"Where are you, Anat Kam?"
Imagine that the US military ordered the arrest of the person who leaked the now-notorious video depicting US soldiers mowing down two Reuters journalists and a crowd of innocent Iraqis. Then imagine that a court then imposed a gag order forbidding all American reporters and bloggers from even mentioning the arrest of the leaker. What would the media blackout say about the state of American democracy?
Of course this hypothetical scenario would be unthinkable in a country like the US, which boasts a grand tradition of whisteblowing, and which has shield laws in 36 states. The reason I raised it was to highlight the outrageous nature of a gag order in Israel that has forbidden journalists and bloggers from reporting on the so-called Anat Kam affair. Who is Kam and why is speaking her name a crime in the Israeli media?
To make a long story shorter, Kam is a 23-year-old Israeli journalist who allegedly procured confidential documents while she worked in an Israeli Army general's office during her mandatory military service. The documents revealed that in 2007, Israeli Army forces assassinated a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member in direct contravention of a Supreme Court order that banned the killing of wanted militants if there was a reasonable chance to arrest them first. Two top Israeli military officials, former Central Command Chief Major General Yair Naveh, Operations Directorate Head Major General Tal Russo, and Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who oversaw the Gaza assault of 2008 and 09, are said to have been incriminated in the documents.
Kam is believed to have photocopied the documents and passed them on to Uri Blau, a top national security reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz (Haaretz's editor in chief has called any link between Kam and Blau "absurd," however). Blau proceeded to publish an article detailing the contents of the documents, provoking the ire of the Israeli military, which since 1988 has demanded that journalists submit all "material relevant to the security of the state" to the military censor for review, and which compels all journalists seeking an official Israeli press card (GPO card) to sign on to the censorship policy. By all accounts, Blau submitted his article for review to the censor and was cleared for publication.
Kam was detained last December and placed under house arrest. However, news of her arrest only began to seep out into the news in March. Kam now awaits trial for treason and espionage, charges that could land her in prison for as long as 14 years.
Meanwhile, Blau is hiding out in London. According to multiple sources, Blau is terrified to return to Israel. His hard-hitting reports on Israeli Army abuses in the occupied West Bank have made him the bane of the military establishment. "At least ten journalists inside Israel have told me [Blau] is the real target," a reporter working in Israel and Palestine told me. "And everyone is saying they're simply prosecuting Kam to make an example out of her."
Seeking to suppress discussion of the scandal, Israel's internal security service, Shin Bet, secured a gag order on the media from an apparent rubber stamp judge who had spent almost her entire career in military courts. The order, issued in January, forbade journalists and bloggers in Israel not only from reporting on the details of Kam's prosecution, but from even acknowledging that she had been detained. A reporter I spoke to was publishing stories on the scandal under an anonymous byline. The New York Times has done the same, meaning even Ethan Bronner might be afraid of the Shin Bet.
The gag order was leaked tonight on the blog of Richard Silverstein. According to Israel's Channel 10, its contents had been kept from secret at the personal insistence of Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin -- even the Speaker of the Knesset was not allowed to see it.
A friend has helped me translate the salient portions:
The order identifies Superintendent Saar Shapira as the police official who went to court to request it; the plan to arrest Kam is referred to as "Operation Double-Overtake." The most notable piece of information is that Israel's National and International Serious Crimes Unit spearheaded the investigation into Kam's conduct. The involvement of this unit, which in the past has gone after Israeli journalists for traveling to designated enemy nations like Syria, and therefore seems primarily concerned with crimes committed abroad, raises the question of whether Kam leaked documents to reporters besides Blau who work for international papers.
While American bloggers like Richard Silverstein have been reporting on the Kam affair for weeks, some Israeli bloggers have taken down their posts, fearing that they could harm Kam's defense -- and possibly place themselves in danger -- by provoking the Shin Bet and reactionary political elements. Kam's defense team has allegedly urged bloggers to take posts down in hopes of lessening her sentence. The fact that the contents of the gag order were not shown to anyone until tonight only added to the climate of confusion and fear.
There are exceptions to the blackout, however. The Israeli reporter Mya Guarneri has written about the Kam affair at The National, a foreign paper. And the scandal has received in-depth treatment from the Palestinian news service, Ma'an News, which recently lost a top editor, Jared Malsin (an American graduate of Yale University), when Israeli security services ordered his deportation on the grounds that he had published damaging reports about Israeli military conduct in the Occupied Territories. Besides a few vigilant Israeli bloggers, a Facebook page devoted to Kam's case is hosting what blogger Didi Remez calls "a de facto civil disobedience campaign."
Two major papers in Israel have tried to find their way around the gag order. Yedioth Ahronoth satirized the media blackout (I'm not sure if the satire was intentional), submitting Judith Miller's report about Kam to the military censor, then publishing a redacted version of the article (see it here). And Haaretz has run an interview with a former Supreme Court Justice, Dalia Dorner, who mocks the order as pointless in the age of the internet. "If the entire world knows about [the Kam affair]," Dorner said, "issuing a gag order is baseless." However, the article does not mention Kam directly or describe the details of her case.
While the media blackout casts the darkest shadow over Israel's already withered democratic institutions, Kam's prosecution for treason is nearly as disturbing. While she may be guilty of leaking confidential documents, she is only accused of malfeasance for exposing a much greater crime, an illegal assassination that appeared to have been authorized at the highest levels of the IDF general command. She is a whisteblower in the tradition of Mark Felt and Daniel Ellsberg. In Netanyahu's Israel, however, she is being treated as an enemy of the state.
If reporters can be prosecuted or intimidated by the state for exposing acts that the Israeli Supreme Court has declared illegal, then the court holds nothing more than symbolic authority. By voiding the rulings of the court without a second thought, Israel's military-intelligence apparatus has demonstrated the preeminence of its power. At the same time, its reliance on gag orders has revealed a growing sense of desperation. What else is the IDF hiding?
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"Special relationship" sounds kinda gay. Guess who is taking it in the rear in that relationship?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeByOeERpY&feature=player_embedded
It's this -- Blau agreed to give up all the illegal documents he received and his computer in exchange for avoiding prosecuted, a fair deal. During that time the gag order was in place and the investigation went on. So what did Blau do? Turns out his story and Kamm's story didn't match - Blau was still holding on to more documents. That is why he high-tailed it to London. That is why he is now "terrified" and for good reason - he's facing prosecution. This story isn't about curbs on a free press in Israel at all, it about alleged espionage and the undermining of Israel's national security by someone who agreed his actions were wrong, made a deal to avoid prosecution then breaks it in favor of professional advancement. Blau is no Judith Miller and Kam is no Ellsberg either, in fact she is begging the press to "back off" her story. Are you listening Max?
The "only democracy in the middle east" is now 93rd among nations for press freedom, behind at least 3 of her arab neighbours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
I don't think there is a plaque dedicated to those who died because of his heroism at the entrance however.
Constant and necessary state of alert.....LOL
It is interesting that Israeli authorities are even able to order a Palestinian reporter deported for reporting on this scandal. If the Palestinians had their own nation, Israel's secret service would have less power to prevent freedom of the press in Palestine.
To quote Ronnie Kasrils, minister for intelligence in the current South African government and also a devout Jew: "The Palestinian minority in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession, solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the very definition of the 'Jewish state', and have virtually no influence on the laws, or political, social and economic policies. Hence, their similarity to the black South Africans [under apartheid]." (The Guardian, 25 May 2005)
Dr. Ilan Pappe, professor of political science at Haifa University: '[Israel's] political system [is] exclusionary, a pro forma democracy - going through the motions of democratic rule but essentially being akin to apartheid or Herenvolk ('master race') democracy."
Adi Ophir, philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University: "...the adoption of the political forms of an ethnocentric and racist nation-state in general, are turning Israel into the most dangerous place in the world for the humanity and morality of the Jewish community, for the continuity of Jewish cultures and perhaps for Jewish existence itself."
And we are to ignore the democracy that the Palestinians were getting going before Israel co-operated in the coup.
But what is really interesting is if you use the loose definition of Middle East that includes Persia.
There you have a democracy (yes, I know, the official propaganda is that it is a dictatorship, but like the line about 'the only democracy in the ME, it falls apart when you look at the facts) where the reaction of the press would be deafening if it tried something similar.
Israel declares, on a pretty regular basis, areas of the country off limits to the press, yet no screams of protest, no proclamations that they are hiding all sorts of abuses under those cloaks of secrecy.
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders issued a statement saying that "Defence of national security is a legitimate objective but censorship must not be used to prevent the Israel Defence Forces from being held responsible if they broke the law."
Very few people would disagree with that.