Breaking NEWS!!!
Israelli PM Netanyahu pulls out of US nuclear summit: BBC
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has cancelled a planned visit to a summit on nuclear security in Washington next week, Israeli reports say.
Mr Netanyahu made the decision after learning that Egypt and Turkey intended to raise the issue of Israel’s presumed nuclear arsenal, Israeli radio said.
Mr Obama is due to host dozens of world leaders at the two-day conference, which begins in Washington on Monday.
Israel has never confirmed or denied that it possesses atomic weapons.
Netanyahu cancels trip to U.S. nuclear summit: Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned trip to Washington, where he was scheduled to participate in a nuclear security summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama, government officials said.
Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor will take Netanyahu’s place in the nuclear summit.
Obama has invited more than 40 countries to the summit, which will deal with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist groups.
Netanyahu was due to arrive in Washington on Monday evening and was set to take part in three or four conference sessions the follwoing day, before returning to Israel on Wednesday.
Officials said the PM canceled the trip over fears that a group of Muslim states, led by Egypt and Turkey, would demand that Israel sign up to the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT.
A senior government official told Haaretz that that Israel was “disappointed” with developments in the run-up to the conference.
“The nuclear security summit is supposed to be about dealing with the danger of nuclear terror,” the official said. “Israel is a part of that effort and has responded positively to President Obama’s invitation to the conference.”
The official added: “But that said, in the last few days we have received reports about the intention of several participant states to depart from the issue of combatting terrorism and instead misuse the event to goad Israel over the NPT.”
One hundred eighty-nine countries, including all Arab states, are party to the NPT. Only Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea are not.
Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but operates a policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’, never publicly confirming or denying their existence.
Many Muslim countries have voiced alarm at alleged nuclear programs in Israel and Iran, and have repeatedly called for an agreement to ban nuclear weapons from the region.
In late March the Arab League called for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons during a closed-door sessio, calling for a review of the 1970 NPT in order to create a definitive plan for eliminating nuclear weapons .
They also called on the UN to declare the Middle East as a nuclear-weapons-free region.
BREAKING BDS NEWS!
Mira Awad, a Palestinian singer from inside Israel, has cancelled her scheduled performance, together with Jewish Israeli singer Achinoam Nini, in the UK sponsored by the Zionist Federation to celebrate Israel’s 62 years of “independence” on Nakba Day.
Awad published a letter today in Al-Ittihad, the newspaper of the Israeli Communist Party, saying that she would “never” perform for Israel’s “independence,” not in London nor anywhere else.
EDITOR: The Israeli Fascists March Onwards
So now there is another idea – those we do not like, say the Israeli fascists, will be stripped of their citizenship. What a marvelous idea, isn’t it? There will be problem, however, as those undesirables will be citizens of no country, and will not be able to gain entry anywhere, of course. Maybe a Final Solution? All options are on the table with those guys.
Israeli lawmaker: ‘Strip those who hurt state security of their citizenship’: Haaretz
Israeli citizens found to be undermining state security should be stripped of their citizenship, the chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee said Thursday, referring to the recently released espionage affair involving journalist and former Israel Defense Forces soldier Anat Kam.
Earlier Thursday, a Tel Aviv district court judge lifted a months-long gag order revealing that Anat Kam, a journalist and ex-soldier, was suspected of “serious espionage” for allegedly giving classified information to a reporter from Haaretz regarding the IDF’s rules of engagement.
Referring to the newly uncovered case, Yisrael BeiteinuMK David Rotem said that he intended to submit a correction to the corrections law in the upcoming Knesset session, which would deny those convicted with hurting state security of their national insurance as well as of prison educational privileges.
“Even though the bill was prepared before the affair being discussed in recent days, this is a classic case in which it would deal,” Rotem said, adding that the Kam case was an “extremely severe case, in which penalty must be served in full, both to Anat Kam who stole the documents and the journalists who published them.”
The Yisrael Beiteinu MK also said that “anyone who dares hurt and slander state security should pay for it,” adding that he intended to strip anyone found guilty for such charges of their citizenship, saying that “citizenship requires loyalty.”
Rotem’s comments was another of several responses to the newly revealed story, both inn Israel and abroad.
Earlier Thursday, human rights group B’Tselem said that the Israeli government was overlooking the serious allegations indicated in the documents leaked in the Anat Kam affair, while choosing to investigate the leak itself.
The lifting of months-long gag order earlier Thursday revealed that Anat Kam, a journalist and ex-soldier, is suspected of “serious espionage” for allegedly giving classified information to a reporter from Haaretz regarding the IDF’s rules of engagement.
In a statement released just hours after the gag order was released, B’Tselem said that with “the lifting of the gag order over the Anat Kam affair, B’Tselem would like to reiterate that this case deals with documents which indicate that the military has been conducting assassinations in the West Bank in the guise of arrest operations, thus contradicting Israel’s official statements and in violation of a High Court ruling.”
“The last official assassination initiated by Israel in the West Bank was in August of 2006. Since then, Israel had stated that, given the opportunity, IDF forces would arrest wanted Palestinians,” B’Tselem added.
The human rights group also stated that “in spite of these declarations “B’Tselem research has shown that in many cases soldiers have been conducting themselves in the territories as if they were on a hit mission, as opposed to arrest operations.”
“What the journalist Uri Blau had uncovered supports B’Tselem’s claims in this matter,” the human rights group said, adding that with the leaking of the affair “authorities rushed to investigate the leak and chose to ignore the severe suspicions of blatant wrongdoings depicted in those documents.”
Also Thursday, Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the N.Y.-based organization Committee to Protect Journalists, told Haaretz he questioned the length of breadth of the blanket gag order, lifted after many international media outlets, not bound by it, already released details regarding the affair.
“It is disturbing to happen in a democratic country – people outside Israel reported that it happened and as a journalist, when you have pieces of information you have to confirm it with the source when possible,” Abdel Dayem said.
“And then the source can’t talk because of the gag order, if they talk under the gag order they might face additional legal action,” he added saying that the judicial decision to gag the story was “artificially creating a roadblock on the way to full and proper reporting of the story. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen in democratic society.”
Abdel Dayem also told Haaretz “There were so many alleged in this story it was hardly a story. And frankly, it was reported outside Israel all over the place,” also saying that all one needed to do was “open the internet and read everything you need about it. But somehow Israeli journalists weren?t allowed to write about it inside Israel.
“The whole rationale for gag order is no longer intact ? the Israeli judiciary had rationale to issue this gag order, but it was out of the window once the story was leaked,” Abdel Dayem said
EDITOR: Land of Extremism
It has been quite clear for some time that Israel has become even more extreme than Iran. After all, Iran has never attacked another country, has not occupied it, and did not rule it brutally for decades. Now it is clear that even in the cultural sphere, Israel is more limited than the Islamic Republic. Well, this is how it is when you have a Jewish Republic, which at the same time wishes to also be the ONLY DEMOCRACY in the Universe…
OK in Iran, shunned in Israel: film about Muslim born a Jew: The Independent
By Jerome Taylor, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Israeli film distributors have snubbed a controversial British comedy about a Muslim man who finds out he was born a Jew.
The Infidel, which was written by Jewish-born comedian David Baddiel and is having its UK premier tonight, is an irreverent culture clash comedy about a devoted Muslim father who discovers he was adopted and that his original parents were Jewish.
In a bid to discover more about his new found identity, the father figure, Mahmoud Nasir seeks out his neighbour Lenny, a drunken Jewish cab driver who begins teaching his new friend how to be Jewish.
For a low-cost British comedy made for little more than £1million it has received impressive global interest. Distribution rights have already been sold in 62 different countries, including a host of Muslims states in the Middle East which are known for their strict censorship rules.
But not a single distributor has come forward to show the film in Israel because of fears that it might cause upset within some sections of the Jewish community.
In contrast Israeli distributors have been happy to buy the rights to Four Lions, a soon to be released religious themed comedy about a hapless homegrown terrorist cell who plan a series of suicide bombings in London.
Uzma Hasan, one of the film’s producers, told The Independent: “It’s strange. We’ve had interest from all over the world. We first pitched the film to distributors at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and we hadn’t even started shooting. All we had was a ten second pitch “Muslim man finds out he’s a Jew” and people jumped on it straight away, especially in the Middle East. But for some reason the Israeli distributors just haven’t picked it up.”
As long as it passes the various censorship bureaucracies in each country, The Infidel should soon be showing in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Oman, Iran and Saudi Arabia. There has even been a request from a cinema in Iraq to screen the film. The rights for Four Lions have also been sold across a number of Muslim countries in the Middle East.
Gianluca Chacra, the Dubai-based distributor Front Row Entertainment who acquired rights for The Infidel to the entire Middle East region outside of Israel, said: “We hope this movie will bring in a clear message of tolerance and therefore respect and a sign of peace in this region.”
Despite the potentially controversial nature of its subject, the film’s producers have always insisted that The Infidel treats religion with respect.
“The comedy is about relationships between communities, stereotypes, ideas that Muslims have about Jews and Jews have about Muslims,” said Baddiel. “Essentially it’s culture clash comedy. In my film there are virtually no jokes about, as it were, religion itself. I treat religion fairly reverentially because it suited the narrative to do so.”
English stand-up comedian Omid Djalili, who is from an Iranian Baha’i family and plays the lead role Mahmoud Nasir, added: “Maybe Israeli distributors want the character to be a Jew
throughout the film or perhaps they are concerned the film will be seen as anti-Semitic. We don’t know. There’s still an offer to buy it for Israeli audiences, but they’re unsure.”
This is not the first time that the film has had trouble with distributors. According to Baddiel, BBC Films helped develop the film’s script but pulled out following the so-called Sachsgate scandal.
“The BBC has become very morally concerned about anything that might offend so it became clear that they weren’t going to do it,” said Baddiel.
A BBC spokesperson last night denied that the decision to pull out was related to Sachsgate. “BBC Films have a number of scripts in development at any one time, and we are not able to invest in many of them for what can be a variety of creative reasons,” she said.
Prior to its release the film was shown to a number of Jewish and Muslim organisations, none of whom have so far raised any complaints.
“People who have seen the film are rather surprised that towards the end of the film there seems to be some sort of resolution which seems to involve a sort of warmth towards religion,” said Baddiel. “Without giving the end away, the main religious characters have to go back to their religious texts – both the Qur’an and the Old Testament – to find a way through their religious confusion. That might imply a sort of pro-religious ending.”
EDITOR: The Jewish Republic of Judea
It is clear to anyone who thinks even a little about this nationalist ethnic theocracy, that such an animal does not need free press or media; what it needs is Jewish, national and ethnic-cleansing press, and this is what it will get if this continues… This affair has gone beyond all others in terms of the attack on press freedom in Israel, but it is a mere marker – soon no Palestinian citizen of Israel (so called Israeli Arab) will be able to open his (or her) mouth without finding themselves in jail, and probably without citizenship. After all, why should a Jewish State have Arab citizens? Arabrein, that is what they want, and also Liberalrein, of course.
Anat Kam has been made a scapegoat, says lawyer: Haaretz
By Yossi Melman and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents
Anat Kam suspected of ‘serious espionage’ for allegedly giving classified information to a Haaretz reporter.
Anat Kam, the journalist and ex-Israeli soldier suspected of “serious espionage” for allegedly giving classified information to a reporter from Haaretz regarding the IDF’s rules of engagement is being made a scapegoat, her defense attorney told Army Radio Thursday.
“Where’s the intent to undermine state security? The fact that she handed the information over to a journalist for him to publish?,” Avidgor Feldman told Army Radio.
“If she had been really interested to undermine state security, there would have been no shortage in hands and ears willing to accept that material and use to hurt the state,” Feldman said, adding that he felt “someone just said to himself ‘let’s find a scapegoat.'”
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The affair, which has been circulating media worldwide over the last few weeks, was under a strict gag order in Israel, preventing any Israeli media from reporting on the case.
(Click here to read the original article by Haaretz reporter Uri Blau)
Kam, 23, is accused of appropriating 2,000 documents, 700 of which were classified as “top secret” while serving in the IDF’s Central Command in 2007. After her army service, Kam went on to work for the Walla news agency.
“She’s an Israeli, she’s a Zionist – she’s even opposed to the refusal of orders,” a representative of Kam said Thursday, after the gag order was lifted. Kam had “no intention of harming the security of Israel,” he added. “This is a dangerous precedent.”
Haaretz is currently negotiating with the legal authorities for the return of the reporter in question, Uri Blau, who is presently in London.
In a rare media briefing on Thursday, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said that Blau was currently wanted by both the security service and Israel Police for questioning.
According to an agreement reached in September 2009 by the Shin Bet and Haaretz’s lawyer, Mibi Mozer, Blau was to return to the security services some 50 classified documents still in his possession. But the Shin Bet believes Blau is still holding a nymber of secret documents that he received from Kam.
“Our main goal is to see those classified documents returned so that they do not fall into hostile hands,” said Diskin. “It is the dream of all our enemy states to get their hands on these kinds of documents.”
“We see this is a very serious matter in terms of the potential security damages it could save caused,” added Diskin. “This affair is not yet over. We are looking for the documents and waiting for them to return to the country, so that the damage cannot be caused.”
Haaretz learned Monday that Israel’s defense establishment decided to withdraw its support of a months-long blanket gag order on the security-related affair.
Diskin told reporters on Thursday that he had agreed to a partial lifting on the gag order after Mozer rejected an offer for another arrangement between Blau and the security services.
The names of those parties involved in the case and the charges leveled against them were thus released in Israel for the first time on Thursday.
After the details were exposed, one of Kam’s lawyers, Eitan Lehman, said Thursday that “some unusual mistakes were made in this case, including the unclear, careless, and lazy investigation which aimed at the wrong places, such as imposing a blanket gag-order.”
“At no time did her actions harm Israel’s security and there was certainly no intent to do the country any damage,” Lehman said, adding that “the published documents were all authorized by the IDF censor, proving that publishing them did not endanger the state’s security.”
“The real story is that the documents were exposed, unmonitored, and available to hundreds of people in the IDF, including low ranking members,” he said, adding that “Anat is not affiliated with any extreme political groups in Israel, and she is not one of those who attempt to hitch a ride on her back. She is a mainstream, Zionist, Israeli girl, the salt of the earth.”
Representatives of the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service and the State Prosecutor’s Office filed an appeal with the Tel Aviv District Court on Thursday, in which they requested the partial removal of the gag order. It has been in place for the last three and a half months.
Despite the court-imposed gag order, Israeli blogs and Web sites, along with foreign media outlets not subject to Israeli law, have been discussing the affair in detail over the past several weeks.
The reversal in the position reportedly came about after messages from the Supreme Court were sent to the State Prosecutor’s Office and the presiding judge, Ze’ev Hammer, allegedly hinting at the peculiar situation created, in which Israeli media was banned from publishing the story while worldwide outlets already released most of its details.
Col. Sima Vaknin-Gil, the chief military censor, commented on the situation during an interview with Haaretz on Monday. “I think when the coverage began abroad … especially with the comprehensive aspects connected to Israel’s image, it would have been right to consider lifting the order, at least partially,” she said.
Sometimes, she continued, “when there is a gag order, the censor is even barred from expressing its professional opinion and has to wait like everyone else for the order to be lifted – usually at the initiative of the media or the body that issued the order.
Debate in Israel on Gag Order in Security Leak Case: NY Times
A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case.
A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it must be fought, and stirring a public furor.
The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service.
Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal newspaper Haaretz, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.
Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.
Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media have so far made only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave from Walla!, but not why.
The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 issue that readers searched the Internet with the keywords “Israeli journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.
If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.
The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began to emerge in mid-March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.
According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding in Britain.”
The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.
Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.
Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military can to carry out pre-emptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.
Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the Israeli Press Council, said the gag order by a magistrate’s court should be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about such gag orders, though the ruling still prevented any discussion of the actual case.
Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the authorities could more easily press the suspect to arrive at a plea bargain.
Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized the ease with which courts in Israel hand out gag orders.
“Only the poor Hebrew readers do not know what is going on,” he said of Israelis unable to read foreign reports about the case in English.
Haaretz and Israel’s Channel 10 are fighting to lift the gag order. Mibi Moser, the lawyer representing Haaretz, said there would be a court hearing on the matter on April 12, if the gag order was not lifted before.
What would happen if Israel stopped fighting the world?: Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
So where did you spend Passover? Tens of thousands of Israelis were in Sinai. They ignored the Counter-Terrorism Bureau’s warning, yet returned home safe and sound. Other Israelis – wait until you hear this – visited Cairo. I repeat: Cairo! They too returned tired but happy. They too did not heed the warnings. Haaretz’s foreign news editor, for example, went to Egypt with his wife and four small children for the holiday. He identified himself as an Israeli everywhere he went, and believe it or not, was made to feel welcome.
Other Israelis traveled to other forbidden places all over the globe, including Turkey, and not a hair on their heads was harmed. They’d all had enough of the frightening campaigns.
Unintentionally, this world travel has become a kind of civil protest, a quiet uprising against the terror campaigns, a sort of rebellion that should be encouraged. In a brainwashed, blind, automatically obedient society, even this is something. It’s not merely the Israelis’ leisure culture, but the essence of their being. We are all surrounded by a phalanx of fear agents and dread brokers, suspicion marketers and anxiety propagandists. An army of generals and analysts, politicians and security specialists, all mobilized for one purpose – to infuse our life with terror.
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It’s time to free ourselves of their yoke. It’s not that there aren’t any dangers, or that we don’t need warning or security apparatuses, but they must not be the only influences. The voice of thunder from Jerusalem, willfully blown up and exaggerated, is the only voice we hear, without a trace of an alternative – a voice of normality, sanity, optimism and hope. This applies as much to our next vacation as it does to Israel’s next step in the peace process.
Spreading horror is a widespread, familiar practice in regimes that Israel does not want to resemble. Fear is the resort of the despot, a way to create false unity and prevent daring moves. Fear also feeds xenophobia, putting domestic problems out of people’s minds whether the foe is real or imagined. From Hamas’ armament to the tunnels to accusations that foreign workers and refugees spread crime and disease, from the Iranian nuclear threat to swine flu – all are tried-and-true methods of intimidation by exaggeration.
If we leave the Golan, missiles will land on Rosh Pina; if we withdraw from Yitzhar, Katyusha rockets will fall on our heads in the Dan region. Unless we bombard Iran, we’ll be blown up ourselves; if we lift the blockade on Gaza, Ashkelon will be destroyed. There may be a grain of truth in all these threats and predictions, but when a no less threatening scenario is provided, it is easy to wonder why exactly we need all this.
For a long time we haven’t had a statesman in these parts who has spread hope. Benjamin Netanyahu is the latest candidate for that position, but he’s not the only one who has instead become an agent of fear; that is the job of almost anyone who has access to the public at large. Auschwitz is on the doorstep all the time, and everything is terribly dangerous. We must get an Iron Dome and gas masks, immigration police and vaccinations for everyone, whether necessary or not. We must not travel, must not speak Hebrew, certainly must not withdraw from anywhere. Countless apparatuses specializing in spreading fear are at work, without a single agent of normality to balance them.
There is nobody in Israel to tell us what will happen if we stop fighting with the rest of the world. Everyone is analyzing only the dangers and risks. You’ll never hear anyone analyzing the chances and opportunities. Nobody is talking about a possible utopia – of being integrated into the space around us and being accepted by the world, of traveling by car to Europe, of enjoying the prosperity and security that ending the occupation would bring. The voices we hear tell us none of that. It might infuse people with hope, and that is dangerous.
Now the first crack has opened in the intimidation wall – a 36 percent increase in the number of travelers to Sinai. It seems like a small matter, but perhaps it will lead to opening additional daring cracks. If we didn’t heed the scaremongers, if we went to Sinai and it was great, maybe we should try a few more things. Perhaps we could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb, without initiating an attack. Perhaps withdrawing from the Golan isn’t as dangerous as they tell us. Perhaps lifting the Gaza blockade will be good for Israel, and recognizing Hamas will be a blessing.
And above all, heaven help us, maybe peace is a good thing, something that consists of more than just the existential dangers about which we’re constantly being warned.
So we ignored the warnings and went to Sinai? Let’s ignore some other imaginary fears too.
EDITOR: The Anat Kam affair
This will run and run, of course, as outside of Israel, everyone will understand this as a Stalinist Show Trial, but in Israel itself, were IQ is limited severely by nationalism, it is another matter. However, one thing is clear – no brutal and illegal regime is ever safe, as long as it employs human beings,because some of those are actually humane…
Israel lifts gagging order on Anat Kam espionage case: BBC
Anat Kam worked in the office of the IDF central command
A gagging order stopping Israeli media from reporting the case of a former soldier accused of leaking top secret documents has been partially lifted.
Anat Kam, 23, has been charged with “serious espionage” for allegedly giving more than 2,000 Israeli military documents to a journalist.
Observers believe they form the basis for claims the military ignored a major court ruling on killing militants.
Ms Kam’s lawyer said she did not harm, or intend to harm, national security.
“Anat denies that any damage was done to the security of the State of Israel or that it was ever her intention to do so,” Eitan Lehman said.
A representative for the former soldier, who did not give a name, said security services were trying to paint her as an “enemy of the state”.
She was a “Zionist” who acted as a “concerned citizen”, not a left-wing activist, the representative said.
Israeli authorities say the journalist in question, Uri Blau of Haaretz newspaper, may still have some secret documents.
Ms Kam, who has worked as a journalist for the Israeli news website Walla, is widely reported to have been under house arrest in Israel since December.
But until Thursday, the gagging order had prevented Israeli media from reporting the case – although details have emerged through the international media.
On Thursday the Ministry of Justice said some limitations remained in place “to maintain state security”.
Assassinations
Ms Kam did her national service in the office of the General Commander of the Israeli military’s Central Command, which is responsible for activities in the West Bank.
She is alleged to have saved onto DVD 2,000 military documents, 700 of which were “secret or top secret”, and taken them home and copied them onto her laptop.
The Ministry of Justice said the case was “exceptionally serious” and the documents included detailed military operational plans and a description of IDF deployments during both routine and emergency periods.
The Israeli state believes she passed some of these documents to Uri Blau, a reporter on the newspaper Haaretz.
There has been widespread speculation that they formed the basis for a report he wrote in November 2008, saying that Israeli forces in the West Bank had breached new rules on the targeting of suspected Palestinian militants.
A 2006 Supreme Court ruling had required that efforts should be made first to arrest rather than kill them.
The report accused the IDF of unilaterally loosening their regulations and designating two leaders of Islamic Jihad as targets for assassination.
At the time, the military said the militants had fired on its forces before they were killed.
The Ministry of Justice said the gagging order, which was heavily criticised in Israel, had been in place to help exhaust the possibilities for the return of the stolen documents, and to prevent obstruction of the investigation.
It said the release of the documents could “endanger human life”, and “reach hostile elements and thus would cause hard and continuous damage to state security”.
But Mr Lehman pointed out that all the articles in question in Haaretz newspaper had been approved for publication by Israel’s military censor.
Mr Blau is currently outside Israel and publishing stories in Haaretz under a London dateline.
The Ministry of Justice said it had been trying to agree a deal with him for the return of documents it believed to still be in his possession.
Israeli gagging order on ex-soldier case condemned: BBC
A media report claims Israeli forces in the West Bank have breached laws
Campaigning organisations have called for the lifting of an Israeli media ban on the case of a former soldier.
Anat Kam, 23, is said to be under investigation for various security offences, including leaking classified military information.
Ms Kam is alleged to have obtained documents concerning apparently extra-judicial killings of Palestinian militants.
She has reportedly been under house arrest since December.
In Israel – as a result of the court-ordered gag – it has become known only as “the security case”.
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the Israeli public are being denied their basic right to information on trials and events taking place in their midst.
“Whatever the rationale for the order…it seems its only purpose is to violate Israelis’ right to information, hinder freedom of the press and stymie public debate on the case” ACRI’s Chief Legal Counsel, Dan Yakir, said.
“Defence of national security is a legitimate objective but censorship must not be used to prevent the Israeli defence forces from being held responsible if they broke the law,” the Paris-based media freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders said.
Trial expected
Anat Kam has worked for the Israeli news website Walla.
Reports that have already been published outside Israel say that while she was a soldier doing her national service she is alleged to have obtained classified military documents and leaked them to an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
Speculation has focused around an investigative report in Haaretz in November 2008.
This claimed that Israeli forces in the West Bank had breached new rules on the targeting of suspected Palestinian militants, which required that efforts should be made first to arrest rather than kill them.
Specifically at issue was the killing of two leaders of Islamic Jihad, which an Israeli defence forces spokesman had said happened only after the men fired at security personnel.
Some of the reports circulating outside Israel say that Anat Kam is expected to go on trial later this month.
Haaretz and an Israeli television channel are planning to challenge the gag on Israeli media coverage of Anat Kam’s case in court.
Dalia Dorner, a former Supreme Court judge who now heads Israel’s Press Council, said it seemed ridiculous to persist with a gag order when the case was being openly discussed in global media outlets.
Legal restrictions have been imposed on journalists reporting this story from Israel, so this article has been compiled from London.
The real moral of the Anat Kam story: The Guardian CiF
Heavyhanded press restrictions by Israel’s Shin Bet have obscured the real scandal of the IDF whistleblower’s case
Israeli reporter Anat Kam – whose long period of house arrest has been subject to a stringent gagging order that has been lifted only today – was not arrested for doing her job as a journalist. She was arrested for stealing and passing on classified military documents. Not that that makes her case any less unjust.
The story goes that, as a conscript serving as a secretary in the office of Maj-Gen Yair Nave, former chief of central command, Kam came into possession of numerous classified documents as a result of the lackadaisical attitude of a superior officer. When she left the army, she left it with a disc that contained, according to the Shin Bet internal security service, more 2,000 copied documents. These she passed to a journalist, Uri Blau of Haaretz. But the leak seems to have been traced back to her.
This is not a story about freedom of speech. The reporter in question submitted every one of these stories to the IDF military censor before publication – and not a single one was blocked. And there is nothing unique or unethical about Israeli laws that make it an offence to possess classified documents.
But the desperate attempt by the Shin Bet to prevent reporting of Kam’s case has highlighted a paranoid and increasingly ridiculous obsession with secrecy on the part of the Israeli establishment. What is worrying is the ease with which the police and security services can go to the courts and forbid the media to report any detail regarding ongoing investigations.
It’s as if the Shin Bet had never heard of the internet. Mass-market daily Yediot Ahronoth ran an already-iconic page reprinting a foreign-media story (by New York Times reporter Judith Miller) with the censored lines “redacted” in black. A few days later, they supplied readers with the necessary English key-words so they could google the foreign reports.
Indeed, Israeli friends have been gossiping about this story for weeks now. When I Googled Anat Kam’s name a fortnight ago, there were no more than two or three hits. Today, there are more than 200,000 – and she even gets her own Wikipedia entry. Well done with that gagging order, guys.
The disappointing truth is that the furore over the attempt to block publication of Kam’s arrest is a diversion that has also allowed the Israeli media to neatly sidestep the real story that emerged from the documents – that supreme court rulings over targeted killings of Palestinians were disregarded – and make it one of press freedom.
Only a minority of Israelis will get worked up about assassinations of alleged Palestinian militants. But when it comes to a theoretical restriction of their own freedom of information, that’s something guaranteed to enrage them. It may have become a tired old Zionist trope but Israel does have a spectacularly free press, with eye-wateringly lax libel laws, sub judice a concept virtually unknown, and public debate sometimes exhaustingly healthy.
Ironically, the gagging order on this story has been lifted just after another one was imposed, referring to a very high-profile former politician already being investigated on corruption charges (although given Israel’s current political make-up, that hardly narrows it down much).
And what now for Kam? She seems destined to become a scapegoat for a crime that theoretically carries a sentence of up to 15 years in jail – although, in previous cases, has only amounted to a matter of months. This seems particularly unfair, especially when the IDF has got to be one of the most indiscreet armies in the world. Privates and generals alike routinely brief reporters, and leak like sieves, to the point where officers now routinely have their phone records checked.
There has been no suggestion that Kam asked for or received any payments for the documents, although the Shin Bet’s chief now maintains that Kam’s actions did endanger Israel’s national security – despite the fact that, according to the editor of Haaretz, the IDF censor passed the stories it ran that are alleged to have relied on information supplied by Kam.
The heavy-handed way in which Israel’s security apparatus has handled this fiasco encloses a larger tragedy. Israel likes to market itself as a country of innovation and original thinking and, indeed, it does have one of the highest rate of start-ups and patents per capita in the world. But it simultaneously doesn’t seem capable of giving up on another national doctrine: that if you’re found doing something wrong, carry on doing it – just with more force.
EDITOR: Further Victories of the BDS Movement
The Jerusalem Quartet (Not the one Tony Blair is playing for…) is a proud ambassador for Israel (their own description of their actions) and as such, has been targeted recently by the BDS movement, on a number of occasions. Below you can read the repercussions of those cultural interventions in a number of events at which the JQ was to play.
Another development relates to the 62 Years to Israel celebrations by the Zionist Federation in the UK, at which the two singers, the Israel Jew Achinoam Nini, and the Palestinian Israeli Mira Awad, in London during the May 2010 celebrations. This was touted as a great event, combining the two singers. As can be seen, Mira Awad has reconsidered, and has now cancelled!
British music critics incensed by anti-Israel chants at show: JERUSALEM POST
By JONNY PAUL
LONDON – Award-winning music author and commentator Norman Lebrecht has blasted a group of anti-Israel protesters who interrupted a performance by the Jerusalem Quartet in London last week, describing it as an assault on a place of sanctuary.
Last week, five protesters interrupted a lunchtime performance by the Jerusalem Quartet at Wigmore Hall in central London, shouting abuse at the musicians. The hecklers called them “cultural ambassadors for Israel,” accusing the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and starving the people of Gaza, before they were ejected. The concert was broadcast live on BBC radio.
In Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, Lebrecht described the disturbances as “the work of an eccentric fringe, easily dismissed as the inevitable irritants of an open society.” He said the incident amounted to “an assault on an element of civilization… a sanctuary where people under pressure can find relief from the world and its woes.
“There are few such places left,” he wrote. “I have heard mobiles go off in churches, synagogues, theaters and the House of Commons. Only at havens like the Wigmore are we free from the demands of rapid response… It was this precious freedom that the demonstrators set out to destroy.”
Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly told Classical Music magazine that the disruption had been well-planned.
“The protesters must have bought their tickets for the concert a long time ago, because they were all sitting in individual seats in different parts of the hall,” he said. “One stood up and started singing and shouting, and while we were removing him, another one started up somewhere else, and so on.”
In a statement, the Quartet called the protesters “ignorant” and “inconsiderate,” saying they had only managed to upset the audience and concert hall staff.
“We are musicians, not politicians. We want our audiences to enjoy our music, whoever they may be, whatever their religion or nationality or ethnicity, without unthinking interruptions of the kind that we, our audiences and the staff suffered,” the statement said.
“The demonstrators were ignorant of the fact that two of us are regular members of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of Israeli and Arab musicians,” it continued. “We teach and lead our respective sections of that orchestra. It is destructive of our attempts to foster Israel-Arab relations for us to be the subject of demonstrations of the kind we suffered yesterday.”
The musicians said they were Israeli citizens and not representatives of the government: “We no more represent the government of Israel than the audience at the Wigmore Hall represented the government of the UK.”
Lebrecht said the disturbances had been contained with “immaculate civility,” but would change the dynamics of Wigmore Hall as a place of sanctuary and calm.
“The BBC asked the Quartet to repeat the recital for later broadcast. Nobody got hurt. There are string quartets at play in the Wigmore Hall tonight, tomorrow and most days after. Life goes on. But it does not go on unchanged,” he opined. “And the next time you or I go to the Wigmore Hall, we will be subtly aware that something has changed, no matter how discreet the extra security or how hushed the space sounds in that invaluable hiatus between the moment the musicians raise their bows and the instant the music flows. A seal has been broken. We will need to make an extra effort to shut out the world and its nagging concerns. We are no longer alone with ourselves.”
Organized by Jewish anti-Israel campaigners Tony Greenstein, whom Lebrecht calls “a veteran agitator who avowed aim is to attract attention,” and Deborah Fink, who set up a group called Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, the disruption was condemned by other prominent Jewish members of the boycott and sanctions campaign against Israel.
Activist Brian Robinson said the disturbances would have a negative effect and make people angry.
“I appreciate the strength of feeling behind the interruptions, I understand why people feel moved to actions of this kind, but do we know if they’re effective? Or do they just make people angry with us? I cannot support this kind of action – but I speak only for myself and am not asking anyone to agree with me,” he said.
Veteran campaigner Deborah Maccoby said it could make protesters look like “vandals” and might alienate people.
“I, too, have doubts, which I’ve expressed before, about the effectiveness of disrupting a performance of beautiful classical music – as opposed to a demonstration and picket outside the concert hall. What worries me is that it could make the disrupters look like vandals and Philistines, and it could alienate the people who don’t understand much about the issues and just see their enjoyment of music disrupted,” she said. “It also can be seen as boosting the stature of the performers when they resist the disruption and manage to continue to the end.”
EDITOR: Melanie Rides Again…
For readers of the British press, Melanie Phillips’ diatribes about antisemites under the beds are not new, but are always fun to read – seldom does one find someone more invested in antisemitism than good old Mel… She can aways be trusted to flush out the miscreants, and no one is safe from her valiant poison pen. She is especially keen of unearthing ‘Jewish antisemites’, like Gerald Kaufamn…
Britain’s Israel Derangement Syndrome goes viral: The Spectator
Melanie Phillips, 31ST MARCH 2010
While Obama has opened the global floodgates of Israel-bashing, in Britain it is now open season on Israel and the Jews who defend it – with other Jews hostile to Israel often in the front-line of the charge. What is happening is both hideous and, quite simply, beyond reason. It amounts to a fanatical and obsessive verbal pogrom.
Item: in today’s Telegraph, two Labour MPs – Sir Gerald Kaufman, a veteran and poisonous Jewish Israel-basher and Martin Linton, chairman of Labour Friends of Palestine, claimed that the Conservative party was in hock to both the Jews generally and Israel in particular. The Telegraph headlined its story:
Labour MPs accuse Tories of being too close to Israel
but actually what they said was much worse. Kaufman said:
Lord Ashcroft, the wealthy Tory donor, owned one part of the party and “Jewish millionaires” the other.
In other words, Jews had bought the Tory party. Linton, meanwhile, told a meeting at the House of Commons:
‘There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.’
The word ‘tentacles’, from which Linton later tried to distance himself, is of course straight out of the medieval and Nazi lexicon of Jew-hatred. Linton’s comments echo the ugly ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theory aired on primetime British TV recently in Peter Oborne’s Dispatches programme , in which he claimed that wealthy Jewish supporters of Israel had bought up and suborned the Tory party. Like all ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theories, this one actually flies in the face of demonstrable reality, since the Tory front bench is mostly indifferent to, disdainful of or even hostile towards the State of Israel.
Item: as the veteran ultra-leftist and Israel-basher Tony Greenstein boasts on his blog, anti-Israel bigots disrupted a performance of the Jerusalem Quartet at London’s Wigmore Hall this week – with the result that BBC Radio Three terminated its live broadcast of the concert. There is only one way to describe the mindset of these bullies who compare Israelis — who bear arms solely to prevent themselves from being wiped out — to Nazis, and describe Israel — whose Arab citizens have equal rights – as an ‘apartheid state’, and that is twisted and sick. As for BBC Radio Three, it was cowardly to have aborted its broadcast and thus surrendered to thuggery and bigotry in this way.
Item: in the Independent Richard Ingrams – he who once stated that
‘I have developed a habit, when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it’
— welcomed the expulsion of a Mossad agent from London following the affair over the forged passports
used by a gang of Israeli assassins in Dubai (my emphasis).
A ‘gang of assassins’, eh? So what does that make all the British and American forces regularly killing assorted jihadi leaders in the defence of the west against mass murder? If any of them find and kill Osama bin Laden, as they have been vainly attempting to do, will Ingrams call them too a ‘gang of assassins’?
Yet who can turn a hair over Ingrams when no less than the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband referred in his Commons statement to the plight of the British passport-holder whose identity was used in the Dubai killing and who went to bed as an Israeli citizen only to
wake up as a wanted terrorist…(my emphasis)
When the British Foreign Secretary equates a terrorist mass murderer with those who rid the world of such a menace, it is but a short step to sanitising the mass murderer and denouncing his victims. Which is precisely what has happened in Britain.
In his article, Ingrams foamed on:
What this amounts to is that these people are proud to be friends of a country that operates a system of apartheid in territory which it has illegally occupied and colonised, that subjects the people who live in that territory to intolerable restrictions, that thinks nothing of killing large numbers of them, including women and children, to punish them for daring to launch rockets and that continually lies about its actions as it does about the criminal activities of Mossad.
Once, this would have been considered the ravings of a lunatic, since it denies reality – not to mention morality — with virtually every word. Yet now it is mainstream. In Britain, anti-Israel bigotry and Jew-hatred have gone viral.
Item: the explosion of racist bile on the readers’ thread on the Guardian’s Comment is free blog (hat tip: CiF Watch) below Stephen Pollard’s article pointing out that the outrage over the Israeli building permits in a Jewish area of Jerusalem just over the Green Line was a travesty of the truth:
Far from Israel’s behaviour over East Jerusalem being the cause of the breakdown in talks, it’s the Palestinians who have come up with East Jerusalem as a figleaf for their rejection of talks.
For this simple statement of unarguable historical fact, Pollard was subjected to abuse such as
Mr Pollard has eaten too many kosher pies…
I look forward to articles from child abusers telling us all how it’s a perfectly fine pastime…
No wonder Stephen and his fellow Cabal members are worried…
Actually, it’s Britain that should be worried. A country that turns on the Jews like this is itself invariably heading over the edge of the cliff.
UPDATE: Martin Linton’s office have been in touch to again deny that he said the quote which has been attributed to him.
FURTHER UPDATE: Martin Linton has now apologised for makiing the ‘tentacles’ remark which he first said he ‘didn’t recognise’ and which his office then denied he had said.
Why There Are No ‘Israelis’ in the Jewish State: Palestine Chronicle
Citizens classed as Jewish or Arab nationals.
By Jonathan Cook – Nazareth
A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as ‘Israelis’, a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self-declared status as a Jewish state.
Israel refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality”. Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel”, the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish nation”, meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.
Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalisation, access to land and employment.
Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of “Arab” nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment.
The interior ministry has adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or ethnic terms, with “Jewish” and “Arab” being the main categories.
The group’s legal case is being heard by the supreme court after a district judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing the state’s position that there is no Israeli nation.
The head of the campaign for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor, said: “It is absurd that Israel, which recognises dozens of different nationalities, refuses to recognise the one nationality it is supposed to represent.”
The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to “undermine the state’s infrastructure” — a presumed reference to laws and official institutions that ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in Israel.
Mr Ornan, 86, said that denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin of state-sanctioned discrimination against the Arab population.
“There are even two laws — the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs — that determine how you belong to the state,” he said. “What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?”
Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had resorted to creating national groups with no legal recognition outside Israel, such as “Arab” or “unknown”, to avoid recognising an Israeli nationality.
In official documents most Israelis are classified as “Jewish” or “Arab”, but immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000 arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically registered according to their country of origin.
“Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as “Jewish” or “Christian”,” said Mr Ornan.
The professor, who lives close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the interior ministry refused to change his nationality to “Israeli” in 2000. An online petition declaring “I am an Israeli” has attracted several thousand signatures.
Mr Ornan has been joined in his action by 20 other public figures, including former government minister Shulamit Aloni. Several members have been registered with unusual nationalities such as “Russian”, “Buddhist”, “Georgian” and “Burmese”.
Two Arabs are party to the case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be allowed to live in one of several hundred communities in Israel open only to Jews.
Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the parliament, said the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens.
“The State of Israel cannot recognise an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”
International Zionist organisations representing the diaspora, such as the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, are given in Israeli law a special, quasi-governmental role, especially in relation to immigration and control over large areas of Israeli territory for the settlement of Jews only.
Mr Ornan said the lack of a common nationality violated Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which says the state will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex”.
Indications of nationality on ID cards carried by Israelis made it easy for officials to discriminate against Arab citizens, he added.
The government has countered that the nationality section on ID cards was phased out from 2000 — after the interior ministry, which was run by a religious party at the time, objected to a court order requiring it to identify non-Orthodox Jews as “Jewish” on the cards.
However, Mr Ornan said any official could instantly tell if he was looking at the card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the IDs of Jews was given according to the Hebrew calendar. In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included the grandfather’s name.
“Flash your ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which ‘clan’ you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to ‘handle your kind’,” Mr Ornan said.
The distinction between Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on interior ministry records used to make important decisions about personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on entirely sectarian terms.
Only Israelis from the same religious group, for example, are allowed to marry inside Israel — otherwise they are forced to wed abroad – and cemeteries are separated according to religious belonging.
Some of those who have joined the campaign complain that it has damaged their business interests. One Druze member, Carmel Wahaba, said he had lost the chance to establish an import-export company in France because officials there refused to accept documents stating his nationality as “Druze” rather than “Israeli”.
The group also said it hoped to expose a verbal sleight of hand that intentionally mistranslates the Hebrew term “Israeli citizenship” on the country’s passports as “Israeli nationality” in English to avoid problems with foreign border officials.
B Michael, a commentator for Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, has observed: “We are all Israeli nationals — but only abroad.”
The campaign, however, is likely to face an uphill struggle in the courts.
A similar legal suit brought by a Tel Aviv psychologist, George Tamrin, failed in 1970. Shimon Agranat, head of the supreme court at the time, ruled: “There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people. … The Jewish people is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of diaspora Jewries.”
That view was echoed by the district court in 2008 when it heard Mr Ornan’s case.
The judges in the supreme court, which held the first appeal hearing last month, indicated that they too were likely to be unsympathetic. Justice Uzi Fogelman said: “The question is whether or not the court is the right place to solve this problem.”
– Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jkcook.net. (A version of this article originally appeared in The National, www.thenational.ae, published in Abu Dhabi.)