Israel in uproar over gag on ‘Prisoner X’

February 13, 2013 1:38 pm
Israel in uproar over gag on ‘Prisoner X’
By John Reed in Jerusalem

A furore has erupted in Israel over state secrecy rules gagging sensitive media reports after the government sought to quash news of the mysterious death of an Australian-born Israeli man in a top-security prison two years ago.
Opposition politicians are demanding that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government supply more information about the man’s imprisonment and death – of which few Israelis had known – and overhaul censorship rules they say are no longer fit in the internet age.

Bob Carr, Australia’s foreign minister, said he had been unaware of the death and would be pressing Israel for explanations.
This developed after Australia’s ABC television network on Tuesday aired a report saying that Melbourne-born Ben Zygier, who changed his name to Ben Alon after migrating to Israel, hanged himself in a solitary confinement cell in Ayalon prison, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in December 2010.
The network’s Foreign Correspondent programme cited an unnamed source who said Zygier worked for Israel’s Mossad spy agency. It ran a photograph of him obtained from a social media site and said he also carried an Australian passport bearing the name Ben Allen.
Ynet, an Israeli news website, broke the original news of the man’s death in 2010. After this, Israeli authorities obtained a gag order prohibiting local media from any reporting on the death and the conditions in the prison or – in an indication of the case’s apparent sensitivity – even the gag order’s existence.
ABC said that before his suicide Zygier had been held for “unspecified crimes” at the prison, one of Israel’s most sophisticated and secure facilities, and that prison wardens had tried in vain to revive him after the hanging.
Cell 15, in which he was held, was built especially for Yigal Amir, who assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
After the report was broadcast on Tuesday, Mr Netanyahu’s office convened a meeting of the Israeli Editors Committee, which groups the editors and owners of major Israeli media. The committee was established under David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first post-independence prime minister, as a way of sharing off-record information with journalists.
At the meeting, the prime minister’s office asked media “to withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency”, the newspaper Ha’aretz reported in its Wednesday edition.
The gag order was lifted on Wednesday, allowing Israeli media to report on the case. However, all referred back to the original Australian report.
Mr Netanyahu’s office declined to make any comment on the affair on Wednesday.
Israeli media outlets face censorship on news the government says might compromise national security, but often circumvent this by re-reporting overseas news stories.
This happened during last month’s Israeli air attack in Syria, which Mr Netanyahu’s government has not acknowledged it carried out.
During a debate in the Knesset on Tuesday, Ahmed Tibi, an MP from the United Arab List-Ta’al party, asked Yaakov Neeman, justice minister, whether there were prisoners whose incarceration was being kept secret.
Mr Neeman declined to answer, saying the issue was not under his authority, but said that “if true, the matter must be looked into”.
Other opposition politicians criticised the existence of censorship itself.
“In cases like this, someone should bear in mind that you can’t fight in 2013 the way we did in the war for independence in 1948,” Labour MP Nachman Shai told the Financial Times. “Thanks to social networks and other channels of information, things like this easily come to people’s attention.”
The death of Zygier threatens to strain Israel’s relations with Australia. In 2010 Canberra expelled an Israeli diplomat over the fraudulent use of four Australian passports by suspected Mossad agents linked to the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai.
“Australians should not be working, performing intelligence functions, intelligence gathering functions, for a foreign government using their passport,” Mr Carr told ABC. “They would have breached I guess half a dozen laws by doing that.”