Norway offers to allow in Israeli nuclear whistleblower

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The photo, taken on December 29, 2009, shows Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu flashing the V-sign as he arrives at a Jerusalem court. (By AFP)

Norway has offered to allow Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and his Norwegian wife to immigrate to and live in the Scandinavian country.

Kristin Joachimsen, Vanunu’s wife, said on Friday that she had applied for his husband to be allowed to come to Norway under rules for family reunification.

“Family values have prevailed,” she told Norway’s TV2 channel.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration confirmed that permission had been granted to the Israeli nuclear whistleblower to live with his wife.

Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, served 18 years in prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper in 1986. He was released in 2004 with a stringent set of restrictions, including a ban on speaking with foreigners and leaving Israel.

Joachimsen said the Israeli restrictions on his husband were up for review in November and expressed hope that they would be lifted.

Israel is the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but its policy is to neither confirm nor deny that it has atomic bombs. It has refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and denied international access to its nuclear facilities. 

The regime is estimated to have 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.

In addition to its nuclear activities, Tel Aviv has come under fire over its settlement activities in the Palestinian lands.

Back in May, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), Norway’s biggest and most influential trade union, approved an international economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which campaigns for Palestinian rights, hailed the LO’s move as “courageous,” saying that the union had joined “some of the world’s most important trade union federations… in calling for meaningful BDS pressure on the corporations and institutions that have enabled decades of Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”

There was no immediate reaction from Israeli officials to the Norwegian government’s offer to Vanunu, and it is unlikely that he would be allowed to leave.