Israel Targets Haaretz Newspaper, Still Hunts Top Journalist

Journalist Uri Blau remains in hiding, hunted by the state of Israel. The liberal Haaretz newspaper staff has roused a siege-like mentality.

And the Israeli public would have the blood of any Israeli citizen and human rights activist who blew the whistle on Israel's crimes against humanity in its well-planned 2008 Gaza massacre. Or not, let the secret police head decide, and let whatever happens, happen.

Writes an incensed Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy in "If it were up to the [Israeli] people, Anat Kamm would be executed":

"The head of the Shin Bet [Israel's secret police] threatens a journalist, and it's business as usual, nobody says a word. Nobody got into a tizzy after these brutal words were uttered, nobody even asked what exactly Diskin [director of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin] was getting at. Nobody even bothered to ask if it was in fact the Shin Bet that broke into Blau's apartment and ransacked it."

Anat Kamm leaked documents detailing facts of the coming Israeli Gaza atrocity to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau in 2008.

Kamm is now under house arrest and stands accused of "espionage with intent to harm the state, a charge that carries [up to] 25 years in jail." (Cook)

What was the December 2008 Gaza massacre?

Think of the World War II NAZI atrocity, the 1942 massacre of the village of Lidice (then Lidice, Czechoslovakia) in retaliation for killing a NAZI whom the NAZIs viewed as protected by their Christian God. Now multiply Lidice by ten and you get Gaza, December 2008, that followed years of "protracted collective punishment."

Well, we can write about Israel in these pages. Object, and declare that its crimes are not committed in our names.

Most of the American public would agree. Most of American Jewry agrees.

The U.S. Congress on the other hand is on record supporting Israel and trashing the U.N. Goldstone Report; though on January 21, 2010 a letter signed by 54 members of Congress was sent to President Obama calling for a halt to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, describing the siege as an “ongoing crisis” that would lead to “disastrous” political and humanitarian consequences.

That's the most we have accomplished so far as the "ongoing crisis" works its magic against those not-chosen people [Arabs] in the Middle-East.

A Shin Bet State

Israel Targets Ha'aretz

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth

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 Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.

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. 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.”

Zoubi’s call yesterday followed mounting public criticism of Haaretz for supporting 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 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 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 Blau’s suppressed article might also haverevealed 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 Blau is fired. A petition calling on the Shin Bet to end its threat to charge 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 offence of holding classified information, an offence most of us are guilty of in one way or another.”

A group of Israeli human rights organisations 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 Blau and his sources.

Yesterday, the supreme court tightened restrictions on Anat Kamm, one of 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 Kamm, 23, included military orders that violated court rulings and justified law-breaking by soldiers.

Judge Ayala Procacciasaid: “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.” Kamm, the court decided, must not leaveher 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 Kamm and 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”, Levy added: “If it depended on public opinion, Kamm and Blau would be executed and Haaretz would be shut down on the spot.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net/.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (http://www.thenational.ae/), published in Abu Dhabi.

Mossad Hunts Reporter in Hiding, Has 'Taken off Gloves' in Israel’s Pentagon Papers Case

Israel is hunting down a journalist who exposed its human rights violations in the 2008 Israeli massacre in Gaza in which 1,400 Gazans were killed.

Uri Blau, a reporter with the Haaretz newspaper, has gone underground in London and is threatened with espionage by the notorious Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.

First Israel went after innocent Palestinians, then they came for human rights activists, then they came for journalists. Who is next? Ask Mordechai Vanunu, who 24 years ago blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons of mass destruction what awaits Blau.

We hope that Uri Blau, a hero for truth and justice in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, will seek and be granted asylum from Israel's oppressive state police.

From Jonathan Cook in CounterPunch:

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.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East’ (Pluto Press) and ‘Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair‘ (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net/.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (http://www.thenational.ae/), published in Abu Dhabi.