Now It Is Told: An Israeli Story Of Secrecy and Censorship

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The story on page one of Israel’s largest daily formed a graphic that was a conversation stopper: columns of print that looked like a series of vertical piano keyboards with thick, irregularly spaced black keys, and a large headline that read, “Israel’s Censorship Scandal.”

The article sought to tell the story of Anat Kam, 23, who has been under secret house arrest for more than three months, with a gag order in place that has prohibited the Israeli news media from reporting on her case, and a gag order on the existence of the gag order, which has kept the media from even discussing her existence or the fact that she is under house arrest.

In fact, by the time Yediot Aharonot published its April 6 story, anybody who reads English and has access to the Internet was able to read about the Kam affair: about how Kam allegedly leaked classified documents to an Israeli reporter; about how those documents suggested that the Israel Defense Forces had targeted reportedly unarmed Palestinian militants for assassination in defiance of a Supreme Court order; about how Israeli journalist Uri Blau had published a story in 2008 in the Israeli daily Haaretz based on her alleged leaks, and about how Blau — despite the fact that Israel’s military censor had approved his story — had recently left the country and now sits in London, reportedly fearful of returning.

Yediot’s story, in fact, was a translation into Hebrew of an article by Judith Miller detailing much of this, published several days earlier in The Daily Beast, an online news source. But in Yediot’s version, about two-thirds of Miller’s text was hidden under bars of black ink —deletions forced by the terms of the gag order.

The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Times of London, The Independent, the Guardian and JTA — the Jewish news service that broke the story in the press — were just a few of the places in which the story had already appeared.

If by publishing the article with its blacked out bars Yediot was hoping to force Israeli officials to at least acknowledge the story’s existence, the paper seemed destined for disappointment. Reached by phone on April 5 for comment about Yediot’s front page, Israeli government spokesman David Baker said that he had never heard of Kam or any gag order, and that he — the prime minister’s chief press officer — had not looked at Israel’s most widely read newspaper that day.

“I never heard of her,” Baker said curtly.

Haaretz reported on April 6 that in the face of expanding coverage of the case elsewhere, the security establishment was expected to go to Tel Aviv district court the next day and appeal for the gag order to be lifted. The results were not known by press time.

On the shrunken and besieged Israeli left and among the country’s civil libertarians, many cite the Kam case as the latest in a series of recent events that make them fear for the continued thriving of Israel’s open and free-wheeling political culture. They cite, for example, the police’s repeated breakup of weekly demonstrations protesting the eviction of a Palestinian family in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah despite multiple court rulings that the protests are legal.

http://www.forward.com/articles/127130/

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1. Judge Who Approved Kam Gag Order Perverted Justice in 2003 Palestinian IDF Shooting

Judge Einat Ron, the Petah Tikva magistrate who granted the gag order in the Anat Kam case has a sordid history going back to an infamous 2003 case in which she counseled the IDF how to lie to the Israeli NGO, B’Tselem, to avoid a wrongful death investigation. At that point, she was Colonel Ron of the IDF military prosecutor’s office and weighed in on the case in that capacity.

I thank Diane Mason of Lawrence of Cyberia for bringing this incident to my attention. Here is Chris McGreal’s Guardian report from 2003 (the killing occurred in 2001):

11-year-old Khalil al-Mughrabi was shot dead in Rafah by the Israeli army two years ago as he played football with a group of friends near the security fence. One of Israel’s most respected human rights organisations, B’Tselem, wrote to the judge advocate general’s office, responsible for prosecuting soldiers, demanding an inquiry. Months later, the office wrote back saying that Khalil was shot by soldiers who acted with “restraint and control” to disperse a riot in the area. However, the judge advocate general’s office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own, supposedly secret, investigation which came to a quite different conclusion – that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. The report says a “serious deviation from obligatory norms of behaviour” took place. In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B’Tselem. B’Tselem said the internal report confirmed that the army has a policy of covering up its crimes. “The message that the judge advocate general’s office transmits to soldiers is clear: soldiers who violate the ‘Open Fire Regulations’, even if their breach results in death, will not be investigated and will not be prosecuted.”

Diane also quotes from other sections of the B’Tselem report:

The documents presented in this report raise grave questions about the manner in which the army investigates itself. An eleven-year-old child was killed and two children were injured for no reason. However, the army failed to open any investigation against the soldiers responsible, even though all the army officials involved in the review of the incident clearly knew that the soldiers had used lethal weapons when their lives were not in jeopardy and had violated army regulations.

The army conducted a shallow and superficial inquiry, at all stages of the process, and made no effort to understand how the children were injured, to determine who was responsible, and to ensure that such incidents would not recur. All levels of the army hierarchy failed. The soldiers who violated the Open-Fire Regulations shot to death a child and injured two other children; the IDF Spokesperson provided an imprecise version of the incident (the Southern Command Judge Advocate even noted this in his opinion); the Southern Command Judge Advocate submitted an opinion that offered a version different from that stated in the operations de-briefings.

The Chief Military Prosecutor, Col. Einat Ron, went even further. In her legal opinion, she proposed an obviously false version of events as a reasonable course of action. The fact that she did not hesitate to propose, in writing, possible courses of action that clash with the truth raises a serious concern that lying is considered legitimate practice in the office of the Judge Advocate General.…

Which raises the obvious question: how does a chief military prosecutor guilty of promoting a false account of a lethal IDF firing incident get a promotion to become a civilian judge? But one question we don’t have to ask: why would the Israeli police shop its gag order application to Judge Ron? The answer is obvious even before asking the question. Here is an officer of the court so attuned to the needs of the prosecution that as a prosecutor she was fully prepared to lie on its behalf. Of course the Israeli police would want such a judge to hear their case. And the gag order was a slam dunk.


http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/04/07/judge-who-approved-kam-gag-order-perverted-justice-in-2003-palestinian-idf-shooting/

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2. Kick. nt

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3. I'm kind of surprised this one sank without comment...

I mean, I know it happens, and what attracts comment isn't any indication of what's important or even interesting, but given the interest by some DUers in censorship, I thought a real instance of censorship from Israel would have aroused some interest, especially as the censorship itself is only part of the story, and the IDF continuing to carry out extra-judicial assassinations even after the Israeli High Court had banned them is probably the bigger story....

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4. The real moral of the Anat Kam story

Heavyhanded press restrictions by Israel's Shin Bet have obscured the real scandal of the IDF whistleblower's case

Daniella Peled
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 8 April 2010 12.30 BST


Israeli reporter Anat Kam – whose long period of house arrest has been subject to a stringent gagging order that has been lifted only today – was not arrested for doing her job as a journalist. She was arrested for stealing and passing on classified military documents. Not that that makes her case any less unjust.

The story goes that, as a conscript serving as a secretary in the office of Maj-Gen Yair Nave, former chief of central command, Kam came into possession of numerous classified documents as a result of the lackadaisical attitude of a superior officer. When she left the army, she left it with a disc that contained, according to the Shin Bet internal security service, more 2,000 copied documents. These she passed to a journalist, Uri Blau of Haaretz. But the leak seems to have been traced back to her.

This is not a story about freedom of speech. The reporter in question submitted every one of these stories to the IDF military censor before publication – and not a single one was blocked. And there is nothing unique or unethical about Israeli laws that make it an offence to possess classified documents.

But the desperate attempt by the Shin Bet to prevent reporting of Kam's case has highlighted a paranoid and increasingly ridiculous obsession with secrecy on the part of the Israeli establishment. What is worrying is the ease with which the police and security services can go to the courts and forbid the media to report any detail regarding ongoing investigations.

It's as if the Shin Bet had never heard of the internet. Mass-market daily Yediot Ahronoth ran an already-iconic page reprinting a foreign-media story (by New York Times reporter Judith Miller) with the censored lines "redacted" in black. A few days later, they supplied readers with the necessary English key-words so they could google the foreign reports.

Indeed, Israeli friends have been gossiping about this story for weeks now. When I Googled Anat Kam's name a fortnight ago, there were no more than two or three hits. Today, there are more than 200,000 – and she even gets her own Wikipedia entry. Well done with that gagging order, guys.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/anat-kamm-shin-bet-israel