Israeli regime imperialism’s attack dog: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Ralph Schoenman, the author of “The Hidden History of Zionism,” in Berkeley, to discuss Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu’s recent remarks about Tel Aviv’s nukes.

What follows is a rough transcription.

Press TV: Why has Israel been so blatantly allowed to avoid adhering to any nuclear regulatory body such as the IAEA or joining any treaties such as the NPT?

Schoenman: Because US imperialism is the principle supporter and the defender of the Zionist state, its financier and its supplier of military equipment and all that it requires.

But I want to comment very specifically on Mordechai Vanunu because I was directly involved with Mordechai in 1986 in London, when he had come to London and he came to the London Sunday Times to disclose not just the evidence about hundreds of nuclear warheads and the delivery capacities, but experimental nuclear weapons that the Israelis were using in many parts of the world and specifically in Africa.

He provided enormous amounts of information to the London Sunday Times because he wanted to alert the world that his conscience would not allow him to remain silent about it. He was subjected to the following: the Mossad sent a woman to entice him and to involve herself with him and persuaded him to come for a weekend vacation in Rome, where he was kidnapped and drugged and taken to Israel.

There, he was in a car that was completely blacked out while he was on his way to isolation prison when he managed to write on the window of the car when it stopped at a traffic light in Tel Aviv ‘Vanunu kidnapped by Mossad.’ And this information was spotted by people literally at stop lights where this van was going to Tel Aviv, it got into the press and it became widely and publicly known.

I was in London at the time and involved with not only Mordechai, but his brother Meir Vanunu and with the Israeli anti-Zionist organizations Matzpen and Akiva Orr and we engaged in an international campaign to free Vanunu. As a matter of fact, I can tell you specifically that during the years that I was involved as the director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, I had a lot of dealings with the then deputy ambassador from the Soviet Union to the Great Britain, a man by the name of Vasev.

In 1986, Vasev was in Moscow, he was part of the KGB. I went to Moscow, I met with Vasev, I tried to persuade him to exchange Vanunu for Mossad agents that had been spying on Soviet Union. It was a world of importance we felt to prevent Israelis from killing Vanunu and from suppressing all that he had to say.

The long and short of it is that they kept him in solitary confinement for 18 years, but much of the information that he disclosed for the Sunday Times were disseminated on a global scale. He is a heroic figure, when they finally let him out after 18 years of solitary confinement, they have restricted him to remaining in Israel. He is not allowed to speak to people, he is not allowed to give interviews to people, he is not allowed to escape or to go anywhere else.

It is remarkable that in fact he was able to get some information out on Channel 2. But I should also emphasize that he disclosed not only the nuclear weapons program of the Israeli state, but their experimental programs with neutron weapons in such places such as Cameroon, where in 1986, a supposed explosion occurred in a volcanic lake called Lake Nyos, which caused 1,700 Cameroonians to be found dead in their place in their homes.

Press TV: With respect to Israel’s nuclear program, don’t nuclear powers see the obvious discord that this type of favoritism or bias can create? I mean is nuclear weapons regulation something that we really want to be ambiguous on?

Schoenman: Well, let’s be very clear about this; regulation has absolutely nothing to do with the actions of imperialism. They deploy that only to attack those they want to subjugate. But they are the authors of all of these major programs themselves, they are the ones who use the weapons, they are the ones who experiment with the weapons, they are the ones who menace the world with the weapons. I mean by that the US imperialism and the Israeli state, which is its attack dog.

Vanunu is a heroic figure who documented much of what they were doing and did it because he felt an obligation, to world peace and to the rights of people all over the world to be safe from this constant menace.

Press TV: One of the quotes that Vanunu did say was that he said he was horrified with how dangerous the Israeli nuclear activities are. Now please tell me that this kind of claim doesn’t warrant safety inspection or at the very least regulation. I mean what exempts Israel and makes it different from any other nuclear player in the world?

Schoenman: Listen, we are in our third decade since those revelations. They have been amplified, they have been disseminated, they are understood by everybody on the planet.

It is hardly a secret, Vanunu is a heroic figure for documenting it with photographs, with documentation, with evidence that is indisputable and cannot be denied. The Sunday Times in London published it on its front page; not all of it, a lot of it they didn’t have the courage to release but it has been disseminated since and it continues to be. Everybody who is worthy of the attention understands what this program is, knows about it and the attempts to pretend that it doesn’t exist is sheer dishonesty.

The political will to isolate and expose the Zionist state and its plans and misdeeds is a function of the role of imperialism in the world and the sustaining of Israel as an attack dog of that imperial regime...

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