WORM'S EYE

TODAY Editorial (on Mordechai Vanunu)

Today columnist Red Constantino called him the world's first independent nuclear inspector. And true to that calling, one of the first things a freed Mordechai Vanunu said, as a torrent of words flowed from his long stopped-up mouth, while close relatives vainly tried to stop him from talking lest he call down new sanctions on his head, was an invitation to the chief of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammad ElBaradei, to come to Israel and check out its nuclear arsenal. Not surprisingly, a Jewish mob howled, "Kill him, kill him, kill him," around the place where the very same cry was raised 2,000 years ago about another Jewish Christian who was telling the people some pretty unpleasant things about themselves, such as that before you embarrass another about the mote in his eye, take out the nuclear weapons from your arsenal; and before calling another a terrorist for giving up her life for her country's freedom, check out how your country harried her to that extreme by stealing the land that, sure, God gave you in the Old Testament but look how you repaid Him in the New.

To be sure, a lot of the things Mr. Vanunu said made good soundbytes, prompting BBC and CNN reporters and anchors to repeatedly quote them after the live coverage of his release ended and Israel's most famous prisoner of conscience was hustled away in a car. "I have no more secrets," he said. Yet, hadn't he earlier said, "They could not break me."

It wasn't for want of trying. They put him through unspeakable tortures through 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, all for the sacrilege of exposing Israel's new Ark of the Covenant, its most sacred "self-defense" secret: a consistently denied but substantial nuclear stockpile that analysts said ranked Israel the sixth nuclear power in the world.

A hundred years ago, a vicious and cruel imagination invented and published the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, allegedly outlining a global Jewish conspiracy, and spread it about that the kindly Jews of those times, the people of Spinoza, dropped Christian children down wells to honor a cruel religion. This lie was the direct inspiration for the Nazi isolation and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, even as that is the direct inspiration for the West Bank Wall.

Eighteen years ago, the misguided heirs of that traduced and persecuted race took a leaf from the Protocols and dropped a Christian into a pit of utter darkness, with the demonic aim, not just of destroying a body, but extinguishing a soul.

No one can say what kind of life Mr. Vanunu can still hope to have after his experience of spiritual extinction -- or if he'll even have one -- as a "free man" in the larger prison that is Israel for a Christian Jew: forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; forbidden to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; forbidden to be in contact with foreigners -- whether in face-to-face meetings or by telephone, fax or e-mail -- including foreign citizens residing in Israel; forbidden to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant about which everything is already known by the world; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore cannot leave the country. Only one thing is sure: Mr. Vanunu is not afraid of more of the same because he distinctly expressed the wish to go to Jerusalem even if the first time a Christian did that on a donkey, it did not turn out too well for him. (See Mel Gibson's movie.)

Israel is determined that one of the world's most famous prisoners of conscience shall have absolutely nothing. If it had been up to the authorities, he wouldn't even have his mind today.

The only thing he had, before his release and on that day on April 21 that he walked out of Ashkelon Prison, is an intact conscience. But his motive, says Constantino, is no less urgent.

One could sense the urgency in the way Vanunu tried to speak so breathlessly, partly from the fear of being snatched away from the world and buried again in Sheol, as a helicopter kept whirring overhead. He speaks so much and so fast because, obviously, he has a lot of catching up to do.

Yet beyond the 18 years this man lost for daring to be what others only dream of -- "make me the instrument of your peace" -- Mr. Vanunu needs to hurry us up because, in his words, there is no more reason now for Israel to be keeping so many weapons of mass destruction. All the so-called rogue states of the Arab world have opened themselves up to inspection and revealed -- what else? -- the unlikelihood that camel drivers are capable of the higher math required to create, build and sustain nuclear might. So why not Israel as well, he asks.

From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu was a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negev desert. Here he discovered and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The clandestine armory came to light when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986.. Photographs revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." This in 1986 when America was intimately embedded with Saddam Hussein and knew exactly how far he was from any nuclear war- making capability.

Many in Israel called Mr. Vanunu a traitor for seeking to warn the world that his country had stockpiled up to 200 nuclear weapons. Official retaliation was swift: five days after the Sunday Times interview, Vanunu was kidnapped and drugged, shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial. At least the Nazi trials following the botched assassination attempt on Hitler were public.

Today Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, are closed to international inspection. So that, while Israel shall have the capability to exterminate the Arab race and Islamic religion, the same shall be utterly powerless to prevent it. Why the Americans allow this sick state of affairs can only be explained by the fact that cars can still run on radioactive gasoline.

In a poem he wrote in prison, Vanunu captured very simply the role of the humble but indispensable whistle blower:

I am the clerk, the technician,
the mechanic, the driver.
They said, Do this, do that,
don't look left or right, don't read the text.
Don't look at the whole machine.
You are only responsible for this one bolt,
this one rubber stamp.

Vanunu could have simply bowed his head and done his work as a cog in the machine, consoling himself that Israel's factory of death would have gone up anyway without him.

Yet he chose disobedience and paid the highest price. Today he speaks with urgency, as the tempo for war and division consistently outpaces the slow, dragging pace of peace. Death outraces life each day in the Middle East. Mr. Vanunu is lucky to still be alive and sane because the votaries of Armageddon, not just in Israel and in the Arab Middle East, but in Washington as well, are slouching like the Beast toward Bethlehem so the Prince of Peace shall know not love but only hate and arrogance in the land of his birth, nor peace in the geography of the entire Semitic race.