Israel has no constitution due to the decision of Israel's first
prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his secular associates to
defer a confrontation with the Zionist religious minority over the
nature of the Jewish state in 1948. Thus there aren't
constitutional guarantees for freedom of the press. Yet Professor
Ze'ev Segal, whose book in Hebrew Freedom of the Press: Between
Myth and Reality (Papyrus Publishing House, Tel Aviv University,
1996) is one of the primary references on the topic, writes that
"freedom of expression is a 'supreme value' in the Israeli legal
system. It is considered, according to a legal declaration by an
Israeli Supreme Court Justice, 'the very soul of democracy.'"
However, he adds that "there is a significant gap between the myth
created by such legal declarations and the reality...."
Another expert, legal commentator Moshe Negbi, wrote that the
Israeli press "has tied itself by a series of agreements and
understandings to the belly-button of the establishment. Instead of
focusing on exposure of information about the government and a
critical evaluation of its functioning, it has helped the
government in its attempts to hide information from the general
public. This path, and the abandonment of the basic values of a
free press, dragged the press - and the entire state - into the
worst security mishap we have ever known, the Yom Kippur War
mishap."
An Ideological Press
The history of the Israeli press is rooted in the political history
of Zionism. The father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who
convened the First Zionist Congress back in 1897, was himself a
journalist for the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. He once labeled his
rival, Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg), head of the cultural Zionist
trend, "an obscure, spiteful journalist." Professor Dan Caspi, the
outgoing chairman of the Israeli Communications Association, notes
in his basic primer Mass Media and Politics (The Open University,
1997), that "the majority of the newspapers in the pre-state period
were founded as ideological organs of political trends, and were
under the ideological authority of the political parties and
dependent on their financial backing. The party institutions and
their leaders were involved in the selection process for the
sensitive senior positions in the paper, particularly in the choice
of the editor."
However, a brief glance at any newsstand or bookstore reveals that
almost all of the political dailies and periodicals, which played
such a significant role in the history of the Israeli press, have
closed: The Revisionist Hamashkif (1938-1949), the General Zionist
Haboker (1935-1965), the Progressive Zmanim (1948-1966), Herut's
(forerunner of the Likud) Herut (1948-1965), Hayom (1966-1969),
Maki's (the Communist's) Kol Ha'am (1947-1971), Mapam's
Al-Hamishmar (1943-1995) and the Histadrut's Mapai and later
Labor-associated Davar (1925-1996). Only the small religious organs
and the Arabic-language Communist Al-Ittihad remain.
Today, there are only three major Hebrew-language dailies, and they
are all family-owned commercial concerns: the quality paper
Ha'aretz (founded in 1923), run by the Schocken family; the mass
circulation tabloid Yediot Aharonot (founded in 1939), run by the
Moses family, and its "twin" rival, Ma'ariv (founded in 1948 by
breakaway journalists from Yediot), run by the Nimrodi
family.
A Protective Approach
Both in the pre-state yishuv period and in the first decades of the
post-1948 state, most of the editors felt that their primary role
was educational, to help in the state-building process. Such values
as freedom of the press and the idea of being a public watchdog
were secondary. The Editors Committee was the epitome of this
didactic, protective establishment approach.
Caspi explains that its origins were in the Reaction Committee,
founded by the editors of the Hebrew-language press in 1942, who
"felt the need for guidance from the Jewish community's leadership
on publication policy concerning sensitive matters, such as the
expulsion of ma'apilim (illegal immigrants) and the search for
weapons in Hebrew settlements." This was a special arrangement,
probably without precedent in the democratic world, in which the
heads of the press voluntarily initiated political regulation of
the media. After the establishment of the state in 1948, prime
minister Ben-Gurion saw great advantages in this arrangement, and
he frequently convened the newly renamed Editors Committee to share
important information with the editors, on condition that it not be
published.
This arrangement began to collapse after 1977, when Menachem Begin
and the Likud took over the reins of government. They were
suspicious of the press, which they considered to be hostile
towards the Likud, and they rarely convened the forum.
A second means of establishment of political regulation of the
press is military censorship. Its origins also stem from the
pre-state period. The British Mandatory government issued a series
of Defense Regulations, which were eventually adopted by the
sovereign State of Israel as well. Regulation 87 states that "the
censor has the right to issue an injunction which will prevent, in
general and in particular, the publication of material whose
publication may, or is likely, to damage, in its view, the defense
of Israel or the public good or the public order."
In the early years of the state, the military censor used its
powers freely to close Al-Hamishmar, Yediot Aharonot, Haboker and
Davar, usually for periods of a day or two. The Editors Committee
challenged this arrangement, and new, voluntary understandings were
reached between the editors and the government. In 1949, it was
agreed that censorship would not be applied to "political matters"
(opinions). In 1951, the right to close a paper was taken from the
military censor and transferred to a Committee of Three: a
representative of the Editors Committee, a representative of the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a representative of the general
public. In 1966, in addition to security matters, non-military
subjects, such as fuel deals, immigration from certain countries,
Israeli national foreign loan policy (!) and sensitive water
matters were added to the list of censorable subjects.
During the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn't unusual for certain
newspapers to leave a blank space in an article that was censored.
For some, it was a matter of last-minute necessity, and for others,
like Uri Avnery's muckraking Ha'olam Hazeh magazine, it was a form
of protest.
One of the last times that a daily was closed was the case of
Hadashot (1984-1993), a Schocken family-owned daily which
consciously chose not to join the Editors Committee. It was closed
for four days in 1984 for not sending information to the censor
about the "Bus 300 Affair," when terrorists hijacked a civilian
bus, were captured alive, and later killed by the military
authorities.
Road to Freedom
The struggle for freedom of the press within Israeli society has
been carried out in stages. While there is no constitutional
protection for freedom of the press, the principles expressed in
the Declaration of Independence have served the courts as a basis
for judicial rulings. Thus, in one of the first landmark decisions
concerning the press in the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled that a
government attempt to close the Communist daily Kol Ha'am was
inconsistent with the idea that the state will be "based on
principles of freedom." This is a direct quote from the
Declaration. This principle was reinforced by the passing of two
basic (the equivalent of constitutional) laws in 1994: the Respect
for Man and His Freedoms Law, and the Freedom of Profession Law.
The recent Freedom of Information Law, passed in May 1998, which
authorizes public access to governmental information and records,
while flawed by many restrictions, only serves to reinforce these
freedoms.
During the first decades of the state, there were two basic methods
of getting around the "Big Brother" approach of the Editors
Committee and the IDF censor.
Items published in the international press were considered to be in
the public domain, and could usually be reprinted in the Israeli
press. Thus, Israeli journalists used to feed information to their
foreign colleagues, and then reprint it in their own papers. The
other technique was to ignore the Editors Committee and to try to
get around the military censor by using opaque language.
Uri Avnery and his Ha'olam Hazeh (1949-1993) weekly magazine were
at the forefront of these efforts. As the editor of a weekly,
Avnery was ineligible for the Editors Committee, and he wouldn't
have joined it anyway, because he wanted the freedom to attack the
establishment. While criticized for being a combination of politics
in the front and "porn" in the back (very mild in today's terms),
Avnery laid the foundations for future anti-establishment
investigative journalism.
The major turning point on the road to freedom of the press was the
Yom Kippur War. The entire Israeli society was traumatized by the
unexpected surprise attack by the combined Egyptian-Syrian forces
on October 6, 1973. After the attack was repulsed, with great loss
to human life, a mass grass-roots movement took to the streets to
protest the great governmental mishap.
Journalists across the board also were traumatized, and did some
serious soul-searching. They had accepted the governmental
briefings that had downplayed the threat of war, and felt that they
too bore responsibility for the national misreading of reality.
Many vowed never again to rely on the government's "guided
journalism."
The Nuclear Issue
The problem of writing about Israeli nuclear policy is a special
issue, which warrants an entire article in itself. "In 1960, when
Ben-Gurion finally admitted that the so-called Dimona textile plant
was actually a nuclear facility," Uri Avnery told this writer, "the
Parisian weekly l'Express published an article on Israel's nuclear
program." When he decided to print a translation of the article in
Ha'olam Hazeh, "word for word," without even changing a comma, "the
censor refused to allow me to reprint it. I brought a petition
against the ruling to the Supreme Court, the first time such a
challenge had been posed to the Israeli censor." Avnery lost the
case, and he adds that "the proceedings were so secretive that,
till this day, the fact that there was such a challenge is
unknown." At about the same time, while he was a lecturer at Haifa
University, Professor Alan Dowty was visited by a member of the
security establishment and warned not to continue when he tried to
write about Israeli nuclear policy.
Yet by 1986, when the London Sunday Times published former nuclear
technician Mordechai Vanunu's exposé, "Revealed: the Secret of
Israel's Nuclear Arsenal," no less than three Israeli dailies -
Ha'aretz, Al-Hamishmar and The Jerusalem Post - published extensive
excerpts from the article. Still, some things change and some
things don't. In 1994, the censor banned an article by Dr. Avner
Cohen on "Israel's Nuclear Option in the Years 1949-1967," intended
for publication in an American scholarly journal. In February 1995,
Dr. Cohen was warned by a senior security officer, when he arrived
at Ben-Gurion Airport, that there was concern that his research
into Israel's nuclear program was in violation of Israel's
censorship laws. When Dr. Cohen, currently living in Washington,
eventually published his groundbreaking study of the history of
Israel's nuclear program, Israel and the Bomb (Columbia University
Press, 1998), which he asserts is based solely on public sources
and interviews, Ha'aretz gave him a cover story in its weekly
magazine supplement, and it wrote a spirited editorial in defense
of his right to write the book while calling for a public debate on
the issue. In a similar sphere, Yediot Aharonot frequently consults
with controversial former Mossad agent-turned-author Victor
Ostrovsky whenever a story about the Mossad breaks.
Transformation
With the decline of the party press, the fading of the Editors
Committee and the reduced activation of the censor by the
government, the road is presumably clearer for freedom of
expression. This tendency is reinforced by the end of the
government monopoly in the electronic media, the exposure to CNN,
the BBC, even Jordanian, and possibly in the future, Palestinian
news broadcasts on cable TV, so it has become even harder for the
government to control the news. And we can't forget the Internet,
where the name and address of the Mossad head was published,
against the government's wishes.
Today, freedom of expression faces new challenges. The ratings
wars, between Yediot Aharonot and Ma'ariv, and between TV's Channel
1 and Channel 2, have led to the "talk-showization" and
"tabloidization" of much of the Israeli media. This leaves less
room for serious and creative investigative journalism and
commentary. Lazy and pressured journalists and editors interested
in a quick story also tend to rely too much on briefings and
publicity releases.
The commercial press is clearly not immune to corruption, as
evidenced by the conviction of Ma'ariv publisher and editor, Ofer
Nimrodi, for eavesdropping on his own employees. Yediot Aharonot
editor Moshe Vardi was forced to resign under similar
circumstances. And while Ma'ariv allowed its writers Amnon Dankner
and Ron Meiberg to write a defense of Nimrodi, it prevented two
other employees, Sima Kadman and Moshe Negbi, from publishing an
article critical of Nimrodi's behavior. Kadman promptly resigned
and moved over to the rival Yediot Aharonot.
Another looming danger is cross-ownership, since both Ma'ariv and
Yediot Aharonot have significant interests in the Channel 2
production companies. In addition, with the collapse of the papers
associated with the Histadrut and the left-wing parties, there is
little attention paid to socioeconomic issues from a working-class,
progressive or peripheral perspective. However, much to the chagrin
of the Likud, all three major Hebrew-language dailies offer varying
degrees of editorial support for the peace process and the Oslo
Accords. After all, peace is good for business, and they all
represent business interests.
While there are relapses, such as the current heavy-handed attempt
by Likud functionaries Israeli Broadcasting Authority head, Uri
Porat, and the new Israeli Broadcasting Executive chairman, Gil
Samsonov, to "sweep the stable clean," i.e., to throw out the
"left-wing mafia that controls the electronic media," it is fair to
say that Professor Segal's comment that "during the last decade,
the press has undergone a significant transformation, and it is now
acting, unlike before, as a watchdog for the public's right to
receive information," is accurate.
<