Wartime censorship is necessary, but must be done responsibly - editorial

This past Friday, an op-ed was published in The Wall Street Journal by former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett in which he revealed two operations carried out by Israel in Iran in 2022: an attack on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base in Iran and the assassination of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander.

The one problem: The article was never approved by the IDF Military Censor, the unit responsible for the censoring of information that, if published, may be harmful to Israel’s security.

Bennett wrote, “After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran.”

Israeli media revealed shortly after Bennett’s article was released that, despite revealing sensitive information, the former prime minister did not seek permission from the censor before he filed his op-ed.

In response to the criticism, Bennett said, “The problem with Iran is not the publication of the moves we made against it that were already known in the past, but that Iran attacks us through Hamas and Hezbollah and even the Houthis, and the governments of the past decade talk and speak, but do not exact a painful price from the leaders of Iran.”

Bennett attempts to shift blame

In other words, Bennett attempted to shift the blame from himself, without responding directly to criticism, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While much can be said in the way of criticism of actions in terms of Israeli security carried out by Netanyahu and his governments – especially the present one – this was not the context to do so. This was the context to confess to having made an error at a time, not only of war, but of peak tensions with Iran.

A similar situation had occurred in February 2020 when Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman revealed that then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and then-IDF Southern Command head Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi met with top Qatari officials to work on a deal with Hamas. This news was under gag order by the censor.

That being said, there is cause for concern over the modus operandi being practiced at the Military Censor.

On a regular basis, publications within themselves find their articles shot down, while other publications have the same exact story approved for publishing.

The Journalists Union of Israel sent a letter to Military Chief Censor Kobi Mandelblit last month saying that it had recorded three recent cases in which reports by one news outlet were rejected, while the same reports were approved for other outlets.

“We understand that in a security situation, certainly in wartime, it is vital to maintain national security, and the censor is one of the tools that help in maintaining this,” the union said, but “the accumulation of three cases within a few days raises the suspicion that there is a preference for one media outlet over others.”

In one such case in August, KAN was allowed to publish that security forces had thwarted an Iranian weapons smuggling attempt into Israel from Jordan in July while all other news outlets were told this was under gag order.

Haaretz revealed a month ago that Mandelblit was being pressured by Netanyahu to block reports without national security justification, some of which related to private matters concerning the prime minister and his wife. Mandelblit disqualified the report per request, claiming that it was for the security of the couple.

This came shortly after Netanyahu attempted to pass a law that would make it illegal for the censor to approve publication of leaked cabinet meeting conversations. He claimed that the leaks endangered national security, despite the majority of the conversations being arguments between coalition members, demonstrating fissures in the emergency government.

The censor, at a time of war more than ever, is crucial for preventing security information leaks that could put Israelis in harm’s way. That being said, recent reports demonstrate that the ability to reject news reports is being used and abused, both for political gain and by giving preferential treatment to one publication over another.

This hurts both the media’s ability to report the news – and the public’s right to know it.