The Baltimore Sun · Baltimore, Maryland · 18 October 1982

CP-1982-021

Israeli columnist outwits military censor with fictional story

Associated Press, Tel Aviv

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Transcribed from the clipping

“This article was subject to Israeli military censorship. Tel Aviv (AP)—In what fellow journalists called an ingenious story that evaded military censors, an Israeli columnist informed readers of a major war debate in the cabinet by transposing it to Poland in 1922.

Amnon Abromowitz, who writes for the daily Maariv, learned two weeks ago that his government had nearly launched a new offensive in Lebanon. But military censors refused to let him publish it on national security grounds. So Mr.

Abromowitz bypassed the censors by resorting to ‘historical fiction,’ using details of the real story to concoct a mythical Polish cabinet debate 60 years ago.

What really happened, reported a week later when the government relaxed censorship on the event, was that on October 4 the cabinet defeated by one vote a proposal to attack Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon in retaliation for a guerrilla attack that killed six Israeli soldiers. The move was proposed by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon the day after the attack.

But those who knew how to decode Mr. Abromowitz’s column knew about the vote three days after it took place. ‘I think the public had a right to know how close the cabinet was to launching an action that could have led to a new conflagration,’ Mr. Abromowitz said in an interview.

‘It was my duty as a journalist to get the story out, so I wrote it as though the whole thing happened in Poland 60 years ago.’… It turned out that Mr. Abromowitz’s description of the meeting, and the lineup of ministers in the final vote, closely corresponded to Israeli reality. ‘A lot of reporters phoned me when they read the story,’ Mr. Abromowitz said.

‘They wanted to know whether they had understood me correctly, and whether I could confirm the whole thing. All I could say was that I had nothing to add to what I wrote.’

Confronted with censorship since the Jewish state was established in 1948, local and foreign reporters sometimes must go to extreme and offbeat lengths to get suppressed stories into print… Although censorship applies almost exclusively to national security matters, violators face tough punishment.

All outgoing reports are monitored and foreign correspondents risk losing accreditation.”

Context added by this archive

A dispatch about censorship, carrying a censorship notice in its own first line, describing how reporters got around censorship.

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• What the censor left behind

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