20 April 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
An Arab member of the
Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be
allowed to publish an investigative report that was
suppressed days before
Israel
attacked
Gaza
in winter 2008.
The investigation by Uri
Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid
arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the
impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast
Lead.
In a highly unusual move,
according to reports in the
Israeli media,
the army ordered the
Haaretz newspaper
to destroy all copies of an edition that included Mr
Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to
press and been passed by the military censor. The
article was never republished.
Mr Blau has gone
underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s
secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand
back hundreds of classified documents they claim are
in his possession and to reveal his sources.
He published several
additional reports for
Haaretz in
2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior
military commanders by showing they had issued orders
that intentionally violated court rulings, including
to execute Palestinians who could be safely
apprehended.
Haneen Zoubi, an MP who
previously headed an Israeli media-monitoring
organisation, said it was “outrageous” that the
suppressed report was still secret so long after the
Gaza attack. She is to table a parliamentary question
to
Ehud Barak,
the
defence minister,
today demanding to know why the army suppressed the
article and what is preventing its publication now. Mr
Barak must respond within 21 days.
She said publication of the
article was important both because Israel had been
widely criticised for killing many hundreds of
civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza, and
because subsequent reports suggested that Israeli
commanders sought legal advice months before the
operation to manipulate the accepted definitions of
international law to make it easier to target
civilians.
“There must be at least a
strong suspicion that Mr Blau’s article contains vital
information, based on military documentation, warning
of Israeli army intentions to commit
war crimes,”
she said in an interview.
“If so, then there is a
public duty on Haaretz to publish the article. If not,
then there is no reason for the minister to prevent
publication after all this time.”
Ms Zoubi’s call yesterday
followed mounting public criticism of Haaretz for
supporting Mr Blau by advising him to stay in hiding
and continuing to pay his salary. In chat forums and
talkback columns, the reporter has been widely
denounced as a traitor. Several MPs have called for
Haaretz to be closed down or boycotted.
A Haaretz spokeswoman
refused to comment, but a journalist there said a
“fortress mentality” had developed at the newspaper.
“We’ve all been told not to talk to anyone about the
case,” he said. “There’s absolute paranoia that the
paper is going to be made to suffer because of the
Blau case.”
Amal Jamal, a professor at
Tel Aviv University
who teaches a media course, said he was concerned with
the timing of the Shin Bet’s campaign against Mr Blau.
He observed that they began interviewing the reporter
about his sources and documents last summer as
publication neared of the Goldstone report,
commissioned by the
United Nations
and which embarrassed Israel by alleging it had
perpetrated war crimes in Gaza.
“The goal in this case
appears to be not only to intimidate journalists but
also to delegitimise certain kinds of investigations
concerning security issues, given the new climate of
sensitivity in Israel following the Goldstone
report.”
He added that Mr Blau, who
had quickly acquired a reputation as Israel’s best
investigative reporter, was “probably finished” as a
journalist in Israel.
Shraga Elam, an
award-winning Israeli reporter, said Mr Blau’s
suppressed article might also have revealed the aims
of a widely mentioned but unspecified “third phase” of
the Gaza attack, following the initial air strikes and
a limited ground invasion, that was not implemented.
He suspected the plans
involved pushing some of Gaza’s population into Egypt
under cover of a more extensive ground invasion. The
plan had been foiled, he believed, because Hamas
offered little resistance and Egypt refused to open
the border.
On Monday, an MP with the
centrist Kadima Party, Yulia Shamal-Berkovich, called
for Haaretz to be closed down, backing a similar
demand from fellow MP Michael Ben-Ari, of the
right-wing National Union.
She accused Haaretz
management of having “chosen to hide” over the case
and blamed it for advising Mr Blau to remain abroad.
She said the newspaper “must make sure the materials
that are in his possession are returned. If Haaretz
fails to do so, its newspaper licence should be
revoked without delay.”
Another Kadima MP, Yisrael
Hasson, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet, this
week urged Haaretz readers to boycott the newspaper
until Mr Blau was fired.
A petition calling on the
Shin Bet to end its threat to charge Mr Blau with
espionage has attracted the signatures of several
prominent journalists in Israel.
“We believe the Blau case
is unique and are concerned this unique case will
create a dangerous precedent,” their letter states.
“Until now, prosecution authorities have not sought to
try reporters for the offence of holding classified
information, an offence most of us are guilty of in
one way or another.”
A group of
Israeli human rights
organisations is due to submit a letter this week to
the government demanding that the investigation
concentrate on lawbreaking by the army rather the
“character assassination” of Mr Blau and his sources.
Yesterday, the supreme
court tightened restrictions on Anat Kamm, one of Mr
Blau’s main informants, who has been under house
arrest since December for copying up to 2,000 military
documents while she was a soldier. She is accused of
espionage with intent to harm the state, a charge that
carries a tariff of 25 years in jail.
The papers copied by Ms
Kamm, 23, included military orders that violated court
rulings and justified law-breaking by soldiers.
Judge Ayala Procaccia said:
“The acts attributed to the respondent point to a deep
internal distorted perception of a soldier's duties to
the military system he or she is required to serve,
and a serious perversion from the basic responsibility
that a citizen owes the state to which he or she
belongs.”
Ms Kamm, the court decided,
must not leave her apartment and must be watched by a
close relative at all times.
Media coverage of the case
in Israel has been largely hostile to both Ms Kamm and
Mr Blau.
Gideon Levy
observed in Haaretz today: “The real betrayal has been
that of the journalists, who have betrayed their
profession -- journalists who take sides with the
security apparatus against colleagues who are doing
their job bringing light to the dark.”
Calling Israel “a Shin Bet
state”, Mr Levy added: “If it depended on public
opinion, Kamm and Blau would be executed and Haaretz
would be shut down on the spot.”
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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