In a court appeal filed by the Taub Center for Israel Studies, the center claims that Israel State Archives repeatedly overstepped its authority regarding the disclosure of information pertaining to settlements without having the legal authority to do so, according to a statement by the center.
Taub Center for Israel Studies is a research center in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at New York University (NYU) It was founded in 2003 with the purpose of advancing the study of modern Israel, including its recent history, society and politics.
The center also conducts research on the history of Zionism and the Yishuv. It also focuses on the history of settlements, what led to their establishment, its guiding policy and geographical borders. For this purpose, the center has requested access to certain materials that are kept in the Israel State Archives.
However, according to claims made by the center, accessing the material requires an approval by the Military Censure, despite the archives not having the legal mandate to make such decisions.
Housing over some 400 millions types of documentation including government protocols, maps, audio recordings, photographs and stamps, the Israel State Archives receives the records from various branches of the government and ministries.
According to Israeli law, all deposited material is made accessible to the public 30 years after it was first deposited unless it poses a risk to the country's national security.
In addition, banning the disclosure of particular documentation can be ordered only by the governmental office that deposited the documents in the first place.
In this case, the Taub center claims the documentation it requested would not harm Israel's national security and therefore the censure has no legal right to bar the center from accessing them.
Arranged in some 10,000 files, 3,500 of which were marked as classified, the documentation needed for the research contains information from government's sessions that took place during the 1970s and the 1990s regarding the establishment of various settlements including Elon Moreh, Gush Emunim (Sebastia), Shilo and Ma'ale Adumim.
Some of the files were previously disclosed to the public, but were later sent back to the military to review.