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Tamarack Camps Adventure Center

Tel-12 Mall (Between Montgomery Wards and Toys 'IV Us)

Shin Bet Disclosures
Force Reexamination

HELEN DAVIS

Jerusalem Correspondent

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FOR ALL AGES OF CHILDREN AND TEENS

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THE FIJI\ IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. AGAIN

20

FRIDAY, NOV. 20, 1987

sraelis were handed a
bombshell this month
when they were told that
their domestic intelligence
service, the fabled Shin Bet,
has been systematically
beating information out of
suspects and routinely com-
mitting perjury to obtain
convictions.
This is not the first time
that the Shin Bet has been ac-
cused of maltreating security
prisoners. But in the past,
most Israelis have taken com-
fort in the knowledge that the
allegation came from foreign
organizations which, they
persuaded themselves, must
be fundamentally hostile to
Israel.
This month's charges, how-
ever, allowed no recourse to
righteous indignation or in-
jured innocence by either
Israeli officials or the Israeli
in the street. This time, it was
not Amnesty International or
some harebrained United Na-
tions committee that had laid
the charges.
The rude shock was ad-
ministered in a report by a
judicial commission of in-
quiry headed by a respected
former President of Israel's
Supreme Court, Judge Moshe
Landau.
Moreover, the Shin Bet's ex-
ecutives and agents conceded
that the allegations against
them were essentially true.
As the report noted rather
quaintly: "They opened their
hearts to us and admitted
their errors without hiding a
thing."
The Israeli public might
have been expected to have
reacted to the report with
furious outrage. After all,
their blind faith in the essen-
tial integrity of the Shin Bet
had been cruelly abused. But
they had already been psycho-
logically prepared for the
shock by two earlier
revelations.
The first involved the
disclosure in the Israeli
media that two Palestinian
prisoners had been beaten to
death in April, 1985 after the
bus they had hijacked was
stormed by an Israeli com-
mando unit.
In that case, Israelis might
have been able to forgive and
forget. While they were deep-
ly disturbed by the notion of
prisoners being killed in cold
blood, there was little public
sympathy for the Palestinian
hijackers.
A prisoner exchange (1,150

Palestinians for three
Israelis) around the same
time also gave rise to a
widespread feeling that the
government had "gone soft"
on terrorists and that the
Shin Bet agents were
somehow justified in meting
out instant justice.
The second disclosure of
Shin Bet excesses, however,
was of an entirely different
order: It involved an Israeli
Army officer, Izat Nafsu, who
had been sentenced to 18
years imprisonment on
charges of treason and
espionage.
Earlier this year — after he
had spent eight years in jail
— the Supreme Court ruled
that the charges against Naf-
su were groundless. His con-
fession, decided the court, had
been brutally extracted and
his interrogators had lied to
the court when they denied
he had been mistreated.
It was impossible for the
political masters of the in-
telligence community to close
their eyes any longer, and

"How is it possible
that for 16 years,
not a single judge,
prosecutor or
attorney general
was aware of the
systematic
deception . .?"

Judge Landau was charged
with conducting a thorough
housecleaning.
"Regrettably and shameful-
ly," his report confirmed that
the Shin Bet had been indulg-
ing in excesses for the past 16
years. But the report did not
stop there. Such conduct, it
said, had placed Israel's
democracy in mortal danger.
lithe Shin Bet continued to
operate outside the law, warn-
ed the report, "control is one
day liable to fall into the
hands of an unscrupulous per-
son." And the distance from
there to the despotism of a
police state, it added, "is but
a hair's breadth!'
The commission grappled
with two fundamental ques-
tions that affect not only
Israel's security services, but
also the intelligence agencies
of other Western states which
face the threat of terrorism
against their civilians:
• Permitting extra-legal
measures without eroding the
moral and democratic prin-

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