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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.

Original post:
Prison death shows censorship flaws

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

In the days after Israel partially acknowledged a report that it secretly jailed an Australian-Israeli main who later died in prison, there is doubt about the censorship powers that enabled the government to stifle the Israeli media until yesterday.

The decades-old sense that the Jewish state is under a constant existential threat has created tolerance of formal limits on press freedoms, but the sense among many Israelis is that in this case authorities have gone too far, and that such a blackout is not practical, let alone possible, with the advent of online journalism.

An investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation into the 2010 disappearance and death of 34-year-old Ben Zygier suggested the Australian joined the Mossad after immigrating to Israel, but that something must have gone wrong with his service. In the hours after the initial publication of the report, Israels Prime Minister's Office made the rare move of calling in the editors-in-chief of major domestic news outlets to encourage them to uphold a blackout on the Australian report.

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The prime ministers office was backed by a sweeping gag order from a court in force since the original arrest, but the move backfired as Israelis shared details of foreign accounts of the fate of so-called Prisoner X on social networks -- or simply browsed foreign news sites. The dissonance highlighted the seemingly outmoded application of censorship powers in the new media era, and suggested that Israels government had overstepped by keeping the case under wraps for years.

"I truly thought that this kind of thing doesnt happen here. Someone was arrested, interrogated, charged and then he killed himself, and then it was held secret with a gag order," said Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli civil rights lawyer. "They tried to make Israel into Albania, a place where people shouldnt know what is known to the international community.

Israels history of military censorship is rooted in powers assumed by the British Mandatory authorities, which first declared a "state of emergency that has been kept in place, uninterrupted, since Israels establishment in 1948.

Israel is one of the only democracies to subject its press to a military censor office, but the practice had been relatively accepted as a necessity in its early years because of a sense the country was constantly under attack. That said, the militarys authority to strike out information was drastically scaled back by the Supreme Court in 1989. The ruling required the censor to show an objectively imminent and real threat to national security in disqualifying information for publication, rather than a vague reference to national security considerations.

Citing "foreign media sources" has been a common workaround for journalists when censorship is invoked or the government imposes an internal gag order on officials, and it has generally been tolerated by Israeli authorities. But when the government this week pressed Israeli websites to take down initial reports of the ABC television report and revived an antiquated practice of calling in editors to share state secrets in return for a blackout, their efforts only fanned the firestorm.

"[Mossad director Tamir] Pardo and his friend believe that if they only press harder, the door will remain closed," wrote Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. "Meanwhile, on Facebook, on Instagram, and Twitter, everyone is sharing the information, forwarding links, expressing opinions, and cracking jokes.

Read the rest here:
'Prisoner X' case strains Israelis' longtime acceptance of censorship

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