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Harlem Shake (home version of censorship)

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Harlem Shake (home version of censorship) - Video

Benjamin Netanyahu ... instructions to editors failed to take account of the internet. Photo: Reuters

JERUSALEM: The blanket ban on reporting details of the detention and apparent suicide of an Australian prisoner jailed in Israel has raised pressing questions about the relevance of censorship in a digital age.

The mysterious case of Prisoner X briefly emerged in 2010 in an online news report which was immediately taken down due to a gag order, only to resurface on Tuesday when the ABC's Foreign Correspondent reported he was an Australian working for Mossad.

The results are ridiculous and, instead of hushing up the blunder, they merely shine a spotlight on it.

Although the news spread like wildfire across social networks, Israel's media outlets were uncharacteristically silent, gagged by a set of tight restrictions that barred them from even mentioning the ABC report.

The silence was broken only when three Israeli MPs used their parliamentary immunity to raise the issue in the Knesset, forcing the censor to ease its grip and permit coverage of the ABC report.

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Aluf Benn, editor of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, said the case highlighted the old-world thinking among Israel's top intelligence brass.

"I imagined yesterday that I met Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and that I tried to persuade him to remove himself for a day or two from the cloak-and-dagger world he lives in . . . But then I remembered that Pardo is still living in the previous century, when information is kept in regimes' safes," he wrote.

Shortly after the ABC report emerged, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called in the country's top editors to ask them to cooperate by withholding publication of information about an incident that was "very embarrassing to a certain government agency," Haaretz said, in a clear allusion to Mossad.

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Israeli censorship proves futile in digital age

Israel is able to suppress stories like Prisoner X because so many citizens regard security as sacred Israels media operate under official censorship.

That has been a fact of my professional life as a journalist covering foreign policy and national security. Heres how it works: any story involving defence, intelligence or nuclear matters must be submitted to the military censors office. It can run only after being stamped for approval.

Israel being Israel, and not China or the former East Germany, its censorship is less scary than it might appear. The 35 military censors are not faceless bureaucrats. You know them personally and can negotiate wording to let the story pass.

Paradoxically, the existence of censorship has its advantages. Military and intelligence sources are more likely to give you secret information, trusting the censor to play bad cop. And once you have submitted anything to the censor, youre relieved of legal responsibility.

The main goal of censorship is deterrence: you know that your story will be blacked out, so why bother writing it. All of us are well-trained in self-censorship and in using code words such as nuclear capability or nuclear option rather than nuclear weapons.

The success of censorship relies not on coercion, but on public support. The military and intelligence community enjoy a sacred status in Israeli society, and national security resonates much better than civil liberties. Many journalists accept censorship willingly, and criticise their peers who break with the official line. They are even proud of knowing the story and withholding it.

As a young journalist in the late 1980s, I prepared a critical story about the Mossad. Do it in your free time, itll never see the light of day anyway, my editor warned me. It was duly censored. My new editor, Meir Schnitzer, appealed to the high court. We won a landmark case, which set the scope of censorship.

Since then, the tide of censorship has turned in tandem with the public sentiment toward security. The second Lebanon war of 2006 caused a major setback, as the media were blamed for disclosing the locations of rocket attacks and thus supplying Hezbollah with targeting data. The Olmert government, and the Netanyahu government that succeeded it in 2009, leveraged the public anger to impose stricter censorship.

In most cases the media live with restrictions through quoting foreign sources. At Haaretz, we cant write that Israel bombed a nuclear reactor or arms convoy in Syria, but if its published in a London-based newspaper its fine.

This week, however, we were told not to even quote foreign sources, when Australias ABC news broke the story of Ben Zygier, an Australian-born Mossad agent who had strayed from his mission, was locked secretly in solitary confinement, and committed suicide in prison in 2010. The affair was covered by a gag order, which is stronger than ordinary censorship: disobeying it risks criminal prosecution. We ran a story quoting the broadcast, and were told to take it off our website. Then the editors of Israels newspapers, TV and radio news channels were summoned to a private briefing by the Mossad head, Tamir Pardo, who asked them to ignore the story.

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Censorship in Israel's media is widespread