Open Secrets

Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies

Israel Shahak

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781783710676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Israel's foreign policy is perceived to be essentially a defensive one by the international community. Why then is it the only nuclear power which refuses to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty? What is Israel's true foreign and policy? Drawing on the Hebrew press, Israel Shahak reveals Israel's strategic foreign policy as it is really is, as it is presented through its own media: what other Israeli Jews are told – and not what their government tells the rest of the world. Shahak demonstrates that the Israeli government, with the support of the US Jewish lobby, are conducting a policy aimed at securing control of the whole of the Middle East, the Palestinian issue being only one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. This is a frightening and controversial book that exposes Israel's real foreign policy.

Part I

CENSORSHIP

1

The Struggle Against Military Censorship and the Quality of the Army

2 December 1992

Introduction

This chapter illustrates not only how and to what extent the Hebrew press serves as a source of information, but also shows that the relative freedom it enjoys in the 1990s represents a great improvement on a former situation. Let me add that this improvement coincides, and not by chance, with the decline of the Israeli Labor Party, and more generally with the decline of the Zionist ‘left’. Contrary to the opinion of most ‘experts’, the Zionist ‘left’ is more hostile to individual human rights and freedom of expression than the main parties (for example, Likud) of the Zionist right. (The quasi-bolshevik nature of the old-style Zionist ‘left’ and its enmity to freedom for anyone, including Jews, escaped the attention of most left-wing Western writers on Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.) Another important reason for the increase in freedom of the press in the last twenty years, as illustrated in this chapter, were the unsuccessful (or only half-successful) Israeli wars. Another important phenomenon illustrated in this chapter is the great interest taken by readers of the Hebrew press in the Army and everything connected with it, and the way in which this interest can be used to increase the freedom of the Hebrew press.

A similar phenomenon of an increase of freedom of expression following an unsuccessful war occurred in the US, where the actual freedom of the press (although still, in my view, lesser in extent than in the current Hebrew press) increased greatly after the Vietnamese War. Something similar can be observed in other countries.

Among the anomalies of Israeli society none in my view is more glaring than the existence of a fairly free expression in the general and free press in particular, under a censorship which may well be one of the most stringent in the world. This paradox was well described by Yitzhak Gal-Nur (Maariv, 25 November 1992):
‘Legally, [Israeli] military censorship is all-powerful. In practice only a small proportion of press contents are censored in Israel.’ Let me first describe the awesome legal powers of censorship: awesome enough to forbid the description of these powers until recent days. I will next proceed to describe the present struggle against accumulation of so much power in the censor’s hand, and the deeper reasons for the willing compliance of Israeli Jewish society with those realities and the rarity of protests against them in the past.

Some information is needed to clear the ground. Military censorship is only one of a number of separately operating censorships, some of them abolished only in recent years and others still operative. I will not list all of them, contenting myself with two examples. There used to be a censorship committee concerned with the theatre; no production could be staged without its clearance. Before 1967 its vigilance was targeted primarily at what was thought too sexually explicit or contained sexually explicit language in both contemporary and classical plays. After 1967, when Hebrew theatre became a channel of political protest, the targets of the censors shifted to what they would assess (sometimes correctly) as anti-patriotic, anti-army or pro-Arab, especially when a contemporary play would raise the subject of anti-Palestinian atrocities. Several such plays were banned; in several others, whole portions were excised. Since theatre is popular among Israeli middle and upper classes, this particular censorship engendered outcries of protest. The protests forced the censors to be increasingly careful about their bans. After a struggle, this censorship was abolished a few years ago, with the consent of all secular parties over the opposition of the religious ones.

Another censorship committee oversees the mail, and is empowered to open private letters and to confiscate (but not destroy) them. In the 1950s it acted with few restraints, but in recent years it has busied itself primarily with confiscating those letters of new emigrants from the former USSR to their relatives which could deter the latter from immigrating to Israel.

Of all forms of censorships, however, military censorship has from Israel’s inception been by all means the most important, most all-inclusive and most galling. It has been especially so since, as Gal-Nur rightly pointed out, ‘in Israel, the underlying principle is that all public information is secret, except if it has been authorized for publication’, and since ‘the government can be easily tempted to use its powers, for the sake of deterrence or in order to pursue some evil schemes’, or simply ‘to conceal the extent of its own stupidity or misperformance’. One of the effects is that military censorship is actually furthering the Army’s misperformance. Since 1974 when the struggle against military censorship began in earnest, this has been the main and most persuasive argument of its critics and campaigners for its abolition. For the public at large, this argument has certainly carried more conviction than any arguments about the undesirability of keeping people in the dark about the extent of the army’s atrocities. When Israel Landers {Davar Friday Supplement, 27 November 1992) wants to hit military censorship at its softest spot, he recalls how during the week preceding 6 October 1973, censorship banned all the news derived from usual press sources about the massing of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the cease-fire lines. The Israeli Army then assessed these troop concentrations as devoid of all significance, and therefore didn’t want to upset the public unduly. In effect, the ban itself was instrumental in shepherding Israel to its subsequent defeats.

Landers admits, however, that the press itself was then willing to toe the censorship’s line, out of respect for the Army whose prestige stood in 1967-73 at its peak. Formal censorial bans were at that time often not needed because ‘friendly advice’ could suffice. The now raging campaign against military censorship originated from the Army’s clumsy efforts to conceal negligence during the 1992 Ts’elim exercise in which five soldiers were killed. A major factor leading to public outrage over that affair were lengthy press interviews with the families of the killed and wounded soldiers. Their common theme was the interviewees’ desire to know the causes of the accident. But, as Landers observes, this was not always so in the past. He recalls the explosion of an army truck in Eilat on 24 January 1970. Against all regulations, the truck was loaded with charged mines, killing as many as 24 soldiers, wounding even more and destroying parts of the city. ‘No Hebrew paper printed a single story about the dead soldiers’ parents’, recalls Landers. In the following days some stories did appear about the soldiers’ burials, but were relegated to short notes on the inside pages of the papers, very much in contrast to what routinely happens now, when military burials invariably receive maximum publicity. A ‘friendly request’ of the censor to the newspapers’ editors then sufficed to silence the press without any formal ban. Landers quotes from the then published Davar editorial that ‘when Israel’s very survival is in jeopardy, the occasional occurrence of such accidents cannot be avoided.’ Maariv, then the largest circulation paper, went even further: ‘Disasters such as in Eilat are bound to occur in a war.’ This particular accident could not be hushed up totally because it occurred in the midst of a city. In general, however, the coverage of accidents involving soldier’s deaths as a result of the Army’s negligence was banned until the late 1970s. Pictures of wounded Israeli soldiers in pain, or grumbling because of any discomfort, such as were common in the American press coverage of the Vietnam War, are still banned in Israel, but pictures of wounded soldiers smiling in a comfortable hospital beds are encouraged. The Lebanon War brought a change in this respect. Grumblings and protests of soldiers were allowed to be quoted in the media, and even shown on TV. Once the warfare against the Lebanese guerillas turned sour, even anti-war satire was allowed.

Relaxation of military censorship, along with other social changes, must be attributed to the Israeli near-defeat in the October 1973 War. It was this near-defeat which marked the beginning of the yearning of Israelis for more freedom. The transformation of Israeli society in this respect is still under way, yet far from being completed. But until that point in time, unquestioning compliance was by and large voluntary, compensated, as is common also elsewhere, by military triumphs and easy conquests.

Legal documents defining the powers of the military censorship committee, including the texts of agreements reached by the so-called ‘Editors’ Committee’ with the committee, were published for the first time ever by Haaretz on last 26 November. They are based on the British ‘Defence Regulations’ of 1945, originally devised to suppress Jewish underground organizations. Advocate Dov Yoseph, subsequently the Israeli Justice Minister from Labor, defined them in 1946 as ‘worse than Nazi laws. True, the Nazis committed worse atrocities, but they at least did not legislate them.’ These laws were adopted by the State of Israel. Their stipulations regarding censorship are still binding (except for strictly nominal amendments such as the replacement of ‘His Majesty’ by ‘Defence Minister’, or the like). They empower the censor to ban any publication considered as ‘possibly jeopardizing the defence of Israel, or public peace and order’ without providing any reasons for the ban. This applies to any printed matter, from books to crosswords, including reprints of what has been already published. All periodical publications, except for those which appear in single issues, need to be licensed. The censor can also close newspapers, and confiscate printing machines, faxes and duplicating machines, as was done in the Gaza Strip at the onset of the Intifada. An amendment adopted in 1988 commands that ‘anything authored by anyone which may possibly affect the state’s security in any way’ be submitted to preventive censorship. And there are additional stipulations, still in force, which bestow on the censor further powers that know virtually no limits.

It begs the question how could the Hebrew press function at all under such laws, even with all the self-restraint it exercised before 1973, and certainly after 1973 when it was already capable of winning some freedoms for itself with increasing success? There can be several answers to this. In the first place, the ‘Defence Regulations’ were adopted, first by the provisional ‘National Council’ in 1948, and subsequently by the first Knesset in 1949, on the understanding, shared by Ben-Gurion who then was bothPrime Minister and Defence Minister, that they were to be applied mainly against the Arabs, whereas the Jews were not to be hindered by censorship from political debate and criticism of the goverment, no matter how truculent. This distinctively Israeli mixture of democracy and racism was at first informal, because the Labor Party was loath to acknowledge openly its racism. Eventually censorship was nevertheless institutionalized, not by law, but in an agreement, first signed in 1951 and amended in 1966, between the military censorship and the Editors’ Committee, which represented the bulk of the Hebrew press, tiiough no Arab newspaper was included. The text of the agreement was kept secret until published recently by Haaretz: ‘ 1. The sole purpose of the censorship committee is to prevent publications of security-related information apt to help the enemy or prejudice the defence of Israel. 2. Censorship will not be applied to political arguments, opinions, comments, evaluations or any other contents, except when they contain, or can involuntarily disclose some security-related information. 3. Censorship is to rely on cooperation of the army authorities with the [Israeli] press aiming at meeting the purpose defined in section 1.’

This statement of principle is followed by detailed specifications in regard to forms of the mentioned cooperation, to be discussed below. But it needs to be first admitted that the promise of Section 2 has been fully kept. From the beginning the Hebrew press could freely criticize and abuse the government, as well as other politicians. And it used its freedom fully, in the 1950s even more than in the 1990s. (In the Arabic press the situation was different, in that its freedom of expression has been limited. But this matter will not be discussed here.) The meaning of the phrase ‘security-related information’ was stretched to cover topics whose bearing upon security was most tenuous, but comparing the Israeli Prime Minister (or any other politician) even to Hitler has always been allowed in the Hebrew press.

The remainder of the agreement sets terms of the cooperation between the two parties to it, with the aim of ensuring its smooth functioning. Its primary tool was to be the Editors’ Committee, comprised of the editors of the then existent Hebrew daily newspapers and the director of the Broadcasting Authority. In sheer numbers there were more daily newspapers in the 1950s than now, because every party owned one, in addition to non-party newspapers operating on commercial principles. As I recall in the mid-1950s there appeared as many as twelve daily Hebrew newspapers, representing the entire spectrum of Zionist political parties.

Commenting on the agreement, Dori Klasenbald (‘Voluntary agreement to be censored corrupts’, Hadashot, 19 November) stated that it was slanted in favor of censorship. ‘The worst aspect of the agreement under discussion is that it imposes on both the newspapers and the censoring bodies an obligation to submit a disputed issue to a “censorship committee” comprised of an army representative, a newspapers’ representative, and a representative of the public. Much as it may sound incredible, no rulings of this committee are binding, unless they are approved by the Chief of Staff. On this point, the agreement is very specific. In effect, therefore, it delegates the overriding authority to the Chief of Staff, which in itself should be a sufficient cause for annulling it... The committee referred to has all the flaws any censorial authority is bound to have. It has no clear procedural rules for conducting deliberations and reaching decisions. Its decisions cannot be invoked as binding precedents. Its deliberations are secret. If it hears an appeal, the very lapse of time between submitting that appeal and obtaining a ruling is bound to reduce the value of an information whose ban is appealed. Finally, the composition of the committee is not such as to guarantee qualified and informed decisions needed in cases of conflict between the opposite interests of the contending sides.’

But the factual subordination of this committee to the Army was not everything. As Klasenbald explains, ‘The agreement rested on the notion that the security of the state was the overriding value, compared to which freedom of expression in general and of the press in particular was something marginal, a kind of favour the censor would agree to render to the press and its readers.’ He concludes that ‘the public should not delegate to any “censorship committee” the powers to determine how far freedom of the press and the public’s right to be informed can go. Delegation of such powers to anyone is contrary to the freedom of expression as a whole.’ And his final conclusion is that ‘any voluntary agreement with censorship corrupts, because it hurts the freedom of expression.’ Moshe Negbi (Hadashoty 19 November) concurs: ‘The newspapers which signed the agreement hoped to operate under comfortable conditions, at the cost of imposing hardships on other papers, left vulnerable to sanctions permissible under the draconic Mandatory regulations, which even entide the censor to close newspapers, as he actually did with the Hadashot eight years ago.’ They won their relative freedom at the cost of renouncing their right to appeal to the Supreme Court against the censor.

Statements like these by Gal-Nur, Negbi or Klasenbald represent in Israel a novelty. No opinions of this kind have ever been voiced by the so-called Zionist left. Zionist parties could, for example, differ from each other on whether the Army or the settlement should have higher priority, but they were unanimous in prioritizing Zionism over human rights, even those designed to accrue to the Jews alone. The Zionist left has never been an exception in this respect. The drive toward freedom of expression as well as toward other elementary freedoms, originates in Israel with the centre of the political spectrum, or with some marginal groups, or else with some individuals on the non-Zionist left. Their influence is in my view primarily catalytic: effective not by itself but by virtue of succeeding in attracting youth and the media to their ideas. This explains why military censorship was accepted voluntarily when the Zionist left wielded much power in Israel. It had to be so as long as censorship was perceived as advancing Zionism’s cause.

Why has this changed? What social factors promoted that change? There were many reasons. One was the influence of Western ways of life on the Israelis, especially upon younger age cohorts no longer prepared to tolerate the stifling atmosphere of the Zionist left as supinely as their predecessors did. But the crucial factor of change were in my view profound transformations in the profile of press readership which roughly took place between 1974 and 1988, in the aftermath of the first major gains won in struggles for extending the margins of freedom.

The character of the Hebrew press itself changed in this period markedly. A number of local commercially-oriented Friday papers began to appear, quickly becoming very popular. Moreover, the press learned to address itself to the mass of readers who were also regularly watching television. Far from losing the competition with television, the press prospered as never before. It is enough to say that Hebrew newspaper sales on an average Friday reach up to 3.5 million copies within a national population of about 5 million which contains substantial minorities which don’t read Hebrew. But the social composition of the readership has also changed markedly since the mid-1950s. Within that population, the less educated, the poorer and consequently the more religious and right-leaning 50 per cent (or even more) tend to shun newspapers, contenting themselves with television. The other half, with opposite social characteristics, tend to buy each Friday two or even three papers, typically one national and one or two local ones, and read them assiduously. The same readership favours more sophisticated and more liberally-minded daily papers. By contrast, the tendency of the religious to refrain from reading any papers (even special weeklies published for their consumption are not overly popular among that public) has been reinforced by denunciations of the entire Hebrew press by their rabbis. Such denunciations became in the last decade increasingly immoderate: to the point of branding that press as a tool of Satan, capable of dooming its pious Jewish reader to untold calamities, not necessarily spiritual but also as physical as death in a traffic accident. By refusing to read the newspapers (as well as all other ‘immoral’ printed matter), Israeli right-wingers become increasingly illiterate.

The bulk of this ‘new press’, as it is called, is commercial. Two still extant papers of the Zionist ‘left’ (at the time of the writing), Davar and Al Hamishmar, have steadily dropping circulations. Even when owned by the right-wingers, the commercial press, lest it incurs financial losses, needs therefore to cater to the tastes of its readers, becoming in effect more liberal-minded than the Israeli Jews – as best proven by electoral returns – are on the average. When the late Robert Maxwell bought Maariv with the intention of supporting the views of Sharon and Shamir, its circulation dropped alarmingly, to the point that after Maxwell’s death it faced the prospect of imminent bankruptcy. It was then bought, however, by the right-wing gun merchant Ya’akov Nimrodi of Irangate fame and given as a present to his son Ofer, a man in his thirties. The new management found that the only way to increase the paper’s circulation was by revising its earlier practice and publishing critical commentary. The financial situation improved almost instantly as a result of this decision. Not by chance, Maariv’s specialty soon became critiques of the Army, the favoured topic of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Christopher Hitchens
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: CENSORSHIP
• 1The Struggle Against Military Censorship and the Quality of the Army
• Part II: FOREIGN RELATIONS
• 2 Israel’s Strategic Aims and Nuclear Weapons
• 3 Syrian Cities and Relations with Saddam Hussein
• 4 Israel Versus Iran
• 5 Israeli Foreign Policy after the Oslo Accord
• 6 Coalition Building Against Iran
• 7 Israeli Foreign Policies, August 1994
• 8 Israeli Policies Toward Iran and Syria
• Part III: ISRAELI FOREIGN TRADE
• 9 Trade Between Israel and the Arab States
• 10 Drugs and Vegetables: The Israeli Trade with Arab Countries
• Part IV: AMERICAN JEWS
• 11 Israel and the Organized American Jews
• 12 The Pro-Israeli Lobby in the US and the Inman Affair
• Part V: OSLO AND AFTER
• 13 The Real Significance of the Oslo Accord
• 14 Analysis of Israeli Policies: The Priority of the Ideological Factor
• Index