Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies (Film/Fiction; 2) - Softcover

Shahak, Israel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745311512 ISBN 13: 9780745311517

Verlag: Pluto Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Israel's foreign policy is perceived to be essentially a defensive one by the international community. Why then is it the only nuclear power which refuses to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty? What is Israel's true foreign and policy? Drawing on the Hebrew press, Israel Shahak reveals Israel's strategic foreign policy as it is really is, as it is presented through its own media: what other Israeli Jews are told - and not what their government tells the rest of the world. Shahak demonstrates that the Israeli government, with the support of the US Jewish lobby, are conducting a policy aimed at securing control of the whole of the Middle East, the Palestinian issue being only one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. This is a frightening and controversial book that exposes Israel's real foreign policy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Israel Shahak (1933-2001) was a resident of the Warsaw Ghetto and a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. He arrived in Palestine in 1945 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was an outspoken critic of the state of Israel and a human rights activist. He was also the author of the highly acclaimed Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto, 2004) and Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto, 2008).

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Open Secrets

Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies

By Israel Shahak

Pluto Press

Copyright © 1997 Israel Shahak
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-1151-7

Contents

Foreword by Christopher Hitchens, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
Part I: CENSORSHIP, 
1 The Struggle Against Military Censorship and the Quality of the Army, 
Part II: FOREIGN RELATIONS, 
2 Israel's Strategic Aims and Nuclear Weapons, 
3 Syrian Cities and Relations with Saddam Hussein, 
4 Israel Versus Iran, 
5 Israeli Foreign Policy after the Oslo Accord, 
6 Coalition Building Against Iran, 
7 Israeli Foreign Policies, August 1994, 
8 Israeli Policies Toward Iran and Syria, 
Part III: ISRAELI FOREIGN TRADE, 
9 Trade Between Israel and the Arab States, 
10 Drugs and Vegetables: The Israeli Trade with Arab Countries, 
Part IV: AMERICAN JEWS, 
11 Israel and the Organized American Jews, 
12 The Pro-Israeli Lobby in the US and the Inman Affair, 
Part V: OSLO AND AFTER, 
13 The Real Significance of the Oslo Accord, 
14 Analysis of Israeli Policies: The Priority of the Ideological Factor, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Struggle Against Military Censorship and the Quality of the Army 2 December 1992

Introduction

This chapter illustrates not only how and to what extent the Hebrew press serves as a source of information, but also shows that the relative freedom it enjoys in the 1990s represents a great improvement on a former situation. Let me add that this improvement coincides, and not by chance, with the decline of the Israeli Labor Party, and more generally with the decline of the Zionist 'left'. Contrary to the opinion of most 'experts', the Zionist 'left' is more hostile to individual human rights and freedom of expression than the main parties (for example, Likud) of the Zionist right. (The quasi- bolshevik nature of the old-style Zionist 'left' and its enmity to freedom for anyone, including Jews, escaped the attention of most left-wing Western writers on Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.) Another important reason for the increase in freedom of the press in the last twenty years, as illustrated in this chapter, were the unsuccessful (or only half-successful) Israeli wars. Another important phenomenon illustrated in this chapter is the great interest taken by readers of the Hebrew press in the Army and everything connected with it, and the way in which this interest can be used to increase the freedom of the Hebrew press.

A similar phenomenon of an increase of freedom of expression following an unsuccessful war occurred in the US, where the actual freedom of the press (although still, in my view, lesser in extent than in the current Hebrew press) increased greatly after the Vietnamese War. Something similar can be observed in other countries.

Among the anomalies of Israeli society none in my view is more glaring than the existence of a fairly free expression in the general and free press in particular, under a censorship which may well be one of the most stringent in the world. This paradox was well described by Yitzhak Gal-Nur (Maariv, 25 November 1992):

'Legally, [Israeli] military censorship is all-powerful. In practice only a small proportion of press contents are censored in Israel.' Let me first describe the awesome legal powers of censorship: awesome enough to forbid the description of these powers until recent days. I will next proceed to describe the present struggle against accumulation of so much power in the censor's hand, and the deeper reasons for the willing compliance of Israeli Jewish society with those realities and the rarity of protests against them in the past.

Some information is needed to clear the ground. Military censorship is only one of a number of separately operating censorships, some of them abolished only in recent years and others still operative. I will not list all of them, contenting myself with two examples. There used to be a censorship committee concerned with the theatre; no production could be staged without its clearance. Before 1967 its vigilance was targeted primarily at what was thought too sexually explicit or contained sexually explicit language in both contemporary and classical plays. After 1967, when Hebrew theatre became a channel of political protest, the targets of the censors shifted to what they would assess (sometimes correctly) as anti-patriotic, anti-army or pro-Arab, especially when a contemporary play would raise the subject of anti-Palestinian atrocities. Several such plays were banned; in several others, whole portions were excised. Since theatre is popular among Israeli middle and upper classes, this particular censorship engendered outcries of protest. The protests forced the censors to be increasingly careful about their bans. After a struggle, this censorship was abolished a few years ago, with the consent of all secular parties over the opposition of the religious ones.

Another censorship committee oversees the mail, and is empowered to open private letters and to confiscate (but not destroy) them. In the 1950s it acted with few restraints, but in recent years it has busied itself primarily with confiscating those letters of new emigrants from the former USSR to their relatives which could deter the latter from immigrating to Israel.

Of all forms of censorships, however, military censorship has from Israel's inception been by all means the most important, most all-inclusive and most galling. It has been especially so since, as Gal-Nur rightly pointed out, 'in Israel, the underlying principle is that all public information is secret, except if it has been authorized for publication', and since 'the government can be easily tempted to use its powers, for the sake of deterrence or in order to pursue some evil schemes', or simply 'to conceal the extent of its own stupidity or misperformance'. One of the effects is that military censorship is actually furthering the Army's misperformance. Since 1974 when the struggle against military censorship began in earnest, this has been the main and most persuasive argument of its critics and campaigners for its abolition. For the public at large, this argument has certainly carried more conviction than any arguments about the undesirability of keeping people in the dark about the extent of the army's atrocities. When Israel Landers {Davar Friday Supplement, 27 November 1992) wants to hit military censorship at its softest spot, he recalls how during the week preceding 6 October 1973, censorship banned all the news derived from usual press sources about the massing of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the cease-fire lines. The Israeli Army then assessed these troop concentrations as devoid of all significance, and therefore didn't want to upset the public unduly. In effect, the ban itself was instrumental in shepherding Israel to its subsequent defeats.

Landers admits, however, that the press itself was then willing to toe the censorship's line, out of respect for the Army whose prestige stood in 1967-73 at its peak. Formal censorial bans were at that time often not needed because 'friendly advice' could suffice. The now raging campaign against military censorship originated from the Army's clumsy efforts to conceal negligence during the 1992 Ts'elim exercise in which five soldiers were killed. A major factor leading to public outrage over that affair were lengthy press interviews with the families of the killed and wounded soldiers. Their common theme was the interviewees' desire to know the causes of the accident....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745311512
• ISBN 13: 9780745311517
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland