16 April 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
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Mr Blau’s stories not be published.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
www.jkcook.net
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