Mordechai has been told he must sign an agreement which in effect gags him, but they can’t make him sign it. He was cross with me and said I shouldn’t have agreed to the meeting with Shabak.After that I went to Jerusalem and a film screening about my brother’s case. My home is now in Australia and I don’t come to Israel that often, but I noticed that, next to a (kosher) butcher’s shop, another butcher was displaying the head of a pig. Fifteen years ago a shop would have been burnt down for such religious disrespect.Monday. This is the first Passover I have spent with my parents for years. Sadly, since Mordechai converted to Anglicanism in 1986, their faith has kept him and them apart, and they will not be at the prison when he walks free on 21 April. Despite the peace of the day, I can’t help worrying about my Shabak meeting.Tuesday I saw the two Shabak agents.

After an extraordinary body search and frisking – looking for bugs, I assume – I was led to meet another two, unnamed, agents. They were polite enough, but I refused to shake their hands, given their role in my brother having spent nearly 18 years (12 of them in solitary confinement) in a cell two metres by three. After 18 years, he doesn’t know anything valuable, but they don’t want to admit that.Wednesday. They stunned me by announcing that my brother, who wants to move to the United States, will not be allowed to leave the country, nor speak to any foreigners, for at least 12 months. They claim that my brother might reveal more secrets, which is absurd.

Reluctantly I agreed.
It was the eve of the last day of Passover, so I stopped to buy some broad beans and mint for a traditional meal with my parents. As we sat in the sun, a furtive voice on my mobile told me that, as one of those most involved in campaigning for his release, I was wanted for a meeting on Tuesday with Shabak, the Israeli security service, to discuss my brother’s release. My morning was spent at the Tamar Caf?n Tel Aviv with a journalist friend of mine. We were discussing the forthcoming release of my brother Mordechai, who, having been kidnapped by the Israeli secret service and imprisoned, has spent the last seventeen and a half years in prison – for revealing that Israel had nuclear weapons. This is good old Anglican fudge of the highest quality, and it should not be derided.Of course, it was disappointing that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, did not simply say last year that people in leading positions in the Church should be judged on the quality of their ministry.

But that is not so easy in an institution in which so many people sincerely believe that someone’s gender or sexuality is relevant to their work for the Church.And it is noteworthy that the global schism in the Anglican Communion that was predicted after the ordination of Gene Robinson as a bishop in the US has not yet happened.The Rev John Habgood, when he was Archbishop of York, once cut a television interviewer off by responding to a persistent line of questioning with a question of his own: “Has it ever occurred to you that the lust for certainty is a sin?” In that, he expressed the authentic spirit of Anglicanism. It would have required only a few moments’ thought about a small number of facts. These facts are well known, not least because the arguments about a referendum raged for more than a year while the constitution was being drawn up by the Convention, chaired by Val? Giscard d’Estaing. Above all, it had become obvious that, if the constitution were agreed and the Bill to ratify it presented to Parliament, there would be a clear majority in the House of Lords for inserting an amendment requiring it to be approved in a referendum. That Labour peers are in a minority in the Upper House is one of the fixed but often neglected features of political life. On this issue, they would be outvoted by anti-European Conservatives, pro-”democracy” Liberal Democrats and a mixture of crossbenchers.The House of Lords is, therefore, a road block.