Israel Matzav: Credit where it is due

Credit where it is due

For the most part, Israel's media elites have rallied around Ha'aretz and its reporter-in-hiding Uri Blau. There have been individual reporters here and there who have maintained common sense (Ben Dror Yemini of Yediot, for example, did a good interview on Israel Radio on Monday morning - I only caught the tail end of it). But the media and the chattering classes themselves have been falling all over themselves to defend Blau (retired Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner has even called for Blau not to be arrested!). One notable exception is the Jerusalem Post.

Anat Kamm stole those documents, and many, many more, during her army service from 2005 to 2007 in the office of the commander of the Central Command. The very fact that these documents had been stolen, and the indiscriminate nature of her theft, might have given the newspaper pause, but it acted properly within the framework of military censorship by getting approval from the censor before publishing specific articles based on particular documents.

It argued that this material fell firmly within the definition of public interest. And it gave the IDF advance notice of the articles, to enable the IDF to respond.

From this point onward, however, Haaretz’s behavior deviates from acceptable journalistic practice. Most troubling is the paper’s willingness to back reporter Uri Blau, presently in self-imposed exile in Britain, if, as is alleged by the state, he is holding on to what may be some 2,000 sensitive documents, 700 of which are judged by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) to be of a confidential or highly confidential nature.

Security sources say the documents contain top-secret information concerning General Staff orders, personnel numbers in the Central Command, intelligence information, information on IDF doctrine and data on sensitive military exercises, weaponry and military platforms. The files also allegedly contain details on what the Central Command does in the event of a major escalation – how it deploys forces to the West Bank and where it stations them there.

Far less comprehensible than Kamm’s alleged ideologically motivated decision to steal so many documents is Blau’s refusal to hand them back. He’s had the documents since at least October 2008, when he began publishing reports based on them.

Damage control is possible only after the Shin Bet verifies precisely which classified documents were taken by Kamm and who received them. The public interest in such damage control, given the sensitivity of the material, should be obvious to Blau and to Haaretz. This is a matter of life-and-death national security.

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Regrettably, however, the unwillingness of Blau and his newspaper to meet the Shin Bet’s demand to return stolen documents whose content would aid our enemies and render our people more vulnerable raises grave questions about the paper’s priorities.

Has Haaretz adopted the radical agenda of some of its writers, who focus obsessively in its pages on Israel’s purported brutality while ignoring Palestinian terror, violence and incitement? Or is the paper truly interested in strengthening Israeli democracy via constructive criticism? The way to clear up the doubt would be to return the stolen documents to the Shin Bet as quickly as possible.

Read it all.

Israel Matzav: Credit where it is due