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There is nothing more basic to the adult Israeli experience than taking your kid to his first day in the IDF. For his whole life you’ve preached about how important it is to serve. National pride, security, the Zionist mission, becoming an adult — all these are wrapped up together. And then, that fateful morning, you discover you are exactly like those other wimpy parents who seem to care more about their children’s welfare than that of the state. National security and Zionism be damned; just make sure my kid comes home safe.
It is only with this experience in mind that we can understand the intense public outrage directed against Anat Kamm, the 23-year-old reporter who has been under house arrest for stealing over 2,000 top-secret documents from the major-general under whom she served in 2007; and against Uri Blau, the Haaretz reporter she fed them to, who has been hiding in the UK for fear of arrest.
But the story is far from straightforward. Is it about freedom of the press? About loyalty to the uniform? About the risk posed to Israeli soldiers by the real possibility that the information Ms Kamm leaked — including details of deployments, open-fire orders and battle plans — might fall into wrong hands? Is it about the “war crimes” that some documents allegedly described? Or about the intelligence breach?
Judith Miller of the Daily Beast did Israelis a service by writing openly about something many Israelis knew but could not report on because of a sweeping gag order. Ms Miller’s piece was discussed intensely, though without detail, on IDF Radio, leading directly to the order being lifted.
“Are we becoming Iran?” presenter Niv Ruskin asked, and then interviewed retired Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner, who called the gag order “ridiculous”. And this, on the IDF’s own radio station. Iran indeed.
But Ms Miller made a mess as well. She approvingly quoted a scholar who said that the Israeli press was “cowardly” for honouring the gag order — as though placing citizenship above journalistic idealism is cowardice.
She talked about “Israeli censors” as if they were responsible for the gag order. In fact the IDF censors cleared Mr Blau’s revelatory pieces for publication, and a civilian judge issued the gag order.
Ms Miller repeatedly described Ms Kamm as a “journalist”, intimating that her arrest was tantamount to stifling the press. But Ms Kamm was not a journalist when she committed her alleged crimes, but a soldier.
All the same, neither Ms Kamm nor Mr Blau are traitors. Nobody is accusing them of spying for anybody other than Haaretz . They, like many others, are convinced that the best way to protect Israel is to keep it transparent. The worst you can say about them is that in their youthful naivete, they took the watchdog role too far. Given the possibility of a massive scoop, they did not care about the laws they were breaking, or that the leaked documents could easily end up in wrong hands.
What should happen to them? Because Ms Kamm was a soldier in uniform, her violation of the trust she was given with IDF secrets endangers the heart of the IDF. She should sit in jail for a long time.
Mr Blau is a different matter. Regardless of his motivations, it really is the essence of a free press that people like him be able to work without fear.
A deal should be struck whereby he returns the documents and is allowed to go back to his career. Let Haaretz’s subscribers be Mr Blau’s judges.
And what about the war crimes? So far, the revelations have been unimpressive. Did the IDF chief take the policy of targeted assassinations further than the Supreme Court ruling allowed? Perhaps. Were settlements built without appropriate approvals? Maybe. Were these revelations worth the price? Almost certainly not.
Because you can’t have journalism without security. Secrets should be uncovered, but not at any price. Freedom of the press is a minimum condition for a healthy society, but security is a minimum condition for life itself. A watchdog that bites its master will end up hungry indeed.
David Hazony’s first book, ‘The Ten Commandments’, will be published in September