Israel’s treatment of nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu is inhuman, illogical and a blot on its human-rights reputation in the world. Mr Vanunu, 43, was found guilty of espionage in 1986 after telling Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper that Israel was secretly building atomic bombs. He gave a great deal of detail to substantiate his claim. He was sentenced to 18 years’ jail. Having served two-thirds of that sentence he would ordinarily be eligible for parole under the Israeli justice system. But this week parole was refused. The parole board said he should stay in prison because he presents a danger to Israeli security.
On that reasoning, presumably he will still be a danger to Israeli security in six years time when his sentence is complete. Will Israeli authorities trump up some other charge to keep him in jail, or will they set him free whatever the security risk? If they have to set him free in six years’ time irrespective of the security question; they should set him free now and treat the security question as an irrelevance.
In fact Vanunu is not a security risk. Rather he is a political embarrassment because he exposed Israel’s nuclear capacity, a capacity that Israel has officially denied. It must be extremely doubtful that he has anything further to make public that is not already known or will jeopardise Israel security. After all, in the 12 years he has been in jail, presumably the Israeli nuclear program has moved along a little, making 12-year-old intelligence useless. If, of course, Israel wants to stick to the fanciful nonsense that it has no nuclear program, then how could anything Vanunu says about a non-entity be a security risk. He should not have been jailed in the first place, let alone kept in jail after 12 years.
Nearly all of Vanunu’s term has been spent in solitary confinement. That he recently came out of solitary indicates that Israeli authorities do not really see him as capable of saying anything of security value.
The continued jailing is merely vindictive.