Letter proposing Mr Mordechai Vanunu be awarded an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, Galway
from Maggie Ronayne, Co-ordinator of the Global Women's Strike in Ireland

See also below: Letter of support from Noam Chomsky and Mr Mordechai Vanunu's CV

Dear President,

I write to propose Mr Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli citizen, to be awarded an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, Galway.  International opinion regards him as a courageous whistleblower who made public the secrets of Israel’s nuclear programme, for which he was accused of treason and espionage and served the full eighteen-year sentence.  Mr Vanunu is currently receiving sanctuary at St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem, where he has been since his release from Ashkelon prison in April 2004.  Mr Vanunu is a writer and activist, publications include poems and political and historical analyses sent from prison.  His goal is to live an academic life to which he would contribute in the field of education his experiences of nuclear resistance and his long considered views on the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

From 1976-1985 he was an employee at the Nuclear Research Centre, Dimona, Israel, where, as a technician, he worked on the process of separating plutonium from uranium and on the production of other nuclear materials including tritium, lithium, heavy water and nuclear waste.  Recognising the danger of this secret programme, he informed the Sunday Times in 1986 of his knowledge, whereupon he was lured to Rome, drugged, beaten, kidnapped and taken to Israel by Israeli Secret Services.  In March 1988 he was convicted in a secret trial of treason, espionage and revealing State secrets, sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, eleven and a half of which were spent in solitary confinement.  In May 1994 Amnesty International called for his immediate release.

Since his release, he has been denied basic freedoms of expression, association and movement via restrictions imposed on him by the Israeli authorities, including a ban on travelling outside Israel or associating with foreigners.  He can be censored or re-arrested at any time.  The international media are threatened and expelled from the country if they interview him.  He is currently appealing these restrictions as a prisoner of conscience.  He is also seeking political asylum in a number of countries, including Ireland.  He is not safe in Israel as a result of numerous threats to his life and hatred stirred up by the government and media in Israel.  Mobs have come to the door of the cathedral shouting threats to kill him and his family and other supporters have suffered threats and/or physical attacks.

His many nominations and awards are listed in the CV attached.  They include 1989-2004 Nobel Peace Prize nominee in Education, an honorary doctorate in 2001 from Tromso University, Norway, Rectorship of Glasgow University, the 2004 Yoko Ono Peace Award, the 1994 Sean McBride Peace Prize and the 1988 Danish Peace Foundation Award.

As well as large numbers of grassroots people and organisations, numerous prominent figures all over the world have supported him including calling for his release and respect for his human rights.  They include Professor Noam Chomsky, former US President Jimmy Carter, various parliamentarians, the EU parliament and Amnesty International.  In Ireland, Senator David Norris and Michael D. Higgins T.D. are among those who have spoken in his support.  Recently, former leader of the SDLP in the North of Ireland John Hume (a previous recipient of an honorary doctorate at NUI, Galway), former leader of the Unionist Party David Trimble and Mairead Corrigan Maguire of the Peace People are among 13 Nobel Peace Laureates who have called on the Israeli government to lift the restrictions on him and allow Mordechai Vanunu to leave Israel. 

This man’s courage in telling truth in the face of severe punishment, censorship and death threats is important for all of us but particularly for the Palestinian women, children and men who continue to struggle for survival under a brutal occupation and daily threats to their lives.  A significant facet of this threat is that Israel, armed by the United States, has weapons of mass destruction including chemical and biological weapons and is a nuclear power, the fourth largest in the world.  None of these is subject to any inspection process.  Mordechai Vanunu refused to be silent and allow the holocaust of Jewish people by the Nazis to be used to justify the suffering and killing of other people.  The award of an honorary doctorate would acknowledge not only Mordechai Vanunu’s achievements in exposing this but also recognise a long commitment by people of Jewish origin to the struggle for justice worldwide, now eclipsed by the violent actions of the Israeli State in the Middle East generally.  It would also lend support to Muslim, Jewish and Christian people coming together to oppose war crimes and genocide in the Middle East and the inaccurate and misleading characterisation of conflicts there as a ‘clash of religions and civilisations’. 

NUI, Galway has a long tradition of honouring those who have struggled for justice and against war, whether in South Africa, Ireland or elsewhere.  Mordechai Vanunu is surely such a person and I commend him to you for the award of the degree,

Yours sincerely,

Maggie Ronayne

Lecturer in Archaeology
National University of Ireland, Galway

 

Letter of Support from Noam Chomsky

 

Dear Professor Iognáid Ó Muircheartaigh,

I understand that Mordechai Vanunu is being proposed for an honorary doctorate at the National University in Galway, and would like to add my personal support for this proposal.

I have followed the Vanunu case closely since the beginning, and have been corresponding with him regularly since he was permitted to receive and send mail after many years in solitary confinement.  He is a person of remarkable courage and personal integrity.

There can be little doubt that nuclear weapons pose an extraordinary danger to the survival of the species.  It was just 50 years ago that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, pleading with them to "consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire," and who now face a choice that is "stark and dreadful and inescapable:

Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?"  Their primary concern, of course, was nuclear weapons.

Since that time there have been a few near-miraculous escapes from probably terminal nuclear war, and some halting steps towards mitigating the disaster, which many strategic analysts regard as an imminent danger: most recently and prominently former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who warned of "apocalypse soon" if nuclear weapons are not eliminated, a legal obligation for the nuclear powers, as the World Court determined a few years ago.  In all these years there has, to my knowledge, been only one person who responded to the Russell-Einstein appeal by exposing the development of nuclear weapons, many hundreds of them according to the CIA.  He was kidnapped, subjected to a disgraceful show trial, imprisoned for many years under conditions harshly condemned by the major human rights organizations, and remains in near-detention even after he was released.  He should be regarded as a major international hero, in my opinion, and truly deserves this honor -- which will also serve as a reinforcement of the warnings of Russell, Einstein, McNamara, and others who know the facts, and could hardly be more serious and urgent.

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor
MIT
Cambridge MA 02139