Coteret

An end to the age of ambiguity

Op-ed, Yaron London, Yediot, April 12 2010

Israel ranks sixth in the world in terms of the number of nuclear weapons it has in its arsenal, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the British journal on military affairs. Its researchers, in an article written with a view to the nuclear conference now convened in Washington, stated that we now possess somewhere between 100 and 300 destructive warheads, which we continue to amass still. According to Jane’s we possess the capability to drop these as bombs from airplanes, launch them as missiles, and shoot them from submarines. This ability to shoot nuclear weapons from the hull of submarines, an ability indeed attributed to us by Jane’s, provides us with the possibility of a “second strike,” that is to destroy the enemy even if the latter takes action first and wipes us entirely our land. Indeed the submarines will have no shore to which they can return, but they are sure at least to get their revenge.

Reading this, internet commenters were jubilant. News websites were overflowed with calls to bomb Iran immediately. Many were quick to link the doomsday weapon to the Holocaust and demanded that havoc be wrecked as a preventative step before havoc would be wrecked: We’ll destroy them before they destroy us. Also this time around, the Auschwitz reflex operated as it is designed to. When the neurologist tapped on our knee with his small hammer, we delivered a high kick with spiked shoes.

The internet commenters, speakers on behalf of the masses, did not bother asking, following Jane’s publications, whether or not the findings were in fact correct, and why we need hundreds of nuclear bombs, which possess the ability to obliterate all of the cities in the Middle East several times over. They did not wonder how we calculated the precise figure of megatons needed to deter the Ayatollahs. They cast no doubt as to the wisdom of this being a secret and they did not complain that there was no open public debate on the matter.

Neither were they bothered by the issue of the ambiguity policy’s value in a world so extensively covered by the media: the phrase “foreign sources,” echoed in Israeli media outlets is constantly escorted with a wink and a deriding smile. Good old boy Israel is mocking the world. Who are those interested in maintaining the ambiguity? The United States, with which, according to foreign sources, we have reached an agreement that it keep its wide eyes shut, and the Arab countries, which are unenthusiastic about getting drawn into a nuclear arms race.

But the value of ambiguity has long since passed. Iran is certain to become nuclear, or will perhaps be stopped “half an inch before tightening the screws” from actually getting the bomb. The argument that Iran should not be denied a nuclear weapons so long as this is not being denied from Israel — if we are to believe foreign sources — has found a receptive international audience. Syria was not deterred from attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Egypt has been nagging incessantly, demanding that International Atomic Energy Agency take a look at Dimona, and all the while is making nuclear preparations of its own. Ambiguity has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had.

If the publications are correct, it is quite plausible that the government will realize this. Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu avoided attending the nuclear conference. He sent Dan Meridor, in hope that his scaled-down replacement will also scale down the prospects of those assailing Israel. This will be of about as much help as a screen door on a submarine.

The age of nuclear ambiguity is coming to an end and it will be followed by an age of open debate. It is time that more people be allowed to take part in the debate which is most critical to our very existence.

An Israeli army dog attacks a Palestinian woman during an army raid in the West Bank village of Obadiyah, near Bethlehem, Wednesday, March 21, 2007. The dog, which was supposed to enter a house with troops searching for a wanted militant attacked the female bystander instead. The woman received medical attention from the troops on the scene. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

A minimal sense of sense of history appears to have become an unrealistic expectation when it comes to Israeli policy makers. Some things should not be done, period. No matter how effective they are. But if Jewish leaders can propose labor camps for refugees, why not use dogs against civilians?

The newly coined term, “popular terror,” may indicate, however, that the IDF is concerned that some Israeli audiences, perhaps even some soldiers, would still be upset at the prospect. What better way to dehumanize a teenager throwing stones at soldiers blocking a protest against theft of communal land than to label him a “terrorist”?

Morality is not the only argument against the use of attack dogs in a civilian setting. This photo shows what can result even when the target is armed militants.

Writing recently in Tablet on the Kamm affair, Yossi Melman, no bleeding heart leftist, reminded the Israeli elite that “image and good name also contribute to the security and prosperity of Israel.” Indeed, for years, senior officers and officials have told us that perceptions are critical to victory in “asymmetric warfare”. When it comes to making actual operative decisions, however, other considerations consistently trump strategic insight.

With bared teeth: Oketz dogs to catch stone throwers

Amir Buhbut, Maariv, April 8 2010

The IDF has come up with a new weapon against popular terror: dogs of the Oketz unit will catch shooting cells and firebomb throwers and stone-throwers. “The dogs are a non-lethal weapon,” explained a high-ranking officer in the unit.

Disturbances have increased throughout Judea and Samaria in recent months, and despite orders to make the rules of engagement stricter to prevent an escalation, IDF soldiers killed four Palestinians in two incidents. A Central Command inquiry found that their killing could have been prevented.

In wake of the incidents, the commander of the Oketz unit, Lt. Col. S., approached the commander of the Samaria Brigade, Col. Itzik Bar, and suggested the services of a new Oketz company comprised of dogs and combatants. This unit earned praise in the brigade-wide exercise of the Givati Brigade last month on the Golan Heights.

Col. Bar approved the plan and began to put it into practice on a problematic route where stones and firebombs are regularly thrown at Israeli civilians and security forces. Because of the mountainous topography and the proximity to a Palestinian village, it is difficult to catch the suspects in real time.

“We began this activity last week,” explained a senior officer. “The Oketz dog is the non-lethal weapon that will chase the suspects from the moment they are spotted, taking advantage of its greater speed. In the future, the goal is to let Oketz act to prevent shooting attacks on problematic roads and searches in the casbah.”

Read more…

The sustained protests, against the settlement of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the attendant eviction of Palestinian families, have been widely applauded.  However, they have also elicited some fierce push-back. Notably, these have not come only from government and right-wing elements, but also from members of the old “peace camp.” When hearing criticism from this quarter, one is hard pressed to escape the impression that it is motivated by embarrassment. These youngsters, with virtually no resources, have pulled-off what seemed like mission impossible over the past decade: Effective mobilization of an anti-Occupation movement.

Case in point: After the success of the March 6 2010 rally at the neighborhood — which, with over 3,000 participants, could not be ignored — a number of these stalwarts of the demonstrations of 1980′s took turns slamming the absence of the Israeli flag. Recently, Nili Osherov, and Israeli editor and satirist, explained in Ynet [full translation at bottom] that this demand was a recipe for continued paralysis and that the protest leaders had a better sense of today’s reality than their critics.

I have a clear answer why the Israeli flag has not been waved there, and it has one word: tact. Sheikh Jarrah, just like the nonviolent protests at Bil’in and Ni’lin, just like organizations such as Breaking the Silence and Combatants for Peace, are part of a process being led by young Israelis today (and other young people like them on the Palestinian side), that could be the start of the end of the violent conflict in our area.

I have a clear answer why the Israeli flag has not been waved there, and it has one word: tact. Sheikh Jarrah, just like the nonviolent protests at Bil’in and Ni’lin, just like organizations such as Breaking the Silence and Combatants for Peace, are part of a process being led by young Israelis today (and other young people like them on the Palestinian side), that could be the start of the end of the violent conflict in our area. [...]

These young people understand that the endless cycle of violence created by the “kill or be killed” mentality has to simply be severed. Sheikh Jarrah is a symbol to them, a sort of a local “committee of truth and reconciliation,” from which more committees may grow in more and more places. They are neither fanatics nor blind. They know this is not a one-sided story of perpetrators and victims. They are not blaming the forefathers of Zionism, the founders of Israel nor — thank God — us, their parents, for everything.

But in the present situation, in the current balance of power between us and the Palestinians, they understand who is the weak side and who is obligated to show generosity, concessions and the willingness to swallow their pride and national honor. The Israeli flags seen today in Sheikh Jarrah are the ones waved defiantly on the homes of the settlers who heartlessly took over the Palestinian homes. [...]

Their choice to stay here and to fight an almost hopeless battle for the values of peace and humanism is commendable. Sometimes I want to ask their forgiveness for the impossible country we gave them. They do not have to wave the Israeli flag anywhere. Each one of them is to me a waving flag of humanism, compassion and true loyalty to their country and people. “To the glory of the state of Israel” — nobody deserves that phrase more than they do, even if it gives them the creeps.

Reporting on the suppression of the protest on Friday (April 9 2010), Bernard Avishai makes a mockery of any attempt to label the protesters as radicals.

The organizers of the weekly Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations are a loose, but hardly amorphous, group; no formal hierarchy, but rather a network of perhaps a dozen thirty-somethings, as closely knit as a basketball team. The ones who more or less act as the point guards are graduate students who’ve gone to school in America and have come back — Assaf Sharon from Stanford, Avner Inbar from the University of Chicago — to write theses in political philosophy. Instead, they are now practicing political philosophy. The oldest in the group, Dr. Amos Goldberg, is a Hebrew University teaching fellow in Holocaust Studies (and a former graduate student of my wife, Sidra).

Almost none in the group, I hasten to add, are leftists in the ordinary sense. Assaf and Amos are the products of the National Religious Party youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and came by their skepticism honestly. Another, Sara Benninga, is the daughter of a distinguished Tel Aviv University business professor. Most came to this issue because it could simply not be ignored. Little by little, they are becoming radicals of democratic globalism.

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Tact in Sheikh Jarrah

The Sheikh Jarrah demonstrators are criticized from the right and the left over the absence of Israeli flags at their demonstrations. But when you look at their considerations they are commendable.

Nili Osherov, Ynet, April 3 2010 [Hebrew original here]

“Why don’t you wave the Israeli flag?” the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrators are challenged again and again. The right wing in all of its stripes sees it as further proof of the separatism, alienation and self-hate with which the radical left is inflicted. The new Israeli left (or in a word, the right) begs: “Please wave it. Sheikh Jarrah is a good ‘case’ that could win the sympathy of the Israeli public. If only you waved the Israeli flag the whole nation would be with you.”Is that wise advice? I am afraid that the left of Sheikh Jarrah will not sweep up the Israeli nation even if it wraps itself in national flags from head to toe and decorates itself with pictures of Israel’s chiefs of staff and presidents through the ages. If the left wants the sympathy of the people of Israel I would recommend it wave slogans such as “Jerusalem is our united capital for ever and ever” or “death to the Arabs.” That would do the job better.

But since I was there, and since I know the people well enough to draw a typical profile of a Sheikh Jarrah demonstrator defined as a radical left wing activist (or simply: the true left), I have a clear answer why the Israeli flag has not been waved there, and it has one word: tact. Sheikh Jarrah, just like the nonviolent protests at Bil’in and Ni’lin, just like organizations such as Breaking the Silence and Combatants for Peace, are part of a process being led by young Israelis today (and other young people like them on the Palestinian side), that could be the start of the end of the violent conflict in our area. Read more…

On Friday (April 9 2010) Israeli author David Grossman made an impromptu speech [video here] at the protest against the continued evictions of Palestinians families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and their replacement with fundamentalist settlers.

I think that we are all beginning to grasp — even those who maybe don’t really want to — how 43 years ago, by turning a blind eye, by actively or passively cooperating, we actually cultivated a kind of carnivorous plant that is slowly devouring us, consuming every good part within us, making the country we live in a place that is not good to live in. Not good not only if you are an Arab citizen of Israel, and certainly if you are a Palestinian resident of the Territories — not good also for every Jewish Israeli person who wants to live here, who cherishes some hope to be in a place where humans are respected as humans, where your rights are treated as a given, where humanity, morality, and civil rights are not dirty words, not something from the bleeding-heart Left. No. These are the bread and water, the butter and milk of our lives, the stuff from which we will make our lives, and really make them lives worth living here.

Grossman spoke after police suppressed an attempt, ahead of the protest, by a group of veteran peace activists, accompanied by the young leadership of the Sheikh Jarrah protest movement, to see first-hand the homes of families already evicted and of those under immediate threat. Bernard Avishai, who was with the group, reports:

Ever since the Friday demonstrations began back in January, the police had cordoned off the homes of the displaced families after about 2 PM, so that demonstrators were unable to show solidarity directly to the people evicted, or express their disgust with the Jewish settlers. In response — a kind of outflanking operation — the group invited about 30 of us, including the author David Grossman, former speaker Avrum Burg, NIF President Naomi Chazan, Israel Prize winner Zeev Sternhell, to gather at the homes of the families at 1:30 PM, where we conducted a kind of impromptu seminar for a couple of hours (not a hard thing for writers and professors, as things turned out).

At around 3:30 PM, we all suddenly emerged onto the street with our signs, and stood across from the homes that were confiscated, kitty-corner to the others that are under threat. When the police commanders realized that we were actually behind their lines, they quickly organized and sent a phalanx of heavily armed officers to form a line behind us, and began pushing us out toward the main demonstration in a park across the street.

WE HAD ALL agreed in advance that we would not resist, or do anything to challenge police authority. As we were being pushed, we walked very slowly but steadily toward the demonstrating crowd that was gathered in the usual place. Now and then we would scold the police for pushing too aggressively. Most of the young officers seemed a little abashed to be pushing well-known sixty-somethings around, but that was the point.

Then something unexpected and chilling happened. The commander of the police spotted Assaf and recognized him as the group’s organizer. He instructed several officers to seize him and put him under arrest. Immediately, Avner, Amos, and another leader sat down, challenging the police to arrest them, too, which is exactly what the police did. The instinctive way the three sat down in solidarity, unwilling to allow Assaf to be arrested alone, touched those of us who were walking beside them in ways that are hard to explain. It reminded me of a sentence in Albert Camus’ The Plague, that there is no heroism in fighting something like the plague, just common decency.

Obama to meet leaders attending nuclear conference next week

Netanyahu is not on Obama’s schedule

Sources in US administration: Netanyahu can meet Obama only if he gives positive answers to his demands

Orly Azulai, Yediot, April 7 2010 [page 11; scan of Hebrew original here]

During the nuclear conference opening in Washington next week, Pres. Obama is going to find time to meet privately with some of the attending leaders. Netanyahu, as of now, is not one of them.

The White House spokesman issued in his daily briefing yesterday the list of leaders with whom Obama is going to meet during the conference. In response to a question, Gibbs said Obama did not have a meeting with Netanyahu and added: “I do not know if he is coming. I know that Israel is attending the conference. In any case, the president has recently met Sarkozi, Medvedev and Netanyahu, and therefore he is not going to meet them during the conference.”

Obama’s meeting schedule includes the leaders of nine countries: Jordan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Pakistan and South Africa.

A senior official in Washington said in a private conversation that the White House has been closely following the contacts between administration officials and Netanyahu’s people and reached the conclusion that the Israeli prime minister does not yet have answers to Obama’s demands regarding negotiations with the Palestinians, and since the two leaders met only two weeks ago there is no reason for another meeting between them.

The White House expects Netanyahu to provide his answers to President Obama’s demands before the nuclear conference opens in Washington next Monday. There have been constant talks between Obama’s and Netanyahu’s people over the past few days, and the special envoy George Mitchell has prepared to leave for the Middle East and meet Netanyahu to receive his answers before the conference. Mitchell has not yet scheduled his visit to Jerusalem because he and his people think there is no reason to have a meeting as long as Netanyahu does not have the answers. If Netanyahu does not have written answers by the time the meeting convenes, the two leaders will not meet.

However, political sources in Washington said that if Netanyahu comes to the conference with clear answers that satisfy the administration, Obama may meet him. But the White House says officially at this stage that no meeting has been scheduled between the two.

Not having a meeting with Netanyahu is undoubtedly a means to put pressure on Netanyahu. Read more…

UPDATE May 14 2010: Aluf Benn notes that Dermer is advising Netanyhau to wait Obama out until the Republican victory in the November mid-terms:

The opposing camp, personified by political adviser Ron Dermer and Netanyahu’s right-wing partners, is calling on the prime minister to wait for the Congressional elections in November. The Republicans are expected to win a majority in the House of Representatives, and the offended president, who will be starting to fight for his own reelection, will go easy on Israel. This approach says an excuse needs to be found for extending the freeze until November; to remain standing during yet another round and then to win the fight on points and remain in power without ceding a millimeter.

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This morning the New York Times covers a story that has been central to Israeli public debate for months: The ongoing campaign to silence dissent in Israel and suppress the local human rights community.

Reporter Isabel Kershner does not name the official associated with the campaign nor specify the venue where the statement was made:

A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”

Here is the full quote from the original article, by Herb Keinon, in the July 16 2009 edition of the Jerusalem Post

“We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity,” said Ron Dermer, director of policy planning in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Dermer and Sharansky with Bush

Dermer was Natan Sharansky’s ghost writer for the 2004 book “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.” This neoconservative “democratization agenda” manifest was published by the Sheldon Adelson funded Shalem Center, whose alumni now staff many of the senior positions at the Prime Minister’s Office. Dermer used his extensive GOP connections to bring the book to the attention of President Bush, who in a 2005 interview advised anyone who wants “a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy” to read it.

As Finance Minister in the Sharon government, Netanyahu appointed Dermer to the post of Economic Attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and he has come to be known as one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers. Maariv’s Shalom Yerushalmi reports that Dermer was a central figure in the drafting of the Bar-Ilan speech. His fellow columnist, Ben Caspit, cites Dermer and uber-hawk Uzi Arad  as architects of the Israeli agenda for the first Netanyahu-Obama summit. Frustrated at the meeting’s failure, Dermer famously told reporters on the flight back that “two states for two peoples is a stupid and childish solution to a very complex problem.”

The explanation often given by Israeli pundits for Netanyahu’s bankrupt US policy is that the self described “expert on Washington” was unable to fathom the immense changes within the beltway since Bush’s first term. The fact that his right-hand man on policy is a movement neoconservative with deep roots in the previous administration was probably not helpful.  In this context, it is interesting to note the similarities in style and strategy between Dermer’s current campaign and the push to silence dissent in th US ahead of the invasion of Iraq.

Say something to Obama

Nahum Barnea, Yediot, April 4 2010 [page 2 with front-page teaser]

Wiesel and Obama

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that he is in deep trouble at the White House. This weekend he made an interesting effort to find ways into Barack Obama’s heart. The author Elie Wiesel, in Israel for the holiday, received a call from the Prime Minister’s Office asking that he meet urgently with Netanyahu. On Friday afternoon Wiesel arrived at Netanyahu’s Ceasarea home.

Obama venerates Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. He sees in him a role model for the struggle for human rights. When Obama, on his way back from the Cairo University speech, decided to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp, he asked Wiesel to accompany him and give the keynote speech at the on site ceremony. Obama asked that he join him on the Air Force One flight to Washington.

During the flight, Wiesel read the text of Obama’s Cairo speech and remarked that there was no room for comparison of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering. Obama was convinced and rectified the message in a speech he gave after returning to the US.

Netanyahu

This is the background for the request that Wiesel meet Obama as soon as possible, in order to defend the Prime Minister and convince the President that he is mistaken in his appraisal of the motivations and actions of Netanyahu and his government.

Wiesel listened and told Netanyahu that he is scheduled to meet the President for lunch soon and he will use the opportunity to expand on the issues raised by the Prime Minister.

[...]

This morning’s (April 1 2010) readers of Yediot were treated to a particularly cumbersome and puzzling news item, entitled “What the the GSS doesn’t want you to know”:

What all the world’s citizens are allowed to know is denied Israeli residents: Foreign newspapers and international media publish a story whose details cannot be published in Israel.

The foreign media is publishing many details on this story and information on its protagonists. All the details can be found on the internet if one searches for “Israeli journalist gag.”

I’m not sure if linking to a story constitutes a violation of the gag order. If the General Security Service (GSS aka Shabak aka Shin Bet) thinks it does, the legal debate — which would expose the anachronism of some of Israel’s more anti-democratic practices — is well worth the price. So here is the link to Ron Kampeas’s JTA article.

Kampeas was the first to publish the story in the mainstream international media earlier this week (bloggers, notably Richard Silverstein, have been writing about it for weeks.) Donald McIntyre of the Independent became the first Israeli-based international correspondent to do so a day later. Remarkably, some very senior international correspondents who have had the full story, including documents, since January, have yet to report on it.

After reading the news reports one can better understand what former Haaretz editor-in-chief Hanoch Marmari is talking about in the essay below (translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service in Melbourne, Australia.) Marmari’s refrain — it cannot happen here — may help explain what is behind some mainstream US journalists’ reluctance to report on this and other stories exposing severe defects in Israeli democracy: Cognitive dissonance.

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It cannot happen here!

I refuse to believe those who argue that in a liberal democracy like Israel, a person may disappear altogether for allegedly violating state security. I certainly refuse to accept the disappearance of someone whose trial has already started. This is not Guantanamo, nor Lubyanka nor Tehran. This kind of scenario could not be played out here in the free spirit land of Twitter and Facebook .

Marmari

Hanoch Marmari, The Seventh Eye [media matters internet magazine; Hebrew original here], March 14 2010

Here, such a thing cannot happen. We do live in a liberal democracy, true, even if it is not a constitutional democracy. But our High Court of Justice takes the role of a watchdog keeping a sharp eye on the seal of the, as yet, unfinished Constitution. The spirit of the court’s rulings suggests that when it comes to human rights and liberties, it is in no rush to bow its head to any governmental power. The court takes account of both the public interest and individual rights.

Therefore I do not believe that such a scenario could be played out in a democracy like ours. I do not believe that in our country a citizen would be arrested for state security violations, and that an absolute gag order would be imposed on the very fact of the arrest.

Such a thing could not happen here. Perhaps there will be exceptions in severe espionage cases when it is necessary to expose a network of enemy moles which has penetrated a security service. But even then, the media embargo should be confined to a brief, limited, and pre-set period.

The very fact of the arrest of citizens, who have apparently transgressed the law by giving away state secrets, requires a great deal of transparency. I cannot imagine a situation in our liberal country in which a person will be held in custody for an extended period without the public being aware of the very arrest and the reasons for it.

There are no doubt circumstances which do justify a brief media ban, in order to finalise an investigation. But there is a wide gap between that and the comprehensive hiding away of a citizen’s arrest. Ours is a liberal democracy and people do not disappear here into facilities that do not appear on any maps. Nor do we have extended house arrest without the matter being disclosed. This is not Guantanamo, nor Lubyanka nor Tehran. This kind of scenario could not be played out here in the free spirit land of Twitter and Facebook.

No doubt there have been occasions when security agencies’ officials have approached judges in their chambers to request a comprehensive gag. But our judges are not rubber stamps. They delve deeply into the documentation provided and, if need be, they fearlessly stand up to the agencies and declare: enough!

And when the judges do sign up, we know that there is substance to the claims. I am therefore totally relaxed and comfortable about that even if they impose a temporary gag, especially when this involves an allegation of critical harm to the state’s security.

Who can appreciate better than judges the possible harm that a gag order can do to the accused, whether an elderly pensioner who has given his best years to the state, or a young woman who believed that by exposing a secret she would save the homeland? I am totally relaxed and comfortable, secure in the knowledge that our judges are no rubber stamps.

We can, however, recall the extended (a whole ten years) absolute gag order that was imposed on the arrest, trial, conviction and incarceration of Marcus Klingberg on charges of espionage for the Soviet Union. Klingberg, a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology who was head of the Biological Institute in Ness Ziona, disappeared one day (in 1983) without a trace. Even when it became known that he was serving a 20-year sentence for espionage, a total prohibition was imposed on the Israeli press not to reveal it. Even mentioning the existence of the man was forbidden. Klingberg was “the man who never was” for a whole decade.

But Klingberg’s extreme espionage case cannot be used as a basis for drawing  conclusions about a routine leaking of information from the security forces.  And even Klingberg’s case, severe as it was, did not justify the extreme way in which it was kept away from the public consciousness. Censorship of the case was so broad  that you could not even mention his name in the Israeli media in a completely unrelated context. The intention was to totally wipe out his memory from our consciousness. True, this happened three decades ago, and today a recurrence is not possible. I’m sure that the defence establishment has drawn the lesson that the stain which stuck to it for making people disappear is not going to be wiped clean, but has become more conspicuous over the years.

Espionage cases continue to be tried behind closed doors, which must hamper the defence’s ability to conduct its case properly (not having the ability to sight all the evidence, for example), but at least there is no gag on the very existence of the trial, and even the worst spies have been exposed to public scrutiny once the interrogation has been completed.

We are a liberal democracy – even the worst criminals and traitors are entitled to a public trial. Their legal team can be publicly vocal, at least in terms of the conditions of their detention. They can also publicly raise the prosecution’s conduct in the case as it is acting in the state’s name. Therefore I do not believe those who argue that right here and now, a person may altogether disappear because of allegations of security breaches, especially once the person’s trial has begun.

We are one of the world’s most sophisticated democracies. And we have an unhindered and refined legal system. It is clear to all that the purpose of these legal proceedings is to protect ourselves from people who take the law into their own hands, and we wholeheartedly believe that our system is not vindictive nor is devised to strike fear into the accused. Furthermore, our system is not meant to teach the offender a lesson he won’t forget beyond the court’s verdicts.

It is palpably obvious to us that the defence establishment respects the courts. Once a prisoner suspected of giving away classified information is released after serving his sentence, the system lets him live his life, not chasing him, nor trying to erase the (obsolete) knowledge stored in his mind for fear of further leaks.

None of our most famous cases of espionage and treason — those of Mordechai Vanunu, Israel Baer, Shabtai Kalmanovich and Nahum Manbar were held under a total gag order. Even if a spy like Marcus Klingberg were to be exposed today, I don’t believe that it would be possible to conceal his trial as happened at the beginning of the ‘eighties. I therefore don’t believe those stories and rumours that such a thing is indeed occurring.

There have indeed been cases in which even a defence establishment as splendid as our own has stumbled trying to attribute far-reaching malicious intentions to people who made classified information public. But the attempt to set up Brigadier-General Yitzhak (Yatzeh) Yaakov fell flat on its face. The court refused to accept the State’s contention that Yaakov was a spy. It ruled that the distinguished officer with so many achievements did not intend to harm state security and he was convicted of the relatively mild offence of disclosing secret information without authority.

After 15 months of detention and house arrest (in a motel), Yaakov was sentenced to two years’ probation and released immediately. This provides me with another reason why I cannot conceive of the same defence establishment failing again in attributing far-reaching malevolent intentions to people suspected of exposing classified information.

For all these reasons, I do not believe a scenario like that can be played out here. I do not believe that a citizen can be arrested and tried for suspected security offences right under our noses without anyone knowing anything about it.

I do not believe that a total gag order has been imposed not only on the prolonged detention, but on the trial that followed. Unquestionably these are only malicious rumours that are doing the rounds on the Net.

I do not believe that here, in the Town Square, between the Arts Centre and the Hall of Justice, where the public trust in the transparency of the judicial process is embodied, the trial of an anonymous person is taking place behind closed doors even if across the road the Defence Towers are looking down on the Hall of Justice.

This does not seem logical, nor could it possibly be so. This is undoubtedly a baseless rumour, and anyone contending otherwise is trying to besmirch both our justice system and the defence establishment.

Trials do not take place here in darkened dungeons, nor do we have show trials behind glass or chicken wire.  I have no doubt that such a strange, terrible and baseless scenario cannot take place in such a sophisticated democracy as our own.