The commission, and the one paper that printed itFour papers, one dispatch, one that printed the commission · 1987 to 1999
1987 to 1999
The commission, and the one paper that printed it
On Sunday 27 December 1987, four American newspapers printed the same dispatch about the same thing: the Israeli army preparing military trials for about a thousand Palestinians arrested in the first two weeks of the uprising. One of those four told its readers that an Israeli judicial commission had just found that the security service’s agents had committed perjury, and had made a measure of physical force against prisoners lawful. The other three did not. The one that did was the Anniston Star, in a town of about thirty thousand people in north-east Alabama.
This section is about the Landau Commission, which reported in October 1987 under a former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, and about what happened to it on the way to an American reader. The companion section, where the confirmation came from, is about the allegations. This one is about the document that answered them, and about the twelve years it stood.
“Israel’s security force chastised, not prosecuted.”
The commission reported at the end of October 1987 and this is a Maine paper’s summary of it in five words. Chastised is doing the work that prosecuted would have done.
CP-1987-032“The Israeli army is preparing to begin military trials for nearly a thousand Palestinians rounded up after two weeks of disturbances in the occupied territories.”
John Kifner’s dispatch, three weeks into the first intifada. Four American papers in this archive printed it on the same Sunday. Watch what each one keeps.
CP-1987-037“Israeli military to try Palestinian protesters.”
Waco keeps the trials and calls the thousand people protesters. The commission is not in this version.
CP-1987-038“Ninety percent of the cases involving Palestinians from the occupied territories never involved actual trials.”
Florida keeps the lawyer, Lea Tsemel, who has not been allowed to visit anyone, and the figure that makes the headline strange: nine in ten of these cases never reached a trial at all. The commission is not in this version either.
CP-1987-039“The investigation, by the Landau Commission, also found that Shin Bet agents had perjured themselves… Now that ‘mild physical pressure’ has been legitimized…”
Anniston keeps all of it. A paper in a town of 30,000 in Alabama is the only one of the four in this archive to print the commission by name, what it found about perjury, and the phrase that made the practice lawful. Felicia Langer, the lawyer, supplies the rest: It is a terrible wall of secrecy. You are helpless as a lawyer, you don’t know what you are defending against. It ran beside an after-Christmas advertisement for sterling silver at sixty per cent off.
CP-1987-040“Israeli Study Finds Torture Common.”
Five years on, an Israeli study, and the commission’s phrase is now the standard against which the practice is measured. The case it turns on is Mustafa Akawi, who died in Israeli custody that February.
CP-1992-017“The 1987 Landau Commission — in the words of the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’Tselem) — ‘ended up legitimating the use of torture’ with its sanction of ‘moderate physical pressure.’”
Not a news article. A reader’s letter, correcting a government minister quoted in the paper five days earlier, in a story about a Palestinian who had just died under interrogation. The clearest statement of what the commission did, anywhere in this archive, and it arrives in the letters column.
CP-1995-008“He was kept sleepless in contorted and excruciating positions with a stinking bag over his head, he was threatened, he was beaten and he was subjected to violent shaking until he passed out.”
Serge Schmemann’s special report, filed the day the United Nations Committee Against Torture summoned Israel to Geneva. It names the official term, says human rights groups call it torture, and states plainly that the Israeli Supreme Court has regularly condoned the practice. The man it opens on is a twenty-year-old student called George.
CP-1997-011“Israel’s top court bans agents from torturing suspects.”
Twelve years after the commission permitted it, the court restricts it.
CP-1999-013“Israel Supreme Court outlaws torture of Palestinian suspects.”
The same ruling the same morning, two words different. Bans becomes outlaws, and this paper says whose torture it was.
CP-1999-014Put the four versions of 27 December side by side and the difference is not accuracy. Every one of them is true. It is how much room the page had, and what a copy desk decided a reader needed. Three papers gave their readers a thousand arrests and a courtroom. The fourth gave them the arrests, the courtroom, the perjury, the phrase that made it lawful, and a lawyer saying she did not know what she was defending against.
What the commission permitted, the court restricted in September 1999, and two American papers put that in a headline the same morning. Neither ruling ended the reporting. The allegations in the companion section continue through 2020, which is as far as this collection follows them.
The next time a finding like this is described as obscure, or as something that only came out later, it is worth asking where it was published at the time. In this case it was on page 6A of a small Alabama daily, beside an advertisement for discounted sterling silver.