WHAT IS REQUIRED OF ISRAEL
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs-cbnnews.com
April 26, 2004

After spending 18 years in prison - 12 in solitary confinement - Mordechai Vanunu walked out a free man. He is warned by those who imprisoned him that he has been given his freedom and that he must be thankful he has been freed. That even though he has been freed he is not allowed to leave Israel. That he is forbidden to talk to any foreigners, is not allowed to talk to the press, is not allowed to talk about his past work in Dimona, a deadly nuclear facility that his conscience caused him 18 years ago to expose as Israel's dirty deadly secret.

Vanunu's first act - after he takes his first step out of prison - causes people the world over to cry. Vanunu is a new man. The same new man who decided to follow his conscience 18 years ago. Vanunu approaches the local press; he approaches the foreign press. He makes the victory sign with his fingers and speaks directly to microphones and cameras. "You have not broken me," Vanunu tells the Israeli government. Call me a traitor, he taunts his abductors; "I have a greater responsibility."

"I am proud, I am happy, you have not made me crazy. I still believe Israel is wrong to develop nuclear weapons, and I still believe the abolition of nuclear weapons is possible in our lifetime," Vanunu tells the media. "I call on Mohammed ElBaradei, on the international nuclear inspectors of the UN. Come to Israel. Inspect Dimona. Dimona must be shut down."

Outside, a gang of Israelis chant "Kill Vanunu!" Israeli Justice minister - a misplaced term - Joseph Lapid advises the media: "Since Vanunu is surrounded by a throng of activists who worship him, they can very well take care of him. We are not providing him security." Israeli newspapers publish with malice Vanunu's home address. Another paper called Maariv International publishes a poll where readers are asked to choose whether Vanunu should be kept in jail or allowed to leave Israel. Or killed. A day later, after receiving howls of protest, Maariv backs down, takes out its poll, and explains the word kill was improper and should have been replaced instead with the more "appropriate" word "executed."

Israeli officials take turns lambasting Vanunu, accusing Vanunu that he is a traitor, that he wants Israel defenseless. Noone is supposed to question Israel's intentions, duty and obligation to "protect" Israel.

"I visited Auschwitz this morning!" Lapid hectors the host of BBC's program Hard Talk, Tim Sebastian, who merely asked the Israeli minister (who kept insisting that Vanunu caused serious damage to Israel) to give examples of the damage Israel suffered because of Vanunu's revelations. Lapid wields the horror suffered by the Jewish peoples like a bludgeon: anytime the Israeli government is pressed to account for its duplicity, for its malevolent intentions, for its singular racism, the Holocaust is waved around to shut up its critics; Israel has suffered; Israel can do no wrong. Sebastian does the right thing. He tells Lapid to his face: "Excuse me, how can Auschwitz be relevant? I am asking about Vanunu."

Maybe Sebastian should have also asked whether Israel's nuclear weapons are supposed to stop suicide bombers.

"What exactly is a country surrounded by hundreds of millions of people each one of whom have sworn to destroy her supposed to do?" some Israelis ask, as if the mere question is supposed to still the opposition demanding the dismantling of Israel's nuclear facilities.

The question ignores the fact that Arab governments have recognized Israel's right to exist for over 20 years. That polls taken among Arab nations confirms what most people already know - the outrage over the brutal treatment of Palestinians under Israel's occupation is increasing not diminishing - and yet at the same time acknowledges what is all too often ignored - the continued legitimacy among most Arabs of a solution to the Middle East peace problem that includes Israel.

Those who bring up the matter of Israel's supposed "impending annihilation" by its "sworn enemies" do not always realize that the reasoning used to justify Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is in reality a way of thinking framed by a familiar narrative - the small civilized community in a wasteland versus the hundreds of millions of murderous savages intent on annihilating their way of life. Racist.

To prevent "another Holocaust" from being inflicted on them, Israel threatens everyone - in particular the non-Jew - that it will unleash its own Holocaust on them, for reasons that are not entirely as benign as "defending Israel."

Such as to increase Israel's dominance in the region. To legitimize the continuation of its inhumane occupation. To sustain the reign of a regime in the Middle East that favors Jews and Jews alone. A regime that continues to provoke a torrent of hatred - and terrorist acts - against innocent Israelis.

Anti-Semitic statements? Clumsily crafted words, probably, but anti-Semitic? Probably not:

"The wish for peace, so often assumed as the Israeli aim, is not in my view a principle of Israeli policy, while the wish to extend Israeli domination and influence is," said the late Dr. Israel Shahak, a Warsaw-born concentration camp survivor, who was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Internationally acclaimed for research that contributed to cancer treatment, Dr. Shahak had lived in Israel since its creation in 1948 till the time of his death in 2001. Shahak, who spent most of his childhood trying to stay alive in Nazi-occupied ghettos and death camps, often compared the experience of Palestinians under Israeli rule to his own experience living under the Nazis. "Israel is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states ... Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overt hegemony over the entire Middle East ... without any hesitation to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."

"Israel is still a democracy for Jews alone. The problems of Israel, in every walk of life, can be traced to the all-pervasive racism, whether generalized anti-Gentile racism or particularized anti-Arab racism, both of which dominate its society," said Shahak who did not tire reminding Jews who called him "a self-hating Jew" that the slur was originally "a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans."

According to Amira Hass, the distinguished writer and journalist of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "Every Jew, man or woman, citizen of any country in the world, has potential more rights in Israel than any Arab citizen in the state. The Jew will have more chances to find a job, respectable housing, financial aid for higher education, personal advancement. Every foreign Jew has, de facto, more rights in the West Bank and Gaza than Palestinians."

Israel wants to see itself as "the light unto nations." But until Israel realizes what it has become, there will only be darkness.

The truth of the matter is that, according to Yaakov Perry, former chief of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security service, "Israel is heading downhill towards near-catastrophe. If Israel goes on living by the sword, Israel will continue to wallow in the mud and destroy itself."

Listen to Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization:

"Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

"Israel could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below - from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption ...

"Israel cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think itself the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live in Israel, Arab as well as Jew. Israel cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state - not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish."

Here is Major Ishai Menuhin, IDF and chairman of Yesh Gvul, the soldiers movement for selective refusal: "Daily funerals and thoughts of revenge among Israelis tend to blur the fact that we, the Israelis, are the occupiers. And as much as we live in fear of terrorism and war, it is the Palestinians who suffer more deaths hourly and live with greater fear because they are the occupied. Israel's military occupation of Palestine has over the decades made Israel less secure and less humane ... I and others who serve in the [Israeli] defense forces cannot by our actions alone change government policies or make peace negotiations more likely. But we can show our fellow citizens that occupation of the territories is not just a political or strategic matter. It is also a moral matter. We can show them an alternative: they can say no to occupation."

And here is the respected writer and founding member of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) Uri Avnery, a three-term member of the Israeli Parliament: "Violence is a symptom; occupation is the disease ... Israel is in the middle of a war in which three and a half million Palestinians are oppressed by Israel's occupation. The world is shocked that yesterday's victims are today's victimizers. A higher moral standard is required from Israel than from other peoples. And rightly so."

Rightly so.

NOTES:
1. "Anniversary of a whistle blower," Renato Redentor Constantino, TODAY, October 6, 2003.
2. There have been numerous polls conducted among Arab states indicating such sentiment. In the Palestinian territories in particular, a small example among many others: the results of a recent poll released in March 28, 2004 conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between March 14 to 17, 2004 (before the Israeli assassination of Ahmad Yasin). In the poll, 84% support mutual cessation of violence and 70% support a Hudna. "After reaching a peace agreement and the establishment of a Palestinian state, 74% would support reconciliation between the two peoples."
3. "Israeli weapons of mass destruction: a threat to peace," John Steinbach, Center for Research on Globalisation (CRG), March 3, 2002.
4. "The Israeli Myth of Omniscience: Nuclear Deterrence and Intelligence," Israel Shahak, The Middle East Policy Council Journal, Spring 1991, Number 36,
5. "Breaking an iron rule," Amira Hass, Haaretz, April 21, 2004.
6. "Israel on the road to ruin warn former Shin Bet chiefs," Chris McGreal, The Guardian-UK, November 15, 2003.
7. "A failed Israeli society is collapsing," Avraham Burg, International Herald Tribune, September 6, 2003.
8. "Saying no to Israel's Occupation," Ishai Menuhin, March 9, 2002. See http://www.yesh-gvul.org
9. Quotes are from a variety of sources: "Violence is a symptom," Jon Elmer interview of Uri Avnery, September 15, 2003 . "The cost of Zionism," Uri Avnery and Jon Elmer, From Occupied Palestine, February 23, 2004. "Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Zionism: A Practical Manual," Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, January 19, 2004.

A WHISTLE BLOWER MIGHTIER THAN ISRAEL
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 19, 2004

Mightier than the government of Israel. One man.

He has been incarcerated for almost 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, yet he remains freer than his tormentors could ever hope to be - the government of Israel, which continues to languish in the prison of its singular cowardice.

His name is Mordechai Vanunu, whistleblower extraordinaire and the world's first independent nuclear inspector. On April 21 - the day before Earth Day, a fitting occasion - Vanunu will walk out of Israel's Ashkelon Prison with his conscience intact and his motive no less urgent.

The prisoner of conscience is a family hero, an icon of the global peace movement, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and a citizen of the world. If only for the message that Vanunu continues to carry and the example of his sacrifice, the Philippine government should be sending a peace keeping force not to Iraq but to Israel. To receive Vanunu. To embrace him. To provide palpable support to a man who best embodies what is presumed to be a collective aspiration of the world - the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he learned of and documented Israel's secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The world learned of Israel's clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu's interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Photographs that revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and "the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually." In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.

Vanunu's only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped and drugged - five days after the Sunday Times published his interview - and shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years' imprisonment

Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East yet today it remains the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel is the world's sixth largest nuclear power yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, and Israel's biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion remain closed to international inspection.

Vanunu. The man who diagnosed what was wrong with the world in a poem he wrote in prison: "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."

"What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it," said the historian Howard Zinn. "Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."

Vanunu chose disobedience, chose to obey his conscience instead, and was forced to spend the next 18 years of his life behind bars. Was it worth it? For this giant of a man, the answer is an emphatic yes.

"We've succeeded in overcoming this long time of silence ... You were my voice, my conscience - you kept all these issues of secret nuclear weapons in the center and followed my path, " wrote Vanunu recently to his supporters in the US. "We'll not rest until we see a new international agreement to ban, abolish all kinds of nuclear weapons ... We believe it is possible and we can witness it in our lifetime ... The end of nuclear weapons is possible."

"The dreams men dream in sleep are mist and shadow," said Barrows Dunham. "The dreams men dream while waking can become the substance of a world." True.

"I won. I'll be free. The gates and the locks will be opened. They didn't succeed in breaking me," wrote Vanunu, to his brother Meir last February.

Giant, how do we repay you?

We are all caught up in the thousand and one things that life imposes daily, but we will try. For starters, this Wednesday, on April 21, at the Embassy of Israel in Makati City, a small Filipino family will bring a garland of flowers to welcome you.

And all of you who are free - especially this Wednesday - come and join and break bread. Tell Israel that it must get rid of its nuclear weapons and that it must sign the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons treaty. Send your letters and flowers to Israel's embassy at Trafalgar Plaza, H.V. dela Costa Street, Salcedo Village.

Each flower stem will serve to welcome Vanunu and each petal will symbolize the abolition of a nuclear missile.

* * * * *

Dr. Mordechai Vanunu was kidnapped nearly 18 years ago in a terrorist act of the Israeli government and he should not have spent even one day behind bars and yet, as if all these were not enough, the Israeli government still intends to enforce barbaric restrictions on the Nobel Peace Prize nominee after his release from prison on April 21. Another display of the moral bankruptcy of a government all too often erroneously called "the only democracy in the Middle East."

Vanunu will be forbidden to leave city limits unless he reports his intentions to the local police force; he will not be allowed to approach any border terminal, including Ben-Gurion International Airport, the country's ports, or borders with the Palestinian Authority; he is forbidden to be in contact with foreigners - whether in face-to-face meetings or by telephone, fax, or email - including foreign citizens residing in Israel; he is not allowed to approach foreign embassies and divulge details to anyone regarding the Dimona plant where he worked or the circumstances of his being kidnapped and transported to Israel; and he will not have passport privileges, and therefore, cannot leave the country.

Vanunu has formally asked to renounce his Israeli citizenship as a way to prevent the government from confining him to the country after his release from prison.

Send your messages of concern regarding the inhumane restrictions on Vanunu to H.E. Yehoshua Sagi, Ambassador of Israel, at fax number 894-1027 and via email at pressil@info.com.ph.

BEIJING TAXI RIDE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY/abs-cbnnews.com
April 12, 2004

It took about 40 minutes by taxi to get to Beijing International Airport from the Dongcheng District apartment. Enough time for breakfast on the go. Fresh sweet yoghurt in a small clay jar sipped through a straw, Dido singing on the MP3 player, and thoughts of the family waiting back home.

The short trip was somehow like a long train ride minus the clacking of the rails. It was dreamy and yet indifferent, the pining for home fertilizing the blur of urban vistas and the uncertain climate of the present.

Only weeks ago, the trees of Beijing were barren as temperatures hovered between below-7 and 12 degrees. And yet that morning, as I was making my way to the airport, peach, cherry and pear trees were in full bloom, a riot of unruly pastel colors quarreling with infantries of greenery. It was quite jarring.

According to the Beijing Meteorological Observatory, last Thursday was actually the second-warmest April day in Beijing since the foundation of the New China in 1949. Over the next week, "more dry and warm weather is expected."

The sharp shift of the capital's climate was as if spring had somehow hurled and impaled itself on Beijing, expiring as quickly as it arrived, "giving residents the impression that spring simply did not happen."

Warmest weather. Sounds familiar. The ten hottest years in recorded history all occurred around the last ten years.

I think of the photo a friend had given last month, a snapshot of camel owner Baoyin Culu kneeling in prayer at the very place where his last camel died. The camel's bleached bones are scattered in front of Baoyin, like sentries confronting the camel owner's shadow. In the photo, the desert dunes of Inner Mongolia surrounding Baoyin appear as desolate as his plight; once upon a time, he owned 80 camels. But each one has died due to disappearing grasslands and accelerating desertification.

I think of Peter Timeon who, as foreign secretary of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati, said in 1990 in Sweden at a United Nations plenary session on Climate Change: "Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates, I wonder how many people in this hall know where my country is? ... Without wishing to take up so much of this meeting's precious time, it suffices to say briefly that ... no place among our 33 tiny atolls rises higher than two meters above sea leve ... [In the absence of] concerted international action ... commensurate with the dire warnings of ... scientists ... long before the sea rises that far, my country and others like it will have been condemned to annihilation."

I remember the warning issued last March by Swiss Re, the world's second largest reinsurer, that if the world did not curb the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, the economic costs of global warming may double to $150 billion a year in 10 years and hit insurers with $30-40 billion in claims - "the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually."

The impacts of climate change are not trivial, after all. In fact, consequences of humankind's addiction to fossil fuels are the reason why climate change is considered by many as the greatest threat the planet is facing today. The increase in frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, flooding and storms. Retreating glaciers. Rising sea levels.

I think of the words of Lord Peter Levene, board chair of Lloyd's of London, who said recently that terrorism is not the insurance industry's biggest worry, despite the fact that his company was the largest single insurer of the World Trade Center. According to Levene, "Like other large international insurance companies, [Lloyd's] is bracing for an increase in weather disasters related to global warming." In the business sector, the insurance industry is the canary in the coal mine, and right now the canary is nervously tottering on its perch.

I think of Sir John Houghton, a co-chair of the UN-formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said that "Global warming is already upon us ... The impacts of global warming are such that that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction."

And I think of Hans Blix who said that he too was "more worried about global warming than [he was] of any major military conflict."

In the volley of my worries, I think of my son and daughter and I collide once more with a familiar impasse: that I have not contributed enough to make the world that they will inherit a better one. And that I have not spent enough time with them eating ice cream, reading books and romping around the bedroom.

It is a good dilemma, one that I am in no hurry to resolve. "We worry too much," someone once said, "about something to live on and too little about something to live for." Another good dilemma.

I smile as a gust of cold wind enters the vehicle. I take out a photo of my wife and kids, my mind shifting to dreams of kite-flying.