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ERIK SCHECHTER:
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Democracy and the rubber stamp commandos

Thanks to the vigilance of the IDF censor, the enemy will never know about the faulty flux capacitor in the new Merkava IV tank. A triangular stamp mark, care of a military staffer stationed in an air-conditioned Jerusalem office, banned the Jerusalem Post story about the mysterious piece of machinery that causes tank engines to stall “for a crucial 30.3 parsecs.”

Of course, there is no such thing as a “flux capacitor” — except in Marty McFly’s time machine in the Eighties’ smash movie Back to the Future. The term “parsec” is real but hardly relevant: it measures light-speed travel. In Star Wars, the mercenary pilot Han Solo brags to Luke Skywalker that he can skim a black hole in a tight circuit of just 12 parsecs. The Merkava IV, however, is not quite up to intergalactic flight.

The censor was equally alert when, on September 30, this newspaper almost let it slip that the 134th Combat Engineering Battalion was about to attack the West Bank city of al-Jafar. Never mind that Jafar is not a place but the villain from the Disney movie Aladdin. Oh, and no combat engineering battalion has a unit number beginning with one. But why let little things like that get in the way of national security?

Deriving its power from the Emergency Defense Regulations, instituted by the British Mandate authorities back in 1945, the military censor screens security-related stories in the media. It was also used, in the first few decades of the state, to erase government crimes and embarrassments from newspaper headlines.

But with a rise in Supreme Court litigation, cable news broadcasting, and the Internet, the military has released its grip over the press. The censor still exists, but what’s left is an outdated bureaucracy whose decisions are either ignorant or petty or both.

THERE IS no Basic Law guaranteeing freedom of the press in Israel. There is, however, Section 9 of the Law and Administration Ordinance of 1948, which gives the government the power to enact the draconian WWII-era British regulations when a state of emergency is declared. And that’s exactly what the Ben-Gurion government did in May 1948, giving rise to, among other illiberal institutions, the IDF censor. Fifty-five years later, with the War of Independence long over, the country is still under an official state of “emergency.”

Since its inception, the IDF censor has tried to win the voluntary cooperation of news editors in keeping some stories secret from the public. The last thing the military wanted was a legal fight in the High Court of Justice. In the 1950s, a joint committee of editors and IDF representatives, popularly known as the “Censorship Committee,” was created to act as an appeals panel, should an editor object to a decision by the IDF censor. In return for their docility, the editors were given secret briefs by security and government officials.

Or as Hebrew University military historian Martin van Creveld puts it, “They were made to feel important.”

Today, it is the news editor who voluntarily faxes a copy of security-related stories to the censor before publication. Whatever gets crossed out by the military never sees the light of day. Reporting from a declared military zone, tallies of militarily engaged units, changes in overall IDF force structure, reports of future military operations, and faces of pilots and other elite military personnel are all scratched out. The IDF censor also deletes items that are subject to a court gag order.

All in all, Israeli censor regulations are tighter than those of the United States Armed Forces in the midst of the first Gulf War. And the amount of information released by British military during current operations in southern Iraq would throw IDF censors into cardiac arrest. Not only is the overall force structure willingly provided, reporters can name land units and naval ships, including nuclear submarines, and identify their general locations. Journalists are also invited to witness command planning briefs and the demonstrations of military firepower.

“We rely strongly on building a relationship based on trust where the media we work with understand why we are restricting information,” says Royal Navy spokesman Lt.-Cdr. Richard Whalley.

THE IDF, by contrast, bases its relationship with the media almost all on stick and little carrot. Failure to comply with the censor can range from a simple tongue-lashing over the telephone to monetary fines. The military also has the power to shut down a newspaper, but the danger of that is remote. Indeed, despite the fear the censor has of the High Court of Justice, many otherwise independent journalists still go along with the joint committee arrangement.

“The press prefers to have a fairly liberal military censor make all the tough calls,” says Yehiel Limor, chairman of Sapir College’s Department of Communication (and father of Channel 1 military correspondent Yoav Limor). “If the censor banned everything, then journalists would be more combative.”

Given the dangers inherent in compromising national security, why not just give the censor the benefit of the doubt? Because the interests of the military and civilian government are not identical, says Peter Feaver, political science professor at Duke University and author of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations.

“The military has its own view of things, be it budgets or divergent foreign policy,” says Feaver. One way to advance those views unopposed by civilian gadflies is to keep a monopoly on defense information.

Yoram Peri, former chief editor of Davar and civil-military relations expert, recalls how in the early 1990s, the censor banned a Haaretz story about a jet crash. The IAF had been plagued by aviation accidents and simply wanted to avoid more bad press; the newspaper turned to the internal Censorship Committee. Predictably, the military beat the appeal.

“In its defense, the censor claimed that the article gave away the order of battle,” laughs Peri. “The enemy now knew that the IAF had one less plane!”

THE CENSOR has been used to cover up precisely those actions which, in a democracy, merit public scrutiny. For example, in 1954, the Egyptian authorities rounded up a local spy ring run by then-OC Intelligence Col. Binyamin Gibly. The conspirators, in what was known as Operation Susannah, planned to bomb British and American sites in Cairo and Alexandria, acts which would be blamed on Egyptian terrorists.

Though the Israeli press knew the truth, it was instructed to write that Egypt’s claims of a nabbed spy ring were false. Of the 10 plotters brought to trial, two were acquitted, two were hanged, and the remaining six languished in jail instead of being traded in POW deals. Trying to understand the indifferent attitude of the government, Robert Dassa, one of those sentenced to life imprisonment, said: “Maybe they didn’t want us to come back. There was so much intrigue in Israel.”

Likewise, in 1984, the military censors closed down Hadashot for four days after the paper ran a photograph showing two Arab terrorists, from the infamous Bus No. 300 hijacking, being led away by agents. The IDF Spokesman had claimed that the two, who were really executed in cold blood by the Shin Bet, died during the initial hostage rescue operation. (The domestic intelligence agency was only put under official government regulation in February 2002.)

In at least two instances, censorship actually worked to the benefit of Israel’s enemies. The IDF was badly mauled at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War because the Intelligence Corps was mesmerized by the Concept — the notion that Egypt would not strike first so long as it lacked long-range bombers. Wedded to this neat theory, OC Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Eli Zeira ignored all evidence of an impending sneak attack.

The press knew about Arab war preparations, notes van Creveld. But at the behest of the chief of General Staff, they did their patriotic duty and kept that information to themselves.

“Who knows what would have happened if they published what they knew?” he wonders. “They might have roused the country from its slumber.”

Over 2,500 Israelis died in the conflict.

In April 2002, the IDF invaded the Jenin refugee camp to hunt down those believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombing attacks. But since the army banned journalists from the camp, there was no one to contradict massacre stories concocted by PA officials like Saeb Erekat and Yasser Abed Rabbo. Even Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya’alon admitted it was a self-inflicted PR wound.

Amir Rappaport, the military correspondent of Ma’ariv, tells how, last April, the army censored his story warning that Pi Glilot fuel depot north of Tel Aviv was vulnerable to terrorism. A month later, terrorists struck the site.

“Had my story been published,” says Rappaport, “there would have been increased security at Pi Glilot.”

NO DOUBT, the situation of the freedom of the press has gotten better over the years. The legal turning point came in 1988, says Hebrew University political science professor Menachem Hofnung. The IDF censor tried to ban an article in the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir that was critical of the outgoing Mossad chief. The case went to the High Court of Justice, which ruled that the military can only censor a story if it demonstrated, to use the American legal phrase, “a clear and present danger” to national security.

The failure of the IDF censor in the face of modern communications technology was revealed during the Gulf War. In 1991, a CNN broadcast from Israel showed a map of where all Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles had landed — inadvertently giving the Iraqis an opportunity to correct their aim. The censor yanked the broadcast off the air, but the damage was done.

On March 14, 1995, the censor was ambushed by the Internet. Someone posted on two news groups on Usenet the name and address of the newly appointed Shin Bet head, Carmi Gillon. Until then, the heads of the security services were just identified by their initials. A few months later, Haaretz followed suit and published the name of the new head of the Mossad, Danny Yatom.

Gilon and Yatom were not assassinated by Arab terrorists. The security of the state was not imperilled. But since 1995, the public has now had the opportunity to debate appointments to the security services — a victory for civilian oversight.

“In the age of the Internet, it’s stupid to have a censor — except in cases where you break the news of IDF casualties to families in a humane manner,” says Brig.-Gen. (res.) Oren Shahor.

The IDF censor did not answer a Post request for an interview.

In 1999, there were discussions of civilianizing the censor in order to save money from the defense budget, but nothing came of the proposal. When asked by the Post, IDF Spokesman declined to say how much funding goes to the military censor’s office.

Apparently, that too is censored.

The case for the axe Since 1948, there have been 17 chiefs of General Staff, but there have been only four chief censors: Gershon Dror, Avner Bar-On, Yitzhak Shani and currently, Brig.-Gen. Rachel Dolev.

However, Bar-On and Shani had the greatest impact on how the censor works; together, they headed that office for 49 years, from 1951—1977 and 1977—2000, respectively.

Bar-On discovered early on that determining what was sensitive information was more art than science. In his book Democracy, Law and National Security, Menachem Hofnung relates how Bar-On asked then-Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin the definition of “harm to state security.”

An annoyed Yadin directed the new chief censor to his predecessor, who said, “It is impossible to define it. After you have been seated here for some time, you know what is harm to state security and what is not.”

State security meant, among other things, defending the prerogatives of the defense establishment. Yoram Peri, former editor-in-chief of Davar and civil-military relations expert, cites one notable instance. In 1957, then-Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan criticized a government decision to withdraw from Gaza, which had been captured in the previous year’s Sinai Campaign.

But when Haaretz tried to take him to task for interfering in politics, it was banned by the censor, says Peri.

The next chief censor, Yitzhak Shani was a yekke — orderly and pedantic, but far more liberal with the press, says military historian Col. (res.) Benny Michelsohn.

“It was the military and the security services,” he says, “that were always coming to him with complaints that he allowed too much material to be published.”

It is an accusation still levelled today with increasing liberalization of the military office.

“So much can be gleaned on Israel from the open media,” complains former OC Intelligence Brig.-Gen. (res.) Doron Tamir. “Our enemies must be celebrating. I blame the censor.”

Who gets to close the book? Prodded by the Malmab, a security agency within the defense ministry, the IDF Censor stymied but ultimately failed to stop the publication in 1998 of Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb. Though based on open archive sources, the book outraged Malmab because it discussed the history of Israel’s nuclear weapons program — a taboo topic since it violates the country’s policy of nuclear ambiguity.

In 1993, Cohen agreed to submit a chapter from his draft to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, but only after he first got approval from the IDF Censor — even though, at the time, he was doing research at MIT, as co-director of the Project on Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle East.

At first the censor refused to even read the chapter. Then in April 1994, it banned the whole thing. In September, Cohen took his case to the High Court of Justice, but the justices did not rule on the matter, asking both parties to come to a compromise.

It was not to be. In a July 25, 2000 letter to Attorney General Elyakim Rubenstein, Cohen wrote, “We received reassuring signals from the Censor, but it was the Malmab which was calling the shots.”

In 1995, Cohen dropped his High Court petition, but every time he visited Israel, he was interrogated by the police, who wanted to know about the status of his draft. In 1998, the police attache in Washington, DC, Lt.-Cmdr. Hezi Leder, warned Cohen that if he published his book without first submitting it to the censor, he may face criminal proceedings.

Cohen ignored Leder. The book was published by Columbia University Press, and in 1999, it even appeared in Hebrew. Though the police investigation into his alleged security violations was officially closed, Cohen continued to fear trouble with the authorities and cancelled his attendance at a 2000 conference on Israeli nuclear policy held by the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

Cohen is currently a senior researcher at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies.

Military censorship elsewhere In late May 2000, the Sri Lankan government shut down two leading weeklies, the Sunday Leader and the Sunday Peramuna, after they ran afoul of the military censor. Empowered by emergency regulations, the government also blocked broadcasts by the CNN and the BBC cable news programs.

Defending the actions of the chief censor, then-deputy defense minister Anuruddha Ratwatte accused the press of leaking details about the military offensive against Tamil separatists that began in April of that year. Since 1983, Colombo has been waging a war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the northern part of the country.

An island off the eastern coast of India, Sri Lanka is a representative democracy and unlike Israel, it has a written constitution. According to Chapter III, article 14 (1) (a), every citizen is guaranteed “freedom of speech and expression including publication…”

But the founding document also gives the government power to institute temporary emergency regulations, under which the media can be banned from publishing information on military operations — their successes or failures — as well as the deployment of troops or use of equipment.

Unlike in Israel, the Sri Lankan military censor can be a civilian, but that hardly ensures liberality. The international lobby group Reporters Without Borders ranks Israel as 44th in the world in press freedom, which is better than South Korea (though in the territories, it holds 146th place — worse than the Palestinian Authority); by contrast, Sri Lanka claims the 89th position.

“Censorship in Sri Lanka has two purposes,” says Vincent Brossel, head of the Asia Pacific desk at Reporters Without Borders. “One is to limit military reporting and the other is to limit criticism of the government.”

Since 1995, censorship has been applied three times — in coordination with military offensives against Tamil rebels: from September to December 1995; April to October 1996, and May to September 2000. (Two months after the last operation ended, the LTTE and Sri Lankan government reached a cease-fire deal.)

But despite the fact that the measures were only temporary, the Sri Lankan media showed more independence than its Israeli counterpart.

“Most newspapers refused to send their articles to the censor,” says Brossel.

Like Israel and Sri Lanka, Russia also has elections — as well as military censorship.

In 1994, Russian troops entered Chechnya to prevent the Muslim republic’s attempt to secede from the Russian Federation, and after two years of indecisive warfare, both sides agreed to postpone the call for independence for up to five years. The Russian military attacked again in 1999 and intent on victory, it tightly regulated journalists who might report less than glowing results of the campaign.

According to Emil Pain, director of Moscow’s Center for Ethnopolitical Studies and former adviser to president Boris Yeltsin, military censorship increased since the last Chechen war.

“The circle of journalists allowed to report from Russian troop positions about events in the second campaign has been strictly limited,” Pain wrote in the July-August 2000 issue of Military Review.

In March 2000, deputy press minister Mikhail Seslavinsky said that broadcasting comments by Chechen leaders was banned because it spread terrorist propaganda. The Russian government even tried to go after Chechen Web sites — running up against the very same technological barriers that the IDF Censor faces.