Censorship in a Gossipy Democracy

...one of Israel's leading newspapers...

...But before a subject is fully excluded from the media, the Committee members must vote to decide whether they are willing to grant a request for general self-censorship on it-that is, to instruct their news desks to withhold material relating to the topic from the pages of their papers...

...Should it censor your scoop today, even if the Appeals Committee decides in your favor tomorrow you are likely to be the loser...

...Naturally, whatever is disclosed at the meetings cannot be published...

...For by the next day a scoop is generally no longer a scoop, or later developments may have rendered your story obsolete altogether...

...he simply must allow publication of the disputed item...

...Its provisions allow officials to hold a suspected spy under secret arrest until trial, disclosing his whereabouts to no one other than his lawyer and the judge who must regularly renew the detention...

...Secrecy has its ironies-the government did not want any interruption in the usual weekly offerings of rape and mayhem, lest it tip off the public about the arrests...

...Actually, Ha'aretz, the nation's largest and only privately owned morning paper, quit the group when it changed its rule from a one- to a two-vote veto...

...To begin with, a newspaper found guilty of violating the censorship restrictions can be fined thousands of pounds, but a censor whose action is overturned pays no fine...

...This arrangement does not apply to foreign correspondents who, in theory at least, are supposed to submit every word cabled, phoned, or mailed abroad to military scrutiny...

...The censors, of course, know this and-to use a rather mixed metaphor-the knowledge gives a sharp clout to their otherwise dulled scissors...

...The success of the security apparatus is no doubt due in part to an instinct of "in-the-know" Israelis (most of them born during times of foreign rule or in hostile diaspora...

...Although this has produced a fairly smooth relationship in Israel between the press and the state, there is no denying that in several ways the arrangement is tilted in favor of the government...

...Much of the credit, though, must go to Israel's unique system of press censorship-sespite the fact that it seems to bear a greater resemblance to a huge piece of Swiss cheese than to an impenetrable curtain of secrecy...

...This system, overseen by Israel's military, is a strange mixture of very draconian measures that are generally not enforced and completely voluntary arrangements that are strictly adhered to...

...its editors returned half a year later after securing a compromise whereby they are not obliged to accept decisions of sessions from which they absent themselves...

...They apparently are able to discern what can be discussed with whom, and what should not be talked about...

...When a newspaper feels that a censor has exceeded his authority, or when a censor believes a paper has violated the regulations, a complaint is lodged with the three-man Joint Appeals Committee-composed of one representative each from the military and the Editors' Committee, and presided over by an independent chairman who is selected by mutual consent and serves until he resigns...

...And while the two editors were kept in jail for weeks, they were permitted to continue publication, and to hold work-sessions with their staff in prison...

...This advantage is only partly balanced by the fact that the Army chief of staff can reduce (but not increase) any penalty imposed on a daily, and that the money paid by the paper goes to the welfare fund of the Journalists Association...

...Usually the chairman is a prestigious private lawyer...

...More realistically, publications can be restricted by judges, who may prohibit the printing or broadcasting of judicial proceedings if they decide this is in the interest of the litigants or the public...

...In theory, the military can also employ the country's normal libel laws...

...and, second, by the effectiveness of the mechanism that prevents this information from being leaked to the local press, or to the scores of great world newspapers that maintain resident correspondents in Israel...

...THE ISRAELI VOLUNTARY SYSTEM Censorship in a Gossipy Democracy BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Friday nights"-those evenings when friends B gather for discussion and gossip at one another's homes -are an essential part of Israel's social life and of its political opinion-making process...

...Copy-desk editors make the preselection, sending off for inspection only the stories covered by the notices...

...the action was voided by the Supreme Court on technical grounds...

...for years now, the post has been filled by the past president of the Israel Bar Association...

...Israeli courts recognize the crime of defaming groups of people -whether mailmen, saxophonists, or tank commanders-and therefore this possibility, albeit far-fetched, exists...

...Consisting of the editor-in-chief and one or two major editors from each daily paper, as well as representatives from broadcasting, the Committee meets regularly for off-the-record and deep-background briefings that are given by the country's top leaders and officials, from Prime Minister Golda Meir to the director general of the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption...

...The affair, known as the "BULL scandal"-after BULL'S EYE...

...While Saturday nights are usually reserved for the cinema or the theater, the arrival of the Sabbath is the occasion for lively exchanges on topics like the devaluation of the dollar, or Golda's latest speech in the Knesset, or the bungling protege of some Cabinet minister who is being kicked upstairs though he actually should have been fired...

...But often, particularly for anybody who comes across sensitive and classified documents in the course of his regular work, the weekly confabulations are a source of amazement: One is repeatedly struck, first, by the number of people with access to real secrets that are none of their business...

...As for the specific procedures of Israel's voluntary censorship, they are embodied in an agreement signed by the presidium of the Editors' Committee and the chief of staff of the Army...

...It is this statute that has in practice been replaced by Israel's voluntary system-the main and, with rare exceptions, the only serious form of domestic censorship...

...have occasionally succeeded in getting judges to exercise this power...

...To defend their interests, the heads of the Jewish newspapers organized the "Committee of Response...

...It invests authorities with the power to punish those who have published anything that endangers public peace or order, and gives them the right to compel a newspaper to print official communiques denying the veracity of the paper's own stories...

...Another instrument for censorship is the State Security Law...

...Since its membership includes small foreign-language dailies, many of whom have official, or de facto, affiliations with the ruling Labor party, it has a built-in pro-government majority...

...The openly admitted double premise of these sessions is that the nation's editors should be accurately informed on vital questions, and that once they are informed it will be possible to persuade them to keep sensitive matters-even those that do not fall within the jurisdiction of the state censor-out of print...

...Finally, time enables the military to retain the upper hand...

...an amended compendium of old emergency regulations providing the military with the right of prior restraint...

...the name of the sheet-caused such a furor that it is highly unlikely authorities will want to repeat the experiment again...

...Next, there is the Treason and Espionage Act, possibly the most broadly written and arbitrary of the nation's security laws...

...In fact, this measure has teen employed against the press but once, in the case of a sex-and-crime magazine of all things...

...The mechanism prevents censorship disputes from reaching crisis proportions in the courts: By agreeing to accept the Joint Appeals Committee rulings, the military, and through it the government, undertakes not to push for the implementation of laws that could result in the temporary closing down of a newspaper and the jailing of its editors...

...The roots of the noncoercive system date back to the period just before independence, when the government was British and the "native" press was divided into hostile Arab and Jewish camps...

...There is, to begin with, the Press Ordinance (inherited, like almost all restrictive legislation, from the British Mandatory regime in Palestine, and revalidated by the Israeli Parliament...

...And the informal, clublike atmosphere prevailThe New Leader ing in the Committee is such that the more independent-minded editors dislike playing perennial spoilsports by continually casting vetoing votes...

...and their positions may change hands more than five times in a single year...

...The person representing the press comes from a special Editors' Censorship Subcommittee that also functions as a liaison with the chief censor...

...But if the two civilian members rule in favor of publishing a censored story and the Army representative votes against it, he can claim that vital security interests are at stake...

...Each of the more than 20 daily newspapers has one vote, and the decision has to be practically unanimous: If two or more publications stand against the motion, the request is automatically rejected...

...Were censorship to be applied "by the book," that is, were every paper every day required to submit every line of everv article to the authorities, the militarv would have to keep battalions ol censors on duty to go through the mass of material so that the presses could roll on schedule...

...An appeal then goes to the chief of staff, who has the last word...

...Second, if a majority of the Appeals Committee rejects a complaint from the press, its decision is final...

...the press, similarly, abdicates its right to seek court injunctions against public officials...

...The other two members are chosen ad hoc...

...Since state secrets can be conveyed to the enemy simply by printing them, journalists and newspapers are fully liable under the statute...

...After the establishment of the State of Israel, this body, renamed the "Israel Editors' Committee," assumed a role in regulating news dissemination...

...Prosecutors, claiming a threat to the "national security...

...Instead, Israeli dailies receive periodic lists from the chief censor detailing the categories of subjects that must be cleared by the government...

...Still, in a way the Committee is a subtle-and sometimes not so subtle-instrument of government censorship...

...Only twice in Israel's history-both in the early days of statehood-has the government tried to use this regulation, and in the second instance Eliahu Salpeter, our regular Middle East correspondent, is a member of the editorial board of Ha'aretz...

...The unenforced laws constitute a formidable arsenal of censorship weapons...