A few months ago the International media reported on the arrest of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli, for having given information to the Sunday Times of London concerning Israel's nuclear capabilities. Vanunu, now on trial, is being denounced as a traitor in Israel; yet some groups elsewhere have proposed his name for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vanunu case has numerous implications touching on issues of nuclear proliferation, human and civil rights, and the growing militarization of Israeli society. Mordechai Vanunu was born on October 13, 1952 in Marrakesh, Morocco, a member of a family of ten. His father, a small businessman, was relatively well off. Following the induced mass emigration of Jews from Arab and Moslem countries, Vanunu's family went to Israel in 1963 and was settled in Beersheva. On their way to Israel, the family purchased expensive rugs, carpets, an electric refrigerator, a washing machine, a record player and recording equipment items not then widely available in Israel. Although official ideology promoted the myth of the backward and impoverished origins of Sephardim, the move to Israel represented, for most families coming from Arab and Moslem countries, a clear decline in material standards. The Vanunus, as part of this pattern, were placed in the unexpectedly harsh conditions of a slum neighborhood in a remote town in the Negev desert. It was at that time governmental policy to settle Sephardic families away from the center of the country, along the borders, in poor and isolated regions, in so-called "development towns."