the Dimona story broke in the Sunday Times.
If it had broken in advance, would the Israelis have kidnapped him? Once they had kidnapped him, they sought to cover their tracks. He was tried in camera, but while in court he managed to write a message on his hand that he had been kidnapped in Rome. As he was being driven away from the court he pressed his hand to the window of the prison van and photographers captured the message.
The world has known since then what happened to Vanunu, but few have lifted a finger in his cause.
In the light of history, there is little doubt that the people of Israel need all the defence they can muster, so acquiring nuclear weapons is understandable.
If their enemies had nuclear weapons and threatened to use them, could the Jewish people expect the rest of the world to come to their rescue? History certainly says no.
Comparatively few helped Jewish people during the Nazi era. Pope Pius XII, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill have been blamed for doing nothing, but no national leader did anything for the Jewish people.
Mordechai Vanunu's story has nothing to do with Israel protecting itself; it is about suppressing the truth. George W Bush started a war in Iraq over mythical weapons of mass destruction, but he turned a blind eye to Israel's nuclear warheads and supports Ariel Sharon, the butcher of the Sabra and Shatila camps, where over 3,000 people were slaughtered, mostly women and children, in 1982. That was just one of many 9/11s for the Palestinian people.
Of course nobody should expect any American politician to stand up to the Jewish lobby.
Dwight Eisenhower did balk when Israel colluded with the British and French in providing the pretext for the invasion of Suez in 1956, but every other American president since Harry Truman has been kissing the Israelis on all four cheeks and refusing to take a public stand, even when they acknowledged privately that Israel's behaviour was intolerable.
TO prevent Vanunu talking, he was held in solitary confinement in a 10ft by 6ft cell with just a bed, table and chair, a hole in the floor for his toilet and shower drain and a tiny window high in the wall. His lawyers appealed against his kidnapping from Italy. On Christmas Eve 1995 the Israeli High Court rejected his petition. By then he had spent over nine years in solitary confinement. That court hearing was held in camera. While being brought to and from the court he was gagged and masked to insure that he could not communicate with waiting journalists. The court decision was delivered on Christmas Eve to ensure minimal press coverage in the Christian world. The whole sordid affair made a mockery of the Israeli system of justice and effectively blasphemed the most sacred of Christian holidays.
The Nuremberg trials following the second world war established that people owe a greater loyalty to humanity than to their own governments. The people in Israel should understand that best of all.
In 1960 few Israelis objected after their agents kidnapped the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel. Eichmann was one of the principal functionaries in implementing the holocaust in which some six million Jewish people were murdered.
Of course, there is no comparison between the crimes of Eichmann and those with which Vanunu was charged. Yet Eichmann was allowed to speak in his own defence. Yigal Amir, the man who murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, was even allowed to give media interviews.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the "Pentagon papers" exposing the murderous activities of American authorities during the Vietnam War, denounced "the outrageous and illegal restrictions" being imposed on Vanunu. Those "should be widely protested and rejected", Ellsberg said, "not only because they violate his fundamental human rights but because the world needs to hear this free man's voice".
"Vanunu did the world a service in exposing Israel's secrets, and humanity owes it to him to demand his immediate release," an Irish Examiner editorial proclaimed on New Year's Day 1996.
Now, more than eight years later, he is no longer in solitary confinement but he is still not free. Is it too much to expect, even at this late stage, that our Government would have the decency to speak out against this outrage?
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