[GushShalom] Vanunu and the American connection + action billboard
Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)
info at gush-shalom.org
Sat Apr 24 19:48:52 IDT 2004
GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - www.gush-shalom.org/
Reminder + date correction (NB!):
[1] Our activists meeting will be Wednesday, April 28 at 8pm in Tel-Aviv
also on the agenda
[2] Sunday, Israeli women join Palestinian women-only anti-wall march
[3] Sunday, an Alternative Day of Remembrance in Tel-Aviv
[4] Monday: Yesh-Gvul's Alternative Independence Day Ceremony
articles & reports
[5] Two articles on Vanunu and the American connection
# Uri Avnery: Vanunu: The Terrible Secret
# The last taboo By Avner Cohen
[6] Education Minister boycots BGU for not firing Prof.Lev Grinberg
ongoing struggle
[7] Links to continuous updates
#Against the Wall (contact addresses + appeal to Irish government)
daily struggle / appeal to Ireland / eye-witness reports
#Refusniks (prisoner addresses & links to constantly updated sites)
updated refusniks lists / support to five long-time incarcerated
\\// //\\ \\//
[1] Our activists meeting will be Wednesday, April 28 at 8pm in Tel-Aviv
[Hebrew was sent earlier / ðåñç òáøé ðùìç ëáø + éùìç ùåá òì ôé á÷ùä]
In the present situation:
with Sharon making declarations on "disengagement from Gaza" and
the dismantling of settlements, but meanwhile leading us towards
unprecedented escalation and brutalization of Israeli society;
with Bush giving his backing to plans of occupatiuon and annexation;
with the Labor Party crawling into the government and Peace Now
losing its way in face of Sharon’s manoeuvres;
with a new generation of Israeli peace activists directly joining the
Palestinian intifada against the Wall -
it is time for us, the activists of Gush Shalom, to meet together, to
speak and listen, to share our views and feelings of this complicated
situation, and to formulate (if possible) some creative ideas about how
to face it.
We meet on Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 8.00 pm, in the Kibbutz
Movement House, 13 Leonardo Da Vinci St., Tel-Aviv. See you!
+++
[2] Sunday, Israeli women join Palestinian women-only anti-wall march
------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: aya zamir <aya_zamir at yahoo.com>
Hebrew at request / òáøéú òì ôé á÷ùä
Dearest anti-wallers!
Come on sunday, 10am, to Biddu - to the first all and only women's
anti-wall demonstration: Palestinian women from the entire region will
march against the construction of the wall in Biddu, and they ask for
massive Israeli and international women participation. It is vital that we
support this new phase in the popular non violent resistance to the
wall.
for more details: Cheska 052 4494030 or Jenny 052 4415589
LEAVING FROM TEL AVIV: at 8 am, near platform 605 (the bus to
Jerusalem), central bus station, 6th floor.
[3] Sunday, an Alternative Day of Remembrance in Tel-Aviv
------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: "yuval halperin" <yuvalhal at hotmail.com>
Hebrew at request / òáøéú òì ôé á÷ùä
Day of remembrance to the victims of war and occupation.
An alternative ceremony of the day of remembrance will take place at
the Gada Smalit ("Left Bank", Ahad Ha'am 70) on Sunday, 25 of April,
at 19:30.
The participants:
Ibrahim Bushnak,whose nephew was murdered in October 2000 by the
guns of the Israeli police;
-Rami Elhanan, member of the joint Israeli-Palestinian forum of
bereaved families for peace;
-Moshe Yehudai, member in the Israeli branch of the world federation of
war resisters;
-Hava Keller, who fought in 1948: "I was promised that the refugees
would return to their homes shortly";
-Uri Yaakobi, 2003 draft resister;
-Yaakov Chen, 1956 draft resister;
-Ruti Kantor, activist in the "New profile" organization;
-Shmuel Yerushalmi, poet and peace activist.
An exhibition on the theme of Israeli militarism will be opened.
+++
[4] Monday: Yesh-Gvul's Alternative Independence Day Ceremony
------- Forwarded message follows -------
To: <YeshGvul at yahoogroups.com>
From: "peretz kidron" <cherryk at zahav.net.il>
Date sent: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 18:15:59 +0200
Subject:
Hebrew at request / òáøéú òì ôé á÷ùä
Yesh Gvul
Invites you to an
ALTERNATIVE INDEPENDENCE TORCHLIGHTING CEREMONY
Dedicated to an Israel more moral, more just, more egalitarian.
We will light torches for an immediate end of the unnecessary war and
the reconquest of the Palestinian territories; for amends for the
injustices inflicted upon the weak.
AND IN THE HOPE OF PEACE WITH OUR NEIGHBOURS
Torch lighters: Betty Nevenishti, Dalia Golomb, Dov Hinin, Nathan
Lavon, Avi Levy, Adi Leibovitz, Laura Milo, Shebi Korzen, Peretz
Kidron, Sherry Rivkin, Yonatan Shapira
We'll wind up with music by:
UNSOUNDABLE & SAGOL 59
7:45 pm, Monday April 26, 2004 , Emil Gruenzweig Square (opposite
the Prime Minister’s Office)Givat Ram, Jerusalem.
Transportation from Tel Aviv: 6:30 pm, El Al terminal near the Northern
Train Station
Telephone numbers for support and counseling for soldiers or enquiries:
(03) 5224118 or (02) 6250271
info at yesh-gvul.org
www.yesh-gvul.org
Peretz Kidron *** Ram Rahat
+++
[5] Two articles on Vanunu and the American connection
# Uri Avnery: Vanunu: The Terrible Secret
# The last taboo By Avner Cohen
~~
# Avnery: Vanunu: The Terrible Secret
Hebrew at request & soon at the site
òáøéú òì ôé á÷ùä àå á÷øåá áàúø
Uri Avnery
24.4.04
Vanunu: The Terrible Secret
In the darkness of a cinema, a woman’s voice: “Hey! Take your hands
off! Not you! YOU!”
This old joke illustrates the American policy regarding nuclear
armaments in the Middle East. “Hey, you there, Iraq and Iran and
Libya, stop it! Not YOU, Israel!”
The danger of nuclear arms was the main pretext for the invasion of
Iraq. Iran is threatened in order to compel it to stop its nuclear efforts.
Libya has surrendered and is dismantling its nuclear installations.
So what about Israel?
This week it became clear that the Americans are full partners in the
creation of Israel’s “nuclear option”.
How was this exposed? With the help of Mordecai Vanunu, of course.
Throughout the week, a festival was being celebrated around the
prisoner, who was released on Wednesday.
The Security Establishment has not stopped harassing him even after
he has sat in prison for 18 years, 11 of them in complete solitary
confinement – a treatment he himself described on leaving the prison
as “cruel and barbaric”. After he was “set free”, far-reaching restrictions
were imposed on him (e.g. he is forbidden to leave the country, is
restricted to one town, cannot go near any embassy or consulate, may
not talk with foreign citizens). All this under the colonial British
emergency regulations that were condemned at the time by the
leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, as “worse then the Nazi
laws”.
Not, God forbid, because of any desire for revenge!
The security people declared from every podium that this is not
revenge for all the shame Vanunu caused the security services, and is
by no means just more persecution, but an essential security
requirement. He must not be allowed to leave the country or to speak
with foreigners and journalists, because he is in possession of secrets
vital to the security of the state.
Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a
technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has
advanced with giant steps?
But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is
really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership
with the United States in the development of Israel’s nuclear
armaments.
This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the
State Department for “arms control”, Under Secretary John Bolton, has
come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can
cause severe damage to the mighty super-power. The Americans are
afraid of sounding like the lady in the dark cinema.
(By the way, this John Bolton is an avid supporter of the group of
Zionists neo-cons who play a central role in the Bush theater. He
opposes arms control for the United States and its satellites, and was
installed in the State Department against the wishes of the Secretary
of State himself.)
In the short address Vanunu was able to make to the media
immediately on his release, he made a strange remark: that the young
woman who served as bait for his kidnapping, some 18 years ago, was
not a Mossad agent, as generally assumed, but an agent of the FBI or
CIA. Why was it so urgent for him to convey this?
From the first moment, there was something odd about the Vanunu
affair.
At the beginning, my first thought was that he was a Mossad agent.
Everything pointed in that direction.
How else can one explain a simple technician’s success in
smuggling a camera into the most secret and best guarded installation
in Israel? And in taking photos apparently without hindrance? How else
to explain the career of that person who, as a student at Beer-Sheva
University, was well-known as belonging to the extreme left and
spending his time in the company of Arab fellow-students? How was
he allowed to leave the country with hundreds of photos? How was he
able to approach a British paper and to turn over to British scientists
material that convinced them that Israel had 200 nuclear bombs?
Absurd, isn’t it? But it all fits , if one assumes that Vanunu acted
from the beginning on a mission for the Mossad. His disclosures in the
British newspaper not only caused no damage to the Israeli
government, but on the contrary, strengthened the Israeli deterrent
without committing the government, which was free to deny everything.
What happened next only reinforced this assumption. While in
London, in the middle of his campaign of exposures, knowing that half
a dozen intelligence services are tracking his every movement, he
starts an affair with a strange women, is seduced into following her to
Rome, where he is kidnapped and shipped back to Israel. How naive
can you get? Is it credible for a reasonable person to fall into such a
primitive trap? It is not. Meaning that the whole affair was nothing but a
classic cover story.
But when the affair went on, and details of the year-long daily
mistreatment of the man became public, I had to give up this initial
theory. I had to face the fact that our security services are even more
stupid than I had assumed (which I wouldn’t have believed possible)
and that all these things actually had happened, and that Mordecai
Vanunu was an honest and idealistic, if extremely naive, person.
I have no doubt that his personality was shaped by his background.
He is the son of a family with many children, who were quite well-to-do
in Morocco but lived in a primitive “transition camp” in Israel, before
moving to Be’er-Sheva, where they lived in poverty. In spite of this, he
succeeded in getting into university and got a master’s degree, quite
an achievement, but suffered, so it seems, from the overbearing
attitude and prejudices of his Ashkenazi peers. Undoubtedly, that
pushed him towards the company of the extreme left, where such
prejudices were not prevalent.
The bunch of “security correspondents” and other commentators who
are attached to the udders of the security establishment have already
spread stories about Vanunu “imagining things”, his long stay in
solitary confinement causing him to “convince himself of all kinds of
fantasies” and to “invent all kinds of fabrications”. Meaning: the
American connection.
Against this background one can suddenly understand all these
severe restrictions, which, at first sight, look absolutely idiotic. The
Americans, it seems, are very worried. The Israeli security services
have to dance to their tune. The world must be prevented by all
available means from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness, that
the Americans are full partners in Israel’s nuclear arms program, while
pretending to be the world’s sheriff for the prevention of nuclear
proliferation.
“And the lady cried: “Not you! YOU!”
~~
# The last taboo By Avner Cohen
Fri., April 23, 2004
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/418891.html>
Hebrew / òáøéú
<http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=419216>
+++
[6] Education Minister boycots BGU for not firing Prof.Lev Grinberg
------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: Lev Grinberg <lev at bgumail.bgu.ac.il>
My article "Symbolic Genocide" provoked an incredible reaction in
the Israeli media after its publication in "La Libre Belgique" last month,
mainly responses of de-legitimation and defamation, and almost no
debate with my argument.
The last development is the demand of the minister of Education to fire
me, and the boycot she declared on Ben Gurion University due to their
rejection of her demand. (see Haaretz English edition
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/418983.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/418137.html
I trust my University, colleagues and students that they will stand
against the Minister pressure, however the anti-democratic and illegal
demand is a real deterioration in the freedom of speech in Israel with a
few salient MCarthist figures, one is the present Education Minister and
the other the former "liberal" Minister of Education Amnon Rubinstein.
Lev
+++
ongoing struggle
[7] Links to continuous updates
#Against the Wall (contact addresses + appeal to Irish government)
daily struggle / appeal to Ireland / eye-witness reports
#Refusniks (prisoner addresses & links to constantly updated sites)
updated refusniks lists / support to five long-time incarcerated
#Against the Wall
*
ðåëçåú éåîéåîéú áëôøéí îàéîéí ò"é äçåîä ìúàí òí
àééáé 064-604172 isichel at netvision.net.il
àøé÷ 050-607034 info at rhr.israel.net
Day to day presence at villages threatened by route of wall.
Contact:
Ivy Sichel 064-604172 isichel at netvision.net.il
Arik Asherman 050-607034 info at rhr.israel.net
*
Support diplomatic opposition to the Wall by signing
the appeal to the Irish government
http://www.petitiononline.com/WBWall01/petition.html
*
For daily eye-witness reports from the OT written by internationals:
http://www.palsolidarity.org/pressreleases/pressreleases.php
#Refusniks
Constantly-updated refusniks lists:
English - http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english/prison/
Hebrew / òáøéú - http://www.yesh-gvul.org/prison/
English - http://www.newprofile.org/default.asp?language=en
Hebrew / òáøéú - http://www.newprofile.org/
For the latest news about the five:
http://www.refuz.org.il/News.html
Letters of support to
Noam Bahat / Haggai Mattar / Matan Kaminer
AGAF BET
Ma’asiyaho Prison
P.O.B 13
Ramla - Israel
Adam Maor / Shimri Tzameret:
Hermon Prison
P.O.B 4011
KFAR M’RAR - Israel
--
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Arabic)
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