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| Vanunu Release |
| 04.15.04 (10:49 am) [edit] |
by Edmund Colley
[i]Next week Israel’s nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu walks free after 18 years behind bars. Here Edmund Colley analyses the impact of his betrayal and the implications his release may have on Israel’s security.[/i]
Jailed in 1986 for handing The Sunday Times images and information about Israel’s alleged nuclear capability at its Demona reactor, Mordechai Vanunu’s actions and incarceration have made worldwide headlines for almost two decades.
He’s considered by some to be a traitor who betrayed his country by releasing security secrets of a vulnerable nation, while others hail him a hero who alerted the world to dangers of nuclear technology.
As such, Vanunu’s imminent release holds two primary concerns for Israel. First is the possible threat to national security he again represents, in the form of the two main issues he has not already revealed: security arrangements at Dimona and the identities of his former co-workers there.
Israeli officials seem convinced that Vanunu has the potential to cause further damage to the country. Attorney general Meni Mazuz recently claimed at a Knesset judicial committee that, "the security establishment has determined that Mordechai Vanunu still poses a threat to Israel's security and that he is in possession of nuclear secrets which have insofar been unreported."
Because of this, Vanunu will face restrictions upon his release next Wednesday. He will not be granted a passport and although he has made a request for foreign citizenship, a plan to prevent him entering foreign embassies or requesting political asylum is being debated.
Since it is legally impossible to hold Vanunu in administrative detention, it will be hard to monitor his movements.
Others in Israel, however, no longer perceive Vanunu as a threat, as what he knows describes Israel’s capabilities as it was 20 years ago. As Alon Ben David, defence analyst for Israel’s Channel 10 television, told the Jewish News: ‘The main concern is not the information he still has, but that he will lead a media campaign against Israel's defensive capabilities.
Vanunu has not concealed that this is still his intention upon earning his freedom and many who believe Israel has no right to defend itself, let alone to posses nuclear weapons, will use him as an argument for Israel to disarm.’
To counter this threat, Vanunu’s phone and computer may be monitored and he will be warned that any media appearance regarding his nuclear knowledge will see him fast-tracked back to jail.
These restrictions raise questions regarding the treatment he has received and will continue to receive at the hands of Israeli authorities.
Vanunu himself has said: “I had positive intentions for what I did but the state turned me into a monster. I wanted to save the population of Israel from the disaster of a nuclear war and they turned me into a traitor and a spy.”
Yet no matter how severe Vanunu’s punishment was (he has spent 11 years in solitary confinement) and continues to be, other countries have meted out similar treatment to those individuals who betray their security secrets.
Indeed, American national Jonathan Pollard is 19 years into a life sentence for handing over his country’s nuclear secrets to Israel. Alon Ben David said: “Like any other democracy, Israel too has laws against traitors. Can you think of a democracy that was tolerant to a traitor?”
There is also a mounting concern that his release will provoke a concerted campaign to bring Israel’s nuclear capability to the world’s attention at a time when countries like Iran and North Korea are being pressurised into abandoning theirs.
And with former pariah state Libya beeing welcomed back to the international fold after actively abandoning of its weapons programme, Israel now faces more pressure than ever to follow suit and allow international inspectors access to Demona.
Given the conflicting emotions Vanunu elicits, and the controversial nature of the information that he may or may not still have, there is little doubt that although his sentence is almost at an end, world media interest in Israel’s infamous whistleblower will intensify in the weeks and months after he finally earns his freedom.
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| Great Escape |
| 04.08.04 (9:28 am) [edit] |
by Eliana Schneider
[i]This week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the most remarkable events of the Holocaust – an escape from Auschwitz by four Jews who wanted to warn the world of about the mass murders perpetrated by their German captors.
Here Eliana Schneider retells a story of courage and commitment.[/i]
In 1944, 20-year old Auschwitz inmate Rudolf Vrba heard that the Nazis were planning to deport all of Hungary's Jews to the notorious death camp. Along with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, he decided to do something about it.
They decided to escape in an attempt to warn their fellow Jews. With the help of two others, Vrba and Wetzler set to work on a daring plan that would lead them out of the camp and into their native Slovakia where they could tell the world about the atrocities they had encountered first hand at Auschwitz.
Sixty years later, the impact of what is believed to be one of the most important testimonies of the 20th century is still being felt around the world.
The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler Report was the first detailed account of the camp that was heeded. It made its way around the world in June 1944 and turned public opinion towards attempting to rescue the Jews.
"They are great Jewish heroes," says Yad Vashem academic advisor Professor Yehuda Bauer. "These young men decided to risk their lives to save hundreds of thousand of Jews. They made more impact than even they thought."
Today Vrba is the only survivor of the foursome and just this week he was on a speaking tour in Frankfurt although he could not be reached for comment.
But the miraculous tale has been widely publicised over the years. It was an elaborate escape plan - and it had to be.
According to Bauer, only one other person managed to flee Auschwitz. "This was a partnership of all four men," he says.
Both Vrba - who had already been at Auschwitz for two years - and Wetzler were clerks in the camp, allowing them ease of movement as well as extra food to bulk up their strength for the arduous and dangerous journey that lay ahead of them.
Together with Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, who would follow them six weeks later, Vrba and Wetzler prepared a bunker underneath a woodpile. Just hours before the first night of Passover - April 7, 1944 - they hid inside their bolt hole. They failed to answer the evening roll call, but an alert did not go out for another hour, as the guards were so shocked.
An escape from the camp was unheard of.
Vrba and Wetzler remained in the bunker for three days while hundreds of dogs sniffed around nearby. Vrba had spread a tobacco concoction around the area, which could not be tolerated by police dogs. The search was eventually called off, and the two headed towards their native Slovakia.
Vrba wrote several years ago: "I believed that if I escaped the confines of Auschwitz and managed to get back in the world outside and spread the news I could make some significant differences."
He, along with the others, believed that they could halt the impending deportations of 800,000 Jews.
The pair were hidden by what was left of the Slovakian Jewish community and contacted its Jewish council. In late April they gave their eyewitness accounts to the council and warned of coming transports. The Hungarian Jewish leadership was advised.
By June, along with testimonies by Mordowicz and Rosin who had escaped in May and the earlier account of a Polish officer, a report, known as the Auschwitz Protocols, was assembled.
It was sent to the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, the British, US and Czech governments and the Vatican.
Discussions about a possible rescue took place in London and Washington, but no action was taken.
Excerpts from the report were published in several Swiss newspapers. "They were neutral, so not everything was printed," says Bauer.
"But it was the first real information that was paid attention to," adds Bauer, who points out that other accounts had trickled through the year before but were dismissed as rumours.
The Jewish leadership and the Vatican made appeals in late June to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horty, to stop the deportations. But it was too late for most. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz.
Yet 200,000 Budapest Jews were saved from transportation, according to Bauer. "No doubt one of the factors in stopping the deportation was the warning by Vrba and Wetzler," he says. Still, for the four escapees it was viewed as too little too late. Their hopes for saving many of their fellow Jews had been dashed.
While Vrba attacks the Slovak and Hungarian Jewish leadership for not moving faster, Bauer says: "They couldn't stop the rest of the deportations. It was too late and the leadership was too weak."
He says it was the fault of the Western powers for not taking action. "Until then there was a lack of detailed information. But they could have used this information and didn't. They needed a political decision to get something done. Instead there was a decision not to do anything."
Frustrated, both Vrba and Wetzler joined the Slovakian partisans and fought until the end of the war.Mordowicz was discovered and taken back to Auschwitz, but survived.
Though the protocols - which are now housed in Yad Vashem and the Vatican - were entered into evidence at Nuremberg, none of its authors were called to testify. "By that time everything was well known, so it didn't play a major part," says Bauer.
After the war, Wetzler returned to Bratislava as a journalist. He wrote a detailed book of the escape, What Dante Did Not See, and died in the 1980s.
Vrba studied chemistry at the University of Prague, and moved to Canada where he is an associate professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
He published an autobiography: I Cannot Forgive, in 1963, and was awarded an honorary PhD from Haifa University. He said several years ago: "People must know what really happened, how they were deceived, how this deceit was propagated."
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| ADL Sued |
| 04.02.04 (8:42 am) [edit] |
by Alex Sholem
America’s leading race watchdog has been forced to pay out more than $12 million (£6.6m) after it branded a Denver couple as anti-semites.
The Anti-Defamation League accused William and Dorothy Quigley of planning a campaign of anti-semitic intimidation against their Jewish neighbours, the Aronsons, in 1994.
The accusation came after the Aronsons recorded a telephone conversation in which the Quigleys discussed playing on Holocaust imagery in a bid to scare their Jewish neighbours away.
But, although prosecutors brought a case against the Quigleys, it was found the conversation had been taped illegally and could not be used in court.
The case was settled after the ADL appealed to the Supreme Court.
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| A Cold Peace |
| 04.01.04 (11:48 am) [edit] |
by James Kaye
[i]This week marks the 25th anniversary of the peace treaty signed by Israel and Egypt on the White House Lawn. Here James Kaye takes a look at the hopes raised.[/i]
It is remarkable that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, signed on 26 March 1979 has successfully endured for 25 years. Yet more remarkable still is that Israel’s first ever peace treaty with a neighbouring Arab state - culminating in the meeting of Menachem Begin Anwar Sadat and United States President Jimmy Carter on the White House lawn - ever happened at all.
Since Israel’s inception 20 years earlier, Egypt, the mightiest Arab country, had been its arch enemy. The two countries had crossed swords four times in four successive decades. Even in 1970, after the death of President Gamal Abdul Nasser - who led Egypt for 16 years - little seemed to change.
In 1971, Sadat stood shoulder to shoulder with Arab leaders in issuing "a reply to the illusions of the Zionist enemy" saying there would be no reconciliation or negotiations with Israel.
Begin was not an obvious peacemaker either. The Likud leader was the former leader of the underground Irgun during pre-Independence days. Matters came to a head in the 1973 Yom Kippur war when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel and were defeated.
But despite their belligerent facades Israel and Egypt were thinking peace.
Egypt was not what it was, as the archives of the Jimmy Carter library and museum illustrate: "Sadat was faced with severe domestic problems caused by the growing failure of socialism, the economic drain of the six day war, and the constant prospect of more war in the future."
So diplomatic engagement began, and in an unprecedented move, President Sadat visited Israel in November 1977 to addressed the Knesset: He announced: "I have come to you so that together we should build a durable peace based on justice to avoid the shedding of one single drop of blood by both sides. I have proclaimed my readiness to go to the farthest corner of the earth.”
The following September, 12 days of intensive secret negotiations in Camp David - the US presidents woodland retreat in Maryland - culminated in the Camp David Accords.
Former Israeli President, Chaim Herzog, in his autobiography Living History, says Carter deserves credit: "Sadat and Begin disliked each other, yet Cater locked them up in negotiation."
Begin and Sadat picked up the Joint Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. The treaty was done and dusted the following year.
Sadat and Begin declared it a "historic turning point". Israel agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula, including its oil wells and strategic location, as well as dismantle Israeli settlements removing the Jewish population of the area.
Egypt became the first Arab country to recognise Israel's right to exist and pledged not to attack it again.
There was also an arrangement of autonomy for the Palestinian
population of the disputed Israeli territories of Judea Samaria and the Gaza
Strip.
Full diplomatic relations were established. Israel's embassy in Cairo - the first of its kind in any Arab country - was opened in February 1980, and Egypt's embassy in Israel was opened in March 1980.
But Sadat immediately became a pariah in the Arab world. The Arab league condemned him and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, told a rally: "Let them sign what they like. False peace will not last."
Two years later Sadat was dead, assassinated by extremists. So what is the legacy of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty?
Professor Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, told TJ: "The treaty removed Egypt from the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the strongest Arab country it reduced the military capabilities of the Arabs and meant there was no longer a two front war scenario.
But he adds: "It's impact on Israeli/Egyptian society was very limited because there were no people to people interactions. It also set a bad precedent of returning to the 1967 line. It did not deal with the refugee problem and set a precedent of cold peace for the rest of the Arab world."
Dan Eldar, a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan center for middle eastern and African studies, paints a bleaker picture: "Today, the Egyptian perception of peace with Israel still regards the two countries to be in conflict in ways that could lead them to the brink of war.”
Meanwhile, Egyptian popular animosity towards Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people continues. Recently Egyptian state television broadcast a 30-part series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Yet Camp David is still considered the model peace agreement.
In 1993, President Rabin, Chairman Arafat and President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn to sign another peace agreement. Clinton, never one to miss a trick, drew parallels between the Camp David initiative by saying: "The peace between Egypt and Israel has endured, just so this bold new venture today," he said.
And whatever the real effects of the Israeli-Egypt peace treaty, its lofty ideals live on.
As Begin told the Knesset at the time: "To breach the ring of enmity – that is our goal, that is our aspiration, that was our dream...it is worth it, we must, we should take this step: for our people, for all our sons and daughters, for our future, for the peace and security of our neighbours, too."
But in the wake of Monday’s assassination of Ahmed Yassin Egypt has cancelled a visit by lawmakers and other dignitaries to mark the anniversary.
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