Once more Mordechai Vanunu has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize for drawing our attention to Israel’s nuclear capacity, a fact that Israel has tried rather unsuccessfully to conceal to the world she endangers. As Vanunu has pointed out one of his chief tormentors, Shimon Peres, is a recipient. He is just one of a number of people who have led a rather bizarre career of talking about peace while acting as belligerents. These are some of the highlights from the veteran Peres past:
Shimon Peres procurer of arms
In 1947 Shimon Peres joined the Haganah, where David Ben-Gurion named him responsible for personnel and arms purchases. In 1948 he was named head of naval services in the Defense Ministry and in 1952 he was named deputy director general of the Defense Ministry.
In 1953, at the age of 29, he became the youngest ever director -general of the Defense Ministry.In 1959 Peres was elected to the Knesset for the first time. Running with Mapai (Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael), he was made deputy defense minister.
Architect of peace?
In 1992, after Labor – headed by Yitzhak Rabin – won the elections, Peres was named foreign minister. Peres than began negotiating with Yasser Arafat and the PLO, trying to get the organization to recognize Israel. Those negotiations materialized into the Oslo Accords, which effectively created the Palestinian Authority. The Oslo Accords were finalized on August 20, 1993 and signed by Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO and Peres for Israel. In 1994, Peres – along with Rabin and Arafat – were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the peace talks that produced the Oslo Accords.
Architect of Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal
In December 1995 Shimon Peres drew world headlines for his casual remark to a group of Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv: “Give me peace and we will give up the nuclear program–this is the whole story.” Though the media heralded this announcement, it reflected nothing more than longstanding policy. For years, Israel has said that it would negotiate the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East after the establishment of lasting peace. Shimon Peres has told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Israel would be willing to negotiate the signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty within two years after the establishment of “regional peace.”
But Peres has never said what such a peace would include. He has preferred ambiguity in this and much else in Israel’s nuclear diplomacy. In fact, it was Peres who came up with Israel’s most often repeated nuclear declaration. At a April 1963 meeting in the White House, Peres responded to President John F. Kennedy’s questions about Israel’s nuclear program by saying: “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” Two years later, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol elevated Peres’s words to Israel’s official nuclear line.
Mordechai Vanunu on Shimon Peres
Vanunu said in a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee that he did not wish “to belong to a list of laureates that also includes [President] Shimon Peres, the man behind Israeli atomic policy.”
Vanunu added: “Peres established the reactor in Dimona and developed Israel’s nuclear weapons program… In the same way as Pakistan’s [nuclear scientist] Dr. Khan, Peres was the man behind the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Africa and other states. He was also behind the nuclear test in South Africa in 1978.”