A ‘Pentagon Papers’ Scandal Rocks the Middle East

As last week’s Wikileaks Iraq video release aptly demonstrates, it’s a journalist’s duty to ferret out lies and cover-ups by state institutions – and a whistleblower’s duty to get information out. It’s often the whistleblowers who suffer for performing this essential public service, while the journalists become heroes.

At least that’s true in Western democracies.

Israeli journalist Uri Blau cooperated with Israeli censors and now is in hiding in London.

In the militarized society of today’s Israel, they’re trying to prosecute a whistleblower and a journalist: Uri Blau – military reporter for the Israeli paper Haaretz – and Anat Kam, former soldier-turned-journalist who leaked Blau a CD containing a reported 2,000 documents to expose ‘war crimes’ on the West Bank. Blau used some of these documents in a series of 2008 Haaretz stories about the Israeli military’s scheme to violate an Israeli Supreme Court order trying to limit assassinations of West Bank Palestinians [instead of making arrests.] The military’s sinisterly banal name for this: “targeted assassinations.”

The Shin Bet is calling Blau a “fugitive felon.” Kam, facing espionage charges carrying a possible 25-year sentence, has been under house arrest for four months, and just appeared in court saying she is not a traitor, as the right-wing government has claimed, but a whistleblower: “If and when the war crime the IDF was and is committing in the West Bank would be investigated, then I would have evidence to present.”

Former Israeli soldier-turned-journalist Anat Kam is a whistleblower being prosecuted.

Israel-based media have been under a military-imposed gag order on the story for months, but American writer Richard Silverstein broke the story weeks ago in the influential blog Tikun Olam, calling Kam a patriot “in a nation where others cover their tushes or ignore sins that lie right before their eyes.” Silverstein opened a flood of stories in the West – creating pressure on the censors to lift the gag order.

It’s “Israel’s Pentagon Papers,” says writer Bernard Avishai, posting on TPMCafe.:

I expect we will soon hear stories about Kam’s youth, or ingenuousness, or flakiness, which all may be as true as Daniel Ellsberg’s depressions. None of this changes the importance to Israeli democracy of airing the question of whether targeted assassinations as practiced and sanctioned by the IDF command are either morally acceptable in a country of law or will make any of us sleep more safely, even if not more soundly.

Blau is a leading journalist whose famous pieces include a Q & A  interview with anonymous soldiers airing their anti-Palestinian views, and a piece about military units producing racist and violent anti-Arab custom t-shirts to celebrate their graduations. He got into this mess trusting the Israeli military and following its anti-democratic censorship policies – his stories actually were vetted by Israel’s military censors before they were published. Next the military strong-armed him into returning some of the documents on which he based his stories, then violated a legal agreement it entered into with him to get the others. See the details here on Haaretz’s site.

Blau has been traveling abroad and has Kam’s documents with him safely for the moment in London, but who’s to say the Mossad won’t get him?  Blau decried his “Kafkaesque situation” in a Haaretz piece yesterday that, fortunately, is being posted on hundreds of sympathetic sites around the world, such as here in the Jewish Daily Forward:

When you discover that anonymous complaints about you containing a lot of detailed personal information have reached various investigation authorities, it is clear you have been marked by forces bigger and stronger than yourself. These forces won’t hesitate to take steps reserved for states I don’t think we want to resemble. So when they explained to me that if I return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes related to espionage, I decided to fight. Sorry for the cliche, but this isn’t only a war for my personal freedom but for Israel’s image.

Haaretz well deserves its nickname, The New York Times of Israel, as it stands far above the pack of tabloid-style publications and distinct from the establishment toady, the Jerusalem Post - whose editors write as if they really believe all the military press releases and fake “leaks” they are handed. You can practically hear the sucking noises as you read this Post editorial on the subject:

According to Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, Blau reneged on an agreement to hand over the documents – under which he would nonetheless still have had the opportunity to write articles based on them – running off first to China, and then to Britain. His refusal to return the papers, and to return himself, implies he has something to hide.

The argument that Blau’s refusal to hand over the documents lies in his desire to protect Kamm [sic], furthermore, is no match for the wider national security interest ….

The Kamm drama touches on fundamental ethical dilemmas that face the State of Israel as it strives to maintain freedom of press while fighting adversaries that couldn’t care less about such an ideal. The success of Zionism is emphatically about nurturing the Middle East’s only true democracy and ensuring freedom of expression as well as about providing for the physical protection of the Jewish people.

Don’t you love how they talk about being the ME’s “only true democracy” while subverting press freedom to one ethno-religious agenda? The right-wing extremists are calling for Israelis to cancel their Haaretz subscriptions. Pathetic.

Though a pariah in Israel, Mordechai Vanunu, who told the BBC about Israeli's secret nuclear weaponry, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and received many international commendations. Daniel Ellsberg called him "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era."

Kam, the whistleblower, is represented by lawyer Avigdor Feldman, founder of two great human-rights NGOs, B’Tselem and ACRI, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. You can follow this case on their websites. Feldman is famous for taking the case of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli technician who revealed Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986. Vanunu was drugged and kidnapped from Italy by the Mossad, prosecuted in secret, served 18 years in prison, and is still persecuted – forbidden to speak with foreigners, subject to constant harassment and searches.

Meanwhile, the military “accidentally” published the home address of Kam’s parents in occupied East Jerusalem – making her an easy target for the notorious extremist settler hooligans.

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