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34
FRIDAY APRIL 1, 1988
been expected to take their
place at the bottom of the
social heap.
Solomon Vanunu, the
patriarch of the family, ful-
filled this expectation: He set
up a small stall in the Beer-
sheva marketplace, where he
still peddles religious tracts
and artifacts.
At the age of 14, he enrolled
Mordechai at a religious
school, where a fellow student
remembers him as being "in-
different and withdrawn."
In the army, Vanunu was
assigned to the engineers
corps, where he became a
squad commander. Again, the
abiding impressions he left on
his fellow soldiers were of
alienation and apathy.
It seems that Vanunu
emerged from the army with
symptoms that were common
to many other second-gener-
ation Sephardim, the
children of those Jews from
Arab land.
The second generation had
been brought up in Israel,
fought in some of its wars,
tasted its fruits. They were
not content to share the
modest expectations of their
parents. They wanted — de-
manded — a piece of the pie.
Mordechai Vanunu partici-
pated in the revolution that
was provoked by this anger. In
Israel's 1977 election, he was
among the majority of young
Sephardi voters who dumped
their frustrations into the
ballot box, sweeping away the
elitist Labor Party and han-
ding victory to the populist,
right-wing Likud bloc.
Later, at university in Beer-
sheva, Vanunu is
remembered as an extremist
who advocated the expulsion
of the Arab population from
Israel.
He saw in the university an
oppportunity to escape from
the world he had known at
home; to break out of the
cycle of what he perceived as
backwardness and poverty; to
catch . up with the Ashkena-
zim — Jews of Western
origin — whom he suspected
of deliberately blocking.
Sephardi advancement.
His academic achievements
must have been a bitter disap-
pointment. When he did poor-
ly at economics, he switched
to geography, and when he
failed again, he tried
philosophy.
He even failed as a model in
the university's art school.
After posing in the nude
twice, he was not invited back
again because he could not
stand still. When fellow
students asked, "What are
you going to try next," he
turned away sullenly and
refused to respond.
His options were closing,
and his sense of resentment
was being transformed into
anger. Having broken out of
the world of his parents, he
was unable to break into the
world of the Ashkenazim.
In 1978, while still a stu-
dent, he answered a news-
paper advertisement for a job
as a technician at the nuclear
facility in nearby Dimona. He
apparently fulfilled all the re-
quirements, including the
stringent security tests.
He earned a good salary
and, still typical of many
others of his generation,
gambled on the stock ex-
change during the heady
The plain fact is
that the Israeli
public is not
interested in the
nuclear issue.
years of hyper-inflation.
When the market crashed in
October 1985, Vanunu
crashed, too.
By now, he had ceased sup-
• porting the Likud and had
abandoned his desire to expel
the Arabs. His fellow Jews
might not take him seriously,
but the Arab students did. He
embraced their cause and
became their spokesman on
campus.
For his employers at the
nuclear facility, the warning
light should have flashed on.
Mordechai Vanunu was no
longer the introverted,
alienated student and soldier.
Nor did his new mode of
behavior stop at supporting
the Palestinians. In his free
time, he traveled to the West
Bank town of Ramallah,
where he flirted with the
Anglican Church, and at one
memorable student party in
early 1986, he insisted on tak-
ing off his clothes — "to
prove," he announced, "that I
can do it."
But Mordechai Vanunu
seemed to be saying
something else; to be making
a desperate plea for attention.
Those who did take note, how-
ever, ascribed no special
significance to the strange
behavior of this strange
young man.
By the time he left Israel for
Australia, he was waiting to
hear whether his application
to join the Israel Communist
Party had been successful.
While Israelis are curious
about Vanunu, they tend to
see him through very dif-
ferent lenses from the rest of
the world, particularly those
European legislators who
nominated him for the Nobel
Peace Prize.
He is certainly not per-