Short answer: No. Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who exposed Israel's Dimona weapons program in 1986, is a longtime and explicit critic of the Israeli state. He has publicly said "there is no need for a Jewish state," pushed for years to renounce his Israeli citizenship, converted from Judaism to Anglican Christianity, and remains under Israeli travel and speech restrictions he calls unjust. As of August 2026, he is alive.
What Mordechai Vanunu has actually said and done
July 1986: Weeks before his story broke, Vanunu converted from Judaism to Anglican Christianity while in Australia and was baptized under the name John Crossman, according to Wikipedia's sourced account.
October 5, 1986: The Sunday Times of London published "Revealed: Israel's Nuclear Secrets," built on data and photographs Vanunu supplied about the Dimona reactor, and estimated Israel held 100 to 200 nuclear warheads. Vanunu had worked at Dimona as a technician for about nine years before leaving Israel and going public, as recounted by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Five days earlier, on September 30, 1986, Vanunu had been lured to Rome by Mossad agent Cheryl Bentov, drugged and abducted, then secretly returned to Israel to stand trial. He was convicted of treason and espionage in a closed trial and sentenced to 18 years, more than 11 of them in solitary confinement, per Wikipedia and the Arms Control Association.
April 21, 2004: Vanunu completed his sentence and was released, but Israel immediately imposed parole-style restrictions: no leaving the country, no speaking to foreign media or foreigners without approval, no approaching borders, airports, or embassies, and mandatory address reporting, according to the Arms Control Association.
May 2011: Vanunu sent Israeli officials a formal letter requesting revocation of his citizenship, citing his conversion to Christianity and his treatment by the state. Around the same time he told interviewers "there is no need for a Jewish state... there should be a Palestinian state," reported by SocialistWorker.org and the Jewish Journal.
June 6, 2012: Israel's Supreme Court denied his petition to renounce citizenship on procedural grounds, ruling he had not filed it as prescribed and had no alternative citizenship to fall back on, per Wikipedia's account of the ruling.
May 2015: Vanunu married Norwegian theology professor Kristin Joachimsen at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. That same month, Amnesty International condemned an Israeli court ruling that extended his house-arrest-style restrictions, calling it "vindictive" in its own press release.
June 2020: Israeli authorities renewed his full set of restrictions, travel ban and contact limits included, for another year, continuing a pattern of annual renewal documented through June 2021, per his own public updates as reported by The Arab Daily News.
The bigger picture
Vanunu's public record runs in the opposite direction from support for Israel. He is not a critic of one policy; he has called for Israel's dismantlement as a Jewish state, said Jews who want to live Jewishly can do so anywhere, and spent years trying to formally sever his Israeli citizenship, a request Israel's courts blocked on technical grounds rather than granting. He left Judaism for Anglican Christianity in 1986 and has framed his post-prison treatment partly as religious and ethnic persecution, given his Mizrahi (Moroccan-descent) background.
There is no record in reputable reporting of Vanunu donating to Israeli causes, appearing at pro-Israel events, or expressing any Jewish-identity affinity with the state; the documented record points the other way, repeatedly and over decades. Internationally, groups like Amnesty International and the Right Livelihood Foundation, along with European parliamentarians, have treated him as a whistleblower and prisoner-of-conscience figure on nuclear disarmament grounds, a framing itself in tension with Israeli state security policy.
No credible reporting turned up in this research covers a specific public statement from Vanunu on the post-October 7, 2023 war or the 2025 ceasefire that brought the last hostages home. His ongoing restrictions, which bar unsupervised contact with foreign press, make fresh public commentary from him hard to surface, and none should be assumed.
The bottom line
Mordechai Vanunu does not support Israel. He is one of the state's most persistent and highest-profile domestic critics: he exposed its nuclear program, converted away from Judaism, tried repeatedly to renounce his citizenship, and has said on the record that a Jewish state is unnecessary. Nothing in the public record points the other way.
Wear your own answer
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
