Tel Aviv
By the time our group's summer seminar on Israel's security challenges came to an end, we knew something about trade-offs.
We'd made it to an overlook near the Lebanese border, accompanied by an Israel Defense Forces commander, and into a forest with a unit trained to neutralize infiltrators. But, our organizer warned, don't be too specific when writing about such things.
We journeyed into the woods near ___, to listen to the commander of a unit that ___, but strictly off the record. We met imprisoned terrorists whom ordinary Israelis rarely encounter, unless they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. We glimpsed parts of Israel's undercover antiterrorist infrastructure, learned about such bomb ingredients as urea nitrate and ammonium nitrate, heard about operations that must remain on deep background. More than once, we were told to leave our laptops, cellphones, and cameras in our hotel rooms, and, yes, our hosts double-checked us on the bus, sending the forgetful or insubordinate back to their rooms as the rest of us waited.
"Guys," our brilliant, wired, Israeli guide—a former intelligence agent who knew the landscape of our subject backwards and forwards—kept advising us, "You can't write about ___, but you can say ___."
Could the trip have been pulled off for 30 journalists? Doubtful. Happily, we were a group of American professors in disciplines from national security to religious studies, visiting Israel under the auspices of Washington's Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Aim? What you might call an embedded experience in fighting terrorism. Well, not entirely embedded, unless you mean king-bedded.
Our hotel, the Dan Panorama, on the greenest part of Tel Aviv's beachfront, hardly made us feel like warriors. Breakfast included every fruit under the sun. Lectures at Tel Aviv University by experts such as Shmuel Bar, Meir Litvak, Eyal Zisser, and Yoni Fighel required caffeinated alertness, not commando alertness. But once we got going on field trips to the other Israel—the Israel of across-the-board intelligence, hidden military units, 24/7 bomb squads, and horrific-looking checkpoints—things felt different.
For a career newspaper journalist retooled as a philosophy professor, the experience recalled a time living in Jerusalem and Rehovot 22 years ago, trying to understand how security and free speech can be balanced in a country under constant threat of terrorism. A country in which today hundreds of thousands of demonstrators can take to the streets and speak their minds.
Back then, my goal, as the first Eisenhower Fellow from the United States to Israel, was to understand how Israeli military censorship worked—or didn't. This time the aim wasn't to analyze Israeli practice, but to learn from Israeli reality, to inform our teaching. The upshot for this repeat visitor will come from combining what I saw in 2011 with what I learned back then.
*****
On that stay decades ago, my learning curve began with a two-hour interview with the chief Israeli censor. His job reminded me of the Latin roots of the verb "censor"—to assess, judge, estimate.
Israeli censors analyzed not just how dangerous individual pieces of information were, but how pieces of public information might fit together to create security risks—what they called "the mosaic." The chief censor explained that his office once withheld how many doughnuts Israeli soldiers on the northern border received because, thanks to other information in the story, the detail indicated precisely the number of soldiers stationed there. Similarly, the censor often blocked exact descriptions of where rockets landed, so as not to help the rocket launchers to adjust their trajectories.
Unlike the situation in the post-Pentagon Papers United States, where journalists and officials often saw themselves as adversaries in a First Amendment battle, Israeli journalists generally understood why their society needed to control strategic information. They cooperated more with government and intelligence officials and worked, one explained, with "two brains." One was the vacuum-cleaner, fact-gathering efficiency tool shared with empirically minded American journalists. The other was the patriotic, security-minded conscience of the Israeli citizen. When I asked former Jerusalem Post editor Ari Rath what happened when his aggressive, scoop-hungry side and his patriotic, Israeli-citizen side came into conflict, he replied, "When push comes to shove, I am an Israeli patriot."
As I boned up back then on the history of free expression in Israel, I learned that cooperation between journalists and officials dated back to the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine that preceded Israel's founding in 1948. Elements of the Jewish press, whose leaders participated in the so-called Reaction Committee, played a major role in the battle for independence. The committee circulated a list of topics to be kept quiet. Typesetters censored materials that might expose Jewish leaders and underground forces. Future Israeli journalists acquired secretive habits in the struggle against the British Mandate government.
Such habits were in step with the approach of the mandate government itself. After the Shaw Commission—assigned by the British to determine the cause of the 1929 riots in Hebron that left 133 Jews dead—found that Arab newspapers helped incite local Arabs to attack the Jews, the British established the 1933 Press Ordinance, giving the government wide powers of control over the press.
In the early days of Israeli independence, with scores of life-and-death issues on the agenda, state leaders didn't want to open up large Knesset debates on freedom of the press. Rather, they chose simply to absorb previous British laws. Many believed that the press laws' harsher provisions would be used mainly against the Arab press. They also recognized the difficulty of establishing an Israeli constitution given the absolutist beliefs of many religious Israelis. A complicating factor lay in the mixed backgrounds and traditions of many of the early Zionists. That mixture made Israel's freedom-of-expression law, according to Israeli legal scholar Pnina Lahav, in her edited volume Press Law in Modern Democracies (1985), "an amalgam of elements from liberal philosophy and from certain schools of authoritarian political theory."
While "Zionism cherished the values of the Enlightenment, including freedom of expression and criticism," she observed, it was also true that "pre-emancipation Jewish culture, conditioned by ghetto mentality and rampant anti-Semitism, frowned upon criticism, as well as political and religious dissent."
At the same time, early Israeli leaders received conflicting signals from British constitutional liberalism and British colonialism. While many of the Zionist elite admired liberalism's rejection of censorship, they noted that the mandate government had established "an elaborate legal system of political suppression" to maintain public order.
Added to this were clashing principles from Anglo-American liberalism and Continental liberalism. The former, epitomized by John Stuart Mill, emphasized free speech and a free marketplace of ideas, as well as the importance of the individual's freedom against the state. Continental liberalism, mainly a German tradition, emphasized the importance of the state and its supervision of expression. As Lahav pointed out, the latter attitude dovetailed neatly with Zionism, which placed the establishment of a state above all other goals.
With Israel's early legal and political elite a mix of people educated in all these traditions, it was inevitable that Israel's free-expression jurisprudence would become a motley thing, especially given that more practical, historical factors also weighed in against classic marketplace-of-ideas thinking.
For one thing, the early Zionist Labor governments desired a highly centralized system with which to transform the country to socialism. For another, both David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, and Moshe Sharett, his foreign minister, had been journalists or publicists in the classic European form—strong advocacy journalists who shared a certain contempt for their former on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand mainstream peers.
Perhaps most important of all, many of the early Israeli leaders from Europe saw the Holocaust, precipitated by the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany, as a counterexample to naïve faith in free expression. They'd seen how the Weimar Republic's failure to repress Nazi ideology and the Nazi propaganda machine's success in defaming Weimar leaders led to the rise of Hitler. That fed their belief that free speech must often be subordinated to order.
Consequently, after independence, Israel adopted both the 1933 Press Ordinance and the 1945 British Mandatory Emergency Regulations, providing for a government censorship function. Today the powers of the censor remain strong—on paper. But because the first Israeli leaders wished to balance security needs with the values of a free press, and because Israeli journalists recognized the state's security needs, the leadership developed procedures to combine those goals.
One institution with roots before the establishment of the state was the Editors Committee (a later version of the Reaction Committee), composed of the top editors of Israel's daily newspapers, which represented the newspapers in meetings with the government. Under written terms reached in January 1950 between the editors and the Army General Staff (updated in 1966 and later), the editors agreed to drop support for a Knesset bill to replace the 1945 emergency regulations with a law barring censorship not essential for national security.
And so the cooperation continued. The army and government agreed to meet with the editors regularly, to brief them on some of the government's most top secret and classified activities. The two sides also instituted a process for resolving disputes. The balancing act was necessary given that Israel has no written constitution and no bill of rights. In effect, Israelis enjoy a common-law right of free expression rather than a constitutional one. (Lahav, incidentally, remains the scholar to read on Israeli freedom of information. See her article "American Influence on Israeli Law: Freedom of Expression," in Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israeli Relations, edited by Robert O. Freedman, forthcoming from Westview.)
*****
As the lessons of years ago kicked in during this summer's daily announcements of "You can write about ___," but "you can't identify ___," my inner journalist didn't rebel.
One need only read Daniel Byman's recent, wrenching A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterintelligence (Oxford University Press) to be reminded that terrorist attacks on Israel began almost immediately after it defeated its Arab enemies in 1949. (The cost-benefit calculations in regard to Israel's responses to those attacks, of course, continue to differ.) As Byman notes, already by 1952, the number of attempted infiltrators into Israel had reached almost 16,000, although many of those were refugees seeking to slip in for nonterrorist reasons.
Against that security challenge, one tipping point in favor of greater press freedom came after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Before the war, the chief of Israel's General Staff, David Elazar, asked members of the Editors Committee to play down intelligence about Egyptian and Syrian troop concentrations near Israel's borders, to avoid panicking the populace. After Israel suffered its surprise attack, many felt that a quiescent press shared in the blame.
Yet a steely competence at what Israelis must do in regard to state security forms an unquestionable feature of their balancing act with free expression, recognized even in unexpected quarters. A few years before the Gaza flotilla killings undercut Israeli-Turkish relations, I was held and questioned by Turkish customs guards at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport. Eventually I persuaded them that my passport's peeling lamination was an act of nature and humidity, not espionage. A guard gave me back my passport and strongly warned me to get it fixed when I returned to the United States. "We don't fool around," my main questioner advised me in perfect colloquial English when he let me go. "We're trained by the Israelis."
