Haaretz staff said they were told by officials that if they published the story they would “face the consequences.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published two consecutive startling articles that call into question the norms of Israeli democracy.
The paper published an opinion piece by Jonathan Pollack on Wednesday, but much of the article was redacted to reference a standing blackout that bars the media from discussing “administrative detention,” a system in which the Israeli military holds Palestinians indefinitely without charge or due process.
The next day, the paper published a story detailing how two years earlier the Israeli government had used “emergency powers” and threats to thwart the paper's investigative reporting – a story that was later covered by +972 magazine and The Guardian in a shocking report about alleged intimidation by Israel's spy agency, Mossad, against the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Concealing the truth
This “edited” opinion piece, which was deliberately highlighted by Haaretz staff, provides a vivid visual of the opaqueness of the “administrative detention” system.
The headline read, “Reasons for Israeli Detention: …”, with the part after the colon obscured by a black box reminiscent of the black markers used by censors in the past.
The article went on to describe the plight of Palestinians caught in an indiscriminate Israeli dragnet that seeks to indefinitely detain large numbers of people rather than follow due process.
Reason for Israeli detention: ████ ██ █████ | Opinion | Jonathan Pollack https://t.co/3AnYhZ4KTG
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) May 29, 2024
Wherever the author refers to police statements or procedures, or even to vague allegations, the dreaded black mark reappears, frustrating the reader and serving as an added reminder of the dangers of censorship.
Author Jonathan Pollack is a long-time Israeli anti-Zionist activist who has had several run-ins with Israeli security authorities and has been arrested and convicted at least four times on protest-related charges.
He was last arrested in January 2023, charged with throwing a rock at a Border Patrol jeep. As his trial date approached, he took the unusual step of requesting that his trial be held in a military court rather than a civilian one, an opaque judicial system imposed on thousands of Palestinians every year.
Exposure comes at a difficult time for Israel
Haaretz reported on Thursday that Gul Megiddo's article about alleged Mossad pressure on the International Criminal Court prosecutor had been ready to publish for two years.
“you [ICC] Prosecutor
A horrifying article from Haaretz Gourmet Guide How Israeli security services used threats and emergency powers to quash a two-year-old report on Mossad director's attempt to recruit/blackmail ICC's Bensouda https://t.co/hP8z5KchzH
— Esther Solomon (@EstherSolomon) May 30, 2024
Instead, Megiddo's article states that “Israeli authorities used emergency powers at the time to prevent the article from being published.”
The revelations have intensified accusations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to undermine media freedoms in Israel to thwart damaging reporting.
Megiddo, the author of the earlier investigation report, said he was summoned to his office by senior security officials before publishing his report.
He said that during his meetings with officials he was told that if he published it “he would suffer the consequences and get an inside look at the interrogation rooms of Israeli security services.”
The report by +972 and the Guardian, published on Tuesday, focuses on allegations that then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen tried to blackmail then-ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda into dropping an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israel in Palestine.
“If Israel were the democracy it claims to be, one of the survey's key findings would have been known to Haaretz readers long ago,” Megiddo said.
“This case comes at a difficult time for Israel.
“Instead of this investigation being reported in an Israeli newspaper, it is now being published in a newspaper with global circulation. Instead of dealing with this case in peacetime, we have to deal with it in the middle of a war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a wreath-laying ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day in Jerusalem on May 6, 2024. [Amir Cohen/Pool/Reuters]Cohen's secret contacts to pressure Bensouda began several years before she decided to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Guard report said.
Last week, Bensouda's successor, Karim Khan, applied for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, based in part on an investigation launched in 2021.
Khan announced that his office had “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and current Defense Minister Yoav Galant are “criminally responsible” for “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
In a post on X, Haaretz editor-in-chief Esther Solomon called Megiddo's story “horrifying.”
Neil Stanidge, deputy editor of the US political newspaper The Hill, described the report as “a new development in Mossad blackmail towards the ICC”.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that despite Israeli threats, Bensouda “is to her credit for launching a formal investigation into Israel in March 2021, rather than leaving it to her successor at the end of her term.”
