Coteret

Brig. Avi Benayahu, IDF Spokesperson

This year (2009), the Israeli public debate on the issue of institutional corruption in the IDF has been particularly angry. Defense Minister Barak’s lavish stay in Paris during Aeronautical Salon provoked an already incensed media into a frenzy of muckracking. One result was the exposure, in late November, of the fact that MK Nachman Shai (Kadima) was receiving a full IDF pension, even though he served only three years of regular duty (as IDF spokesperson in the early ’90s.)

Unlike the rest of the media, which took the easy path and blasted Shai, Globes columnist Matti Golan, decided to find out who exactly in the IDF made the decision to award the extraordinary pension. Since many Israeli politicians (Barak, for example) held senior IDF positions at the time, this is not a trivial question.

The IDF Spokesperson, unused to questioning of his statements, was caught off guard. Golan’s December 4 2009 column is a blow-by-blow account of how a journalist can sink his teeth into a defense bureaucrat’s calf and hold on like a bulldog.

The spokesman’s office asked what I mean. They are right. They are used to telling journalists “competent authorities” and the journalists repeat it like parrots without unnecessary questions.

Two weeks later, even though the issue is completely out of the news, Golan is still at it. His December 17 column (full text after the jump) chronicles his continued interrogation of the IDF spokesperson’s staff, who continue to throw fragments at him, when he will settle for nothing except the whole story.

I was troubled by the phrase “To the best of our examination.”  What does it mean?  The obvious conclusion would be that they are not certain.  They did not say, “We looked into it and that’s the way it is.”  They said that their examination failed to yield a clear and unequivocal answer.  Should it turn out in the future that their reply was inaccurate, incorrect, or wrong, they could always argue that “the best of our examination” was not good enough…

This is why I sent my following reaction to the IDF spokesperson:  “I wish to know what exactly do you mean by ‘to the best of our examination’?  Is it possible that your examination was inconclusive?

The pension is no longer the issue. Neither is the conduct of the IDF Spokesperson. Golan is out to prove that the soft-pedaling of his fellow journalists facilitates IDF obfuscation. Under the subheading “This is how the media help the whitewashers,” he ends with

I was doubtful right from the start.  In this era of computers, does it really take time to find 13-years-old material?  What is worse, if the IDF needs to look for the “authorizing party,” why did it eventually name those very parties when answering the press?  Was it trying to lie, knowingly?  No, it was not.  This is simply the automatic reply to embarrassing queries: “Authorized parties approved,” “everything was done according to the rules,” and so on.

For civilian deaths, even those of children, a common IDF reply is along the lines of “the force felt threatened and fired at suspects” and, except for a few exceptions that prove the rule, that is the end of any investigative journalism. Imagine the change if every foreign bureau chief or Israeli defense correspondent, took the Golan approach and really looked into the death of even one of every fifty or a hundred dead children. That’s how oversight works — even the slight chance of exposure causes a tremendous change in behavior.

Read more…

Waste and institutional corruption connected to the bloated defense budget have been on the the Israeli public agenda for some time. However, the defense establishment’s political clout has always helped nip any reform initiative in the bud.

This year (2009), the public debate on the issue has been particularly angry. Defense Minister Barak’s lavish stay in Paris during Aeronautical Salon provoked an already incensed media into a frenzy of muckracking. One result was the exposure, in late November, of the fact that MK Nachman Shai (Kadima) was receiving a full IDF pension, even though he served only three years of regular duty (as IDF spokesperson in the early ’90s.)

Globes columnist Matti Golan, who I have disparaged in the past as grumpy conservative, has proven for the third time in two-weeks (see also here and here) that he is a  hard-nosed independent journalist. Instead of taking the easy path and blasting Shai, he decided to find out who exactly in the IDF made the decision to award the extraordinary pension. Since many Israeli politicians (Barak, for example) held senior IDF positions at the time, this is not a trivial question.

The IDF Spokesperson, unused to questioning of his statements, was caught off guard. Golan’s December 4 2009 column is a blow-by-blow account of how a journalist can sink his teeth into a defense bureaucrat’s calf and hold on like a bulldog. Here’s a choice passage (full text after the jump.)

The spokesman’s office asked what I mean. They are right. They are used to telling journalists “competent authorities” and the journalists repeat it like parrots without unnecessary questions. After I clarified my intention, I received another phone call with an answer contingent on being “off the record.” I asked what I was supposed to do with that answer? They said: write it in the name of “military sources.” I said: “I don’t want to. I sent you a written question, the simplest factual question possible. I demand a written answer.” Apparently they are not used to such obvious demands from journalists either.

Why don’t other journalists display the same kind of tenacity on other pressing issues where the IDF effectively operates free of any civilian oversight, such as Palestinian civilian deaths? To be fair, in Shai’s case, the spokesperson could not credibly hide behind security-related secrecy. But I don’t think that is the entire story. There’s also sheer fatigue and an unhealthy, incestuous relationship. The Israeli journalists who should be doing most of the questioning are defense correspondents. In the Israeli media culture, they are dependent on a constant drip feed of leaks from the IDF, with the Spokesperson does much of the leaking. Hardly a day goes without some leaked security item topping the news agenda. Even a few days beyond the IDF Spokesperson’s pale, as “punishment” for being over inquisitive, could end a career.

International journalists are not trapped in this relationship. They should do better. Read more…

Ofer Shelah, Maariv’s defense analyst, already known for saying what he thinks, has been publishing some remarkable commentary lately. Last week, he was very blunt about the recent signs of sedition among fundamentalist settler-soldiers in the West Bank: The IDF top brass should have taken into consideration the consequences of allowing fanatical Rabbis into the combat units during the Gaza war.

His op-ed today is also remarkable. Bottom line: In the IDF you don’t have to lie because you can do pretty much whatever you want, but if you do lie there won’t be any consequences. Here are the key excerpts, but it’s worth reading the entire article (after the jump.) Note the reference to the Goldstone report.

Would the IDF chief of staff lie?…It is unlikely that anyone here would feel the need to lie, and it is more unlikely that he would have to pay any price for being caught in a lie. The Israeli public accepted the results of Kafr Kana, the Shehade assassination and Operation Cast Lead with a shrug of the shoulders. The other side is always more vicious, it shoots at civilians deliberately, it hides inside a civilian population. We’ve long since stopped judging ourselves by a moral yardstick, and consider this a demand of a hypocritical and hostile world. Had he lied, nobody would have been outraged. Just as no one was outraged by the speed with which the IDF closed the investigations into wrongful acts in Operation Cast Lead—and today Israel is wracking its brain over the serious ramifications of the Goldstone report. In society’s whining self-perception as victims, a lie by the army is considered justified self defense against the criticism of an anti-Semitic world. [In the IDF] you won’t have to lie, and if you do lie, nobody will demand that you go.

Can you imagine the professional future of a mainstream US journalist if he expressed similar sentiments about Israel? We still have at least one thing to be proud of in this country — freedom of expression for Israeli citizens and a vibrant public debate. Not for long though, if the Israeli neoconservatives have their way.

Read more…

Not.

But that’s what Haaretz seems to think. A front-page investigative report in this morning’s edition (December 1 2009) finds that Machanaim a US 501c3 tax exempt charity is funding the Task Force to Save the Nation and the Land (aka SOS Israel)

the organization that offered every soldier refusing to evacuate a settlement, and the Kfir Brigade soldiers who publicly demonstrated their opposition to evacuation, NIS 1,000 for every day they spend in military prison

After asking Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, why he has not asked the US government to desist from indirectly funding sedition in the IDF and questioning why an NGO engaged in blatantly illegal activity enjoys a “clean bill of health” from the Registrar of Associations, the article ends with

The Knesset will hold a discussion on the subject of transparency of contributions that non-profit organizations receive from abroad. The event, which will be hosted by Improvement of Government Services Minister Michael Eitan, is being organized by the NGO Monitor organization, which is based in Jerusalem.

Stunning. Gerald Steinberg is not the partisan hack I claimed he was. The Knesset conference will demand transparency for all NGOs. Perhaps we can also expect that the agenda will also include a discussion of the sovereignty-threatening instance of right-wing NGO “lawfare” reported in this morning’s Jerusalem Post, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel’s High Court of Justice petition against the settlement “freeze.”

A quick look at the Hebrew version of the report, however, reveals that hell has yet to freeze over. It questions NGO Monitor on what action it has taken on Machanaim/SOS Israel and gets a vague response.

Disappointing but revealing: The night editor at the English edition, forced to abridge the report, actually assumed that the conference would deal with this issue. After all, its organizer is a group calling itself  an “NGO monitor.”

RELATED POSTS: Exposing Gerald Steinberg and NGO Monitor | Israel Harel, Zionist Strategist (on NGO Monitor’s fundamentalist allies) |Globes on the hypocrisy of right-wing “democrats” |