Israeli archives censorship regulations and oral history
The organizational culture of government ministries and security bodies that were involved in crafting Israel’s foreign policy was lacking for many years.
By ELDAD BEN AHARON, EITAY MACKDR. GEORG HERLITZ at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, 1947.(photo credit: THE CENTRAL ZIONIST ARCHIVES JERUSALEM)
The latest Israeli State Comptroller report revealed that about 1,300,000 historical files in the Israel State Archives are hidden from the public eye, despite the fact that the confidentiality assigned to them by Israeli law has expired. The very need to file an application, the complexity and duration of the document’s reclassification process and the limited initiated disclosure by various archives seems not only an ungainly bureaucracy, but also an impossible barrier to overcome, aimed at those who wish to study the content of these files.However, that is only the bureaucratic failure. In practice, even after obtaining some archival material from Israeli archives, one faces many other difficulties. For example, parts of the documents are often redacted. Furthermore, the organizational culture of government ministries and security bodies that were involved in crafting Israel’s foreign policy was lacking for many years.From a review of official documents prepared by Israeli representatives in dozens of countries, we argue that there was no standardization and methodology according to which Israeli representatives were supposed to document and report back to the headquarters in Jerusalem. This is especially noticeable when comparing the Israeli official documents with reclassified documents that were prepared by US representatives in foreign countries.Due to the almost complete separation between civilian and security body representatives of the State of Israel’s missions abroad, it is relatively rare to find documents comprehensively explaining the policy and nature of relations with a foreign country. Generally, documents and telegrams were written according to the skills, education and personal interest of those who prepared them. Some are written in a sloppy way, dealing with trivial matters and revealing a lack of understanding and familiarity with what is happening. In some cases, Israeli representatives abroad did not receive diplomatic and academic training or did not have sufficient knowledge of the history, culture and political balance of power in the countries they served in.In fact, we found that many telegrams and reports were based on improvisation, intuition and personal connections which Israeli representatives formed during their tenure. It is also possible that the declassified files are not the most important archival material one could hope to find, since many of the files on important topics will not see the light of day for years to come. Some broad-scale histories of foreign policy are fragmented because successive state censors have only partly declassified records on specific themes, leaving certain aspects of such themes such as arms trade and diplomatic relations with dictatorships, or materials pertaining to consecutive periods, classified.To better articulate the problem, any attempt to understand core chapters in Israel’s diplomatic history that is based on official documents in the archives is similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle from countless parts, when some parts are non-existent or broken and other parts are irrelevant or unsuitable at all. How should historians of Israel’s foreign policy and practitioners approach this methodological problem?On the civil level, one approach to confront this problem is to ask for disclosure of official documents. That has been discussed in recent years in a series of freedom-of-information petitions filed in Israeli courts, regarding Israeli defense exports to dictatorships (e.g. ties with the dictatorship in Haiti, with the government in Sri Lanka during the civil war, with the juntas in Argentina and Chile and with the Hutu regime during the civil war and genocide in Rwanda). The Israeli courts have accepted the state’s position that the documents should not be disclosed for fear of harming national security and foreign relations, but the petitions have brought about a public and media debate.One could ask the following: If the hands of security exporters and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs representatives who approved the export are clean, why should the documents be hidden? It is quite obvious that there is a good reason to hide these documents from the public eye, as they could reveal the actions and ties of successive Israeli governments with dictators who systematically violated human rights in their countries.ON THE academic level, the second approach in addressing this problem is to access the memories of Israeli diplomatic/intelligence elites, which inform a history that cannot be seen in censored primary sources that make up the bulk of Israel’s foreign policy. Using oral interviews with Israeli officials could allow a closer look at the history of Israeli diplomacy, and could also shed light on the role that oral history can and should play in such hidden and censored histories.Oral history, therefore, has the potential to be a methodological solution to collect, uncover and document the gray zone, and integrate it into research about Israeli diplomacy.
However, the Israeli oral history culture is, especially in the field of diplomatic history, much slower to adopt oral methodology, compared to other parts of the world. Israeli diplomatic historians have largely accepted the official censorship regulations, which do not declassify diplomatic documents in a consistent, systematic and transparent manner. When it comes to the politics of knowledge (one who has enough connections to obtain confidential documents and clear the hurdles of censorship) the bulk of Israeli academic research is concentrated in the race to obtain official documents in various archives, based on the underlying assumption that these documents can reveal the ultimate truth.Furthermore, Israel has viewed its own political history through the lens of a conflict in the Middle East, and its attempts to preserve the Jewish people and their histories. Israel also tends to express contempt for reports prepared on its conduct by international human rights organizations and the United Nations, when these are based on testimonies. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs tends to claim that these are unreliable and reflect the personal and political interests of those who testify and those who write the reports.Globally, substantial methodological advances in the field of oral history have been taking place since the 1990s. The field of oral history is now based on digital and internet revolutions, utilizes digital humanities tools, and implements high ethical standards on the part of those who conduct oral interviews and archive oral history collections.Nevertheless, the contempt and dismissal towards oral testimony is also entrenched in the Israeli academia: At a first glance, it seems that most of the scholars who study Israeli diplomatic history approach oral testimony with great suspicion, find it irrelevant to their research, and believe that memory is too fallible to be considered reliable. However, this is much like ‘the chicken or the egg’ problem. Which came first?Apart from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, which have been offering limited academic training to their students, too little attention and resources, if at all, have been allocated to oral history methodology in Israeli academia in the past decades. In light of the restrictive regulations of Israeli archives, this seems absurd to us. This state of affairs can explain why scholars studying Israeli diplomatic history find oral testimony irrelevant to their research.Since in the early 1980s the University of Virginia-affiliated Miller Center, specializing in presidential scholarship, public policy and political history, has promoted the presidential oral history projects starting with the ground-breaking work on the Jimmy Carter administration. Since then, both the Miller Center and Columbia University have launched oral history projects for American presidents, from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush to Barack Obama.Due to the fact that oral history has been proven relevant and reliable in the documentation of American diplomacy and statecraft of presidencies since the 1980s, and especially due to the lack of transparency in censorship regulations of Israeli archives, we believe that scholars and practitioners need to adopt oral history methodology more rigorously in the field of Israeli diplomatic history, in order to help document important hidden histories.Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon is an expert on the diplomatic history of the Middle East during the Cold War and his research focuses on Israel’s foreign policy from 1948 to the presentAttorney Eitay Mack is a human rights activist in the issue of Israel’s arms trade and diplomatic relations with dictatorships
