Did Banned
Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?
Publish investigation, Israeli MP demands
by Jonathan Cook
Anti-War.com
April 15, 2010
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 organization, 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 defense 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 criticized 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 delegitimize 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 offense of
holding classified information, an offense most of us are guilty of in one way
or another."
A group of Israeli human rights organizations 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.”
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National, published in Abu Dhabi.
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