Whistleblowing Israeli Journalist Treated
as "Fugitive Felon"
By JONATHAN COOK
Counterpunch
April 13, 2010
An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series
of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a
lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned
at the weekend they would “remove the gloves” to track him down.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, said it was treating Uri
Blau, a reporter with the liberal Haaretz daily newspaper who has gone
underground in London, as a “fugitive felon” and that a warrant for his arrest
had been issued.
Options being considered are an extradition request to the
British authorities or, if that fails, a secret operation by Mossad, Israel’s
spy agency, to smuggle him back, according to Maariv, a right-wing newspaper.
It was revealed yesterday that Mr Blau’s informant, Anat Kamm,
23, a former conscript soldier who copied hundreds of classified documents
during her military service, had confessed shortly after her arrest in December
to doing so to expose “war crimes”.
The Shin Bet claims that Mr Blau is holding hundreds of
classified documents, including some reported to relate to Operation Cast Lead,
Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 in which the army is widely believed to
have violated the rules of war.
Other documents, the basis of a Haaretz investigation published
in 2008, concern a meeting between the head of the army, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the
Shin Bet in which it was agreed to ignore a court ruling and continue carrying
out executions of Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories.
Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet, who has said his organisation
was previously “too sensitive with the investigation”, is now demanding that Mr
Blau reveal his entire document archive and take a lie-detector test on his
return to identify his sources, according to Haaretz. The newspaper and its
lawyers have recommended that he remain in hiding to protect his informants.
Haaretz has also revealed that, in a highly
unusual move shortly before Israel’s attack on Gaza, it agreed to pull a printed
edition after the army demanded at the last minute that one of Mr Blau’s stories
not be published. His report had already passed the military censor, which
checks that articles do not endanger national security.
Lawyers and human rights groups fear that the army and Shin Bet
are trying to silence investigative journalists and send a warning to other
correspondents not to follow in Mr Blau’s path.
“We have a dangerous precedent here, whereby the handing over of
material to an Israeli newspaper … is seen by the prosecutor’s office as
equivalent to contact with a foreign agent,” said Eitan Lehman, Ms Kamm’s
lawyer. “The very notion of presenting information to the Israeli public alone
is taken as an intention to hurt national security.”
The Shin Bet’s determination to arrest Mr Blau was revealed after
a blanket gag order was lifted late last week on Ms Kamm’s case. She has been
under house arrest since December. She has admitted copying hundreds of
classified documents while serving in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, in
charge of operations in the West Bank, between 2005 and 2007.
Under an agreement with the Shin Bet last year, Haaretz and Mr
Blau handed over 50 documents and agreed to the destruction of Mr Blau’s
computer.
Both sides accuse the other of subsequently reneging on the deal:
the Shin Bet says Mr Blau secretly kept other documents copied by Ms Kamm that
could be useful to Israel’s enemies; while Mr Blau says the Shin Bet used the
returned documents to track down Ms Kamm, his source, after assurances that they
would not do so.
Haaretz said Mr Blau fears that they will
try to identify his other informants if he hands over his archive.
Mr Blau learnt of his predicament in December, while out of the
country on holiday. He said a friend called to warn that the Shin Bet had broken
into his home and ransacked it. He later learnt they had been monitoring his
telephone, e-mail and computer for many months.
In a move that has baffled many observers, the Shin Bet revealed
last week that Mr Blau was hiding in London, despite the threat that it would
make him an easier target for other countries’ intelligence agencies.
Amir Mizroch, an analyst with the
right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper, noted that it was as if Israel’s security
services were “saying to Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Hizbullah and Iranian
intelligence agents in London: ‘Yalla, be our guests, go get Uri Blau’.” He
added that the real goal might be to flush out Mr Blau so that he would seek
sanctuary at the Israeli embassy.
Ms Kamm is charged with espionage with intent to harm national
security, the harshest indictment possible and one that could land in her jail
for 25 years. Yesterday another of her lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, appealed to Mr
Blau to return to Israel and give back the documents to help “minimise the
affair”.
“The real question is whether this exceptionally heavy-handed
approach is designed only to get back Kamm’s documents or go after Blau and his
other sources,” said Jeff Halper, an Israeli analyst. “It may be that Kamm is
the excuse the security services need to identify Blau’s circle of informants.”
Mr Blau has already published several stories, apparently based
on Ms Kamm’s documents, showing that the army command approved policies that not
only broke international law but also violated the rulings of Israel’s courts.
His reports have included revelations that senior commanders
approved extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories that were
almost certain to kill Palestinian bystanders; that, in violation of a
commitment to the high court, the army issued orders to execute wanted
Palestinians even if they could be safely captured; and that the defence
ministry compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements
in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law.
Although the original stories date to 2008, the army issued a
statement belatedly this week that Mr Blau’s reports were “outrageous and
misleading”. No senior commanders have been charged over the army’s lawbreaking
activities.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group,
said its research had shown that “in many cases soldiers have been conducting
themselves in the territories as if they were on a hit mission, as opposed to
arrest operations”.
It added that the authorities had “rushed to investigate the leak
and chose to ignore the severe suspicions of blatant wrongdoings depicted in
those documents”.
A group of senior journalists established a petition this week
calling for Mr Blau to be spared a trial: “So far, the authorities have not
prosecuted journalists for holding secret information, which most of us have had
in one form or another. This policy by the prosecution reflects, in our view, an
imbalance between journalistic freedom, the freedom of expression and the need
for security.”
However, media coverage of the case in Israel has been largely
hostile. Yuval Elbashan, a lawyer, wrote in Haaretz yesterday that Mr Blau’s
fellow military reporters and analysts had in the past few days abandoned their
colleague and proven “their loyalty to the [security] system as the lowliest of
its servants”.
One, Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent with the country’s
largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, who is said to have been
approached by Ms Kamm before she turned to Mr Blau, is due to testify against
her in her trial due next month.
Chat forums and talkback columns also suggest little sympathy
among the Israeli public for either Ms Kamm or Mr Blau. Several Hebrew websites
show pictures of Ms Kamm behind bars or next to a hangman’s noose.
A report on Israel National News, a news service for settlers,
alleged that Ms Kamm had been under the influence of “rabidly left-wing“
professors at Tel Aviv University when she handed over the documents to the
Haaretz reporter.
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
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