Israel prison death shows censorship flaws

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 Australia's ABC news said he was an Australian working for Mossad.

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

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

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, 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.

For Israel's security establishment, the press was simply an extension of the state which could be controlled at will, Benn wrote.

"They all find it hard to come to terms with the concept of a free media operating in a democratic state, and they try to recruit the press to work with them, offering journalists a combination of confidential information and the threat of arrest."

Under Israeli law, violation of a gag order is a serious offence, punishable by imprisonment.

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Israel prison death shows censorship flaws