The New York Times · New York, New York · 2 March 1980

CP-1980-023

Israeli Censorship Strikes A Discordant, Insistent Note

By DAVID K. SHIPLER

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — Israeli military censors are outrageously courteous, at times infuriatingly charming. It is so difficult to hate them, as every red-blooded journalist knows he should, that occasionally, even in the hardest reporter’s coldest heart, stirrings of sympathy have been observed for those nice guys who have such an uncomfortable job.

Israel is the only open political system in the Middle East, a tiny dot of free debate at the edge of a vast sweep of dictatorships. Censorship strikes a discordant note, and the army officers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem perusing news copy before publication or broadcast seem an odd contradiction to Israel’s national pasttime of exposing its own sins.

Yet last week the Government revoked the accreditation of Dan Raviv, a reporter for CBS radio. He had avoided the censors by flying to Rome to broadcast a report from anonymous “informed sources” that Israel had detonated a nuclear bomb — allegedly the source of that mysterious flash in the South Atlantic last September. Defense Minister Ezer Weizman denied the story. Mr.

Raviv — for failing to submit it for prior clearance — was deprived of his Government-issued press credentials, without a peep of editorial objection from normally contentious Israeli newspapers. Few Israelis seem to mind the censorship; it is such an accepted part of the landscape that many are only vaguely aware of it.

Officials justify it as essential to protect military secrets during a state of war. The peace treaty with Egypt notwithstanding, there is no peace accord with Jordan, Syria or other hostile Arab nations. A high state of military readiness is an everyday fact of life.

Military authorities, however, often blur the line between protecting the country’s security and protecting its image, and this has provoked occasional criticism.

Not until last autumn, for example, did Israelis learn that an army officer was serving a 30-month prison sentence for murdering Lebanese civilians during “Operation Litani,” a 1978 Israeli sweep into southern Lebanon. Because the military court had tried the man [Lieut. Col. Arye Sadeh] in camera, censors had banned publication of details that emerged in court.

The news leaked out in the British weekly, the Spectator; 150 university lecturers wrote to Mr. Weizman complaining that the punishment was light and the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, reported that the wife of the officer appealed to Prime Minister Menachem Begin for clemency. Events outside the court were not barred by censorship.

Similarly, details of another atrocity during Operation Litani squeezed past censorship months after the fact and caused a furor, including calls for the resignation of Lieut. Gen. Rafael Eitan, the chief of staff. An army lieutenant, Daniel Pinto, was convicted in a closed military court of murdering Lebanese civilians and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

This was reduced to eight by an appeals court, and later to two years by General Eitan. Censors barred publication of details by the Israeli press and by resident foreign correspondents, who are also subject to censorship. But Israel being the kind of flagrantly free-wheeling society it is, nobody stayed quiet.

Uri Avneri, a leftist parliamentarian in the Sheli Party, wrote an unofficial account describing Lieutenant Pinto as having “tortured his victims cruelly for hours, in a number of different ways. At the end, he murdered them by strangulation, using his hands and a nylon cord.” He was said to have dumped their bodies downa well.

Softening a Draconian Law Under censorship, the account could not be published in Israel or be sent out of the country. But it did find its way out. When Dial Torgerson, Jerusalem correspondent of The Los Angeles Times, was vacationing in London, he received a copy from his Los Angeles office.

He had asked the Jerusalem censor if he could write the story and been told no; under no restrictions in London, he wrote it. After publication abroad, the story became open to the Israeli press which gave it big play. Censorship had lost its tenuous hold.

The legal basis of Israeli censorship, dating back to Britain’s mandate over Palestine, is “a Draconian law,” as one military official put it, which authorizes suffocating control over everything printed, filmed or broadcast.

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