Blau-Kamm case
exposes the dark underbelly of Israel's security state
by JONATHAN COOK
MONDOWEISS
APRIL 9, 2010
What is misleadingly being called in Israel the “Anat Kamm
espionage affair” is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has
worshipped for decades at the altar of a security state.
Next week 23-year-old Kamm is due to stand trial for her life —
or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret
documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is
charged with spying.
Blau himself is in hiding in London,
facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s
security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors,
who fear he will be put away too.
This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months,
since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the
trial.
Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when
the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order — a gag
on the gag, so to speak — were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers
began making the restrictions futile [including notably Richard Silverstein].
Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story.
So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the
crimes supposedly committed by Kamm and Blau?
During her conscription, Kamm is said to have copied possibly
hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli
high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders
to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen
Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.
Blau’s crime is that he published a series
of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior
Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.
His reports included revelations that the senior command had
approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial
assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment
to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians
even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a
compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the
West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international
law).
In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable
defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and
Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.
But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the
principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz
newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is
almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.
The pair are already being described, both by officials and in
chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared
or executed for the crime of endangering the state.
The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the
former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel’s secret
nuclear arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having
spent nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house
arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.
Blau and Kamm have every reason to be
worried they may share a similar fate. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet,
Israel’s secret police, which has been leading the investigation, said yesterday
that they had been too “sensitive to the media world” in pursuing the case for
so long and that the Shin Bet would now “remove its gloves”.
Maybe that explains why Kamm’s home address was still visible on
the charge sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of
those crazed talkbackers.
It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet
about how it operates.
Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party
in Israel, is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights.
He had been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a “state
of all its citizens” rather than a Jewish state.
While Bishara was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he
would be put on trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had
had contacts with Hizbullah during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.
Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information
for Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet’s goals and modus operandi were revealed later
by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation
campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of groups or
individuals who threatened the state’s Jewish character “even if such activity
is sanctioned by the law”.
Diskin called this the principle of “a
democracy defending itself” when it was really a case of Jewish leaders in a
state based on Jewish privilege protecting those privileges. This time it is
about the leaders of Israel’s massive security industry protecting their
privileges in a security state by silencing witnesses to their crimes and
keeping ordinary citizens in ignorance.
Justifying his decision to “take the gloves off” in the case of
Kamm and Blau, Diskin said: “It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands
on these kinds of documents” — that is, documents proving that the Israeli army
has repeatedly broken the country’s laws, in addition, of course, to its
systematic violations of international law.
Diskin claims that national security has
been put at risk, even though the reports Blau based on the documents — and even
the documents themselves — were presented to, and approved by, the military
censor for publication. The censor can restrict publication based only on
national security concerns, unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the
government, who obey other kinds of concerns.
Diskin knows there is every chance he will
get away with his ploy because of a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely
patriotic media and a supine judiciary.
The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to
silence any press discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet
that there were vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are
stalwarts of Israel’s enormous security industry.
Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in
2007 after working her way up the ranks of the military legal establishment,
there to give a legal gloss to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was
the chief military prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the
army so that it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy,
Khalil al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a
secret report into the boy’s death was mistakenly attached to the army’s letter
to an Israeli human rights group.
The other judge is Ze’ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag
order this week — but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now
the head of Israel’s Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued
that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was getting
the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.
Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel’s security
industry, according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of
legal study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same
criminal outfit — the Israeli security establishment — that is now trying to
cover up the tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering
what similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be
declaring.
Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned “that if I
return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for
crimes related to espionage”. He concluded that “this isn’t only a war for my
personal freedom but for Israel’s image”.
He should leave worrying about Israel’s image to Netanyahu,
Diskin and judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the
first place. This is not a battle for Israel’s image; it’s a battle for what is
left of its soul.
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