JERUSALEM, 27 July 2004 — Israel’s top court rejected an appeal by Mordechai Vanunu yesterday to be allowed to leave the country, saying the nuclear whistle-blower freed in April after 18 years in jail was still a threat to national security.
The Justice Ministry said it may even prosecute Vanunu again if unauthorized interviews he gave foreign media since leaving prison are found to have violated the terms of his release.
“This is a very sad day and shameful day,” Vanunu said after the High Court of Justice rejected a petition arguing he had no more secrets to tell about Israel’s main atomic reactor at Dimona, and that the travel ban violated his civil rights.
Vanunu, 49, was abducted by Israeli agents and convicted of treason in 1986 after discussing his work as a mid-level Dimona technician with Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper.
His revelations led independent experts to conclude Israel had amassed between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons — a superpower arsenal — and all but blew away the Jewish state’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” over its non-conventional capabilities.
A convert to Christianity, Vanunu has sequestered himself at a Jerusalem church since he was freed on April 21. “I want to go abroad and start my life as a free man. If Israel is a democracy it should allow me to do it,” he told reporters at the court.
But the government ordered him confined to Israel for at least a year and restricted his contacts with foreigners, based on Defense Ministry allegations that he planned to divulge more classified details about Dimona once out of the country.
“Clearly, when a person knowingly breaks the law, he endangers himself anew,” state prosecutor Shai Nitzan said yesterday, referring to the unauthorized press interviews. According to security sources, Israel fears Vanunu could name his former Dimona colleagues, putting them at risk of international sanctions or reprisal attacks.
The Defense Ministry has also cited a jailhouse scrapbook, in which Vanunu noted technical information on the reactor from memory, as proof that he intends to go public again. Vanunu, who declined to give names of staff at Dimona to the Sunday Times, said he would continue to withhold them. “After 18 years, no one is interested in these people,” he said yesterday. Asked about the scrapbook, he described its contents as “basic information with no importance for Israel’s security”. The restrictions on Vanunu are subject to government review and could be extended indefinitely.
