Prisoner X, the Mossad andThe Futility of Censorship
Yossi Melman reviews the recent history of Israeli censorship in the name of security and recommends that Israel end the practice.
On a sunny, humid afternoon in June 2010, I sat on the plaintiff’s bench in Judge Hila Gerstel’s court in Petach Tikva, a town about eight miles east of the bustling city of Tel Aviv. Opposite my lawyer and me were representatives and legal advisors of Israel’s security establishment. My goal, on behalf of the newspaper I then worked for, Haaretz, was to persuade Judge Gerstel to lift a gag order.
We lost the case. Judge Gerstel refused to consider even a compromise — to allow us to reprint news items published abroad about a mysterious Prisoner X. Because of the judicial gag order, the episode was omitted from a book that I later co-authored.
Nearly three years later, I wonder what would have happened had the judge given her consent? Would that have prevented Ben Zygier from committing suicide? Zygier was the Australian who had moved to Israel and, as Ben Alon, reportedly worked for the Mossad until he did something that enraged the Israeli foreign espionage agency. Perhaps a glimmer of media attention would have offered some hope to a man in solitary confinement whose very existence was a state secret.
Zygier had been arrested in February 2010, by officers of Shin Bet, the domestic security agency featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers. He was interrogated, represented by four lawyers, brought before judges, and eventually indicted. He received visits from his wife and other family members. In December 2010, Zygier was found dead in his high-security cell, which had originally been constructed to house Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. Authorities decreed that the prisoner had somehow hanged himself. Every motion and stage of this case was conducted in secrecy.
