Israeli censorship proves futile in digital age

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