JERUSALEM – Israel’s military censor, which has long served as the country’s guardian of state secrets, is suddenly under the microscope following a pair of sensitive reports broken by the international media.
An Australian broadcaster’s story this week about the suspicious death of an Australian-Israeli prisoner held by Israel, following foreign reports of an Israeli airstrike in Syria last month, have revealed the limits of Israel’s decades-long censorship rules and court-imposed gag orders.
In the modern Internet age, many people are now asking whether these restrictions are even relevant.
The idea behind the objections is that in today’s communications environment, when everybody is essentially a publisher with a potentially worldwide audience, to censor “the media” is somehow akin to censoring conversation itself, which Israel, as a democracy, would never conceive of doing.
“(Gag orders) are a tool that can’t deal with the media reality we live in: a globalized, hyper-connected, hyper-fast world. There is no real way to control the spread of information,” said Yuval Dror, an expert in digital communications.
The reporter who broke the story, Trevor Bormann, said Friday he had spoken to about 30 Israeli journalists since his story broke and they felt it had “brought to a head years of resentment at the way Israel’s security services suppress sensitive information.”
Shimon Shiffer, writing in the top-selling Yediot Aharonot, said Israel’s attempts to suppress the story despite it making headlines across the world “portrays our decision-makers as an illiterate band of mafiosos protecting narrow interests and looking to whitewash rather than protecting the security of the state of Israel.”
Senior political officials quoted by Yediot admitted Israel made a big mistake in trying to bury the story.
The censorship office, which emerged from an agreement between editors and the government in the 1950s, has long wielded heavy control over reporting of Israel’s military and intelligence forays abroad and over domestic affairs it wants to keep under wraps.
Journalists writing about potentially sensitive news must clear their stories with the censor’s office before they can be published. It has the authority to block or even delete reports deemed threatening to national security, and violations of the rules can result in penalties, including jail time, for journalists. Israel’s security establishment also often seeks court-issued gag orders on certain cases.
For years, the system was mostly able to prevent the release of sensitive secrets. But with the advent of blogs, Twitter and global news websites, the censor’s office has appeared increasingly archaic.
Today, Israeli media are forced to quote “foreign sources” after international media divulge details, such as the reports of an Israeli airstrike last month on a weapons convoy in Syria.
Underscoring the limitations of censor’s office was this week’s report by Australia’s national broadcaster that an Australian-Israeli man who worked for Israel’s Mossad spy agency had hanged himself in an Israeli prison.
While the report was easily accessible on the Internet, and Twitter and the blogosphere were abuzz with details about the case, the censor banned local media from discussing it.
Israeli authorities have also sought to suppress knowledge of the detention of Arab engineer Dirar Abu Sisi, who vanished after boarding a train in Ukraine on Feb. 19, 2011, only to resurface in Israel three weeks later in detention.
In that case, an Israeli court issued a gag order on his detention. But reports quickly surfaced out of Ukraine and the Gaza Strip about his disappearance and incarceration in Israel.
Abu Sisi was ultimately accused of masterminding Hamas’ rocket program and training fighters in the Gaza Strip and was charged with a number of crimes.
In 2010, a court-ordered ban prevented local reporting of the case of Anat Kamm, a former female soldier charged with leaking more than 2,000 military documents to a newspaper. The case was reported extensively in blogs and foreign press, which Israeli media were initially forced to cite before the gag order was lifted.
“It’s the 21st century. You can’t prevent these things from being exposed,” said Yossi Melman, a security affairs commentator whose own article on the Australian report was removed shortly after being posted on the Walla news site because of censorship. “And (Israel’s leaders) don’t want to learn a thing from the past.”
The censor’s office declined comment when asked about its relevancy in the digital age but demanded this report be submitted for review and asked for changes in some of the wording, engaging in a semantic debate with AP reporters.
In a front-page article, Aluf Benn, editor in chief of the prestigious Haaretz newspaper, accused the country’s security establishment of being stuck in a long-past era.
“Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are awash with people forwarding the information, sharing links to foreign websites, expressing opinions — and utterly ignoring those who are making pathetic attempts to turn back the clock to a time before WikiLeaks, and before bloggers who don’t give two hoots about the censor,” he wrote.
The Australian report is potentially explosive in Israel because of the circumstances of the prisoner’s incarceration. It is not clear what crime he committed, but considering his alleged links to Mossad, any leaked information has the potential to affect Israel’s intelligence activities.
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