Israel closes ranks over justice v. security

Press, 13 June 1986, Page 17

Israel closes ranks over justice v. security

ROBIN LUSTIG

reports from Jerusalem on

the rare unity in Israel’s coalition Government over the replacement of the Attor-ney-General who had been calling for an inquiry into the deaths of two Palestinians, allegedly at the hands of security service agents.

Israel’s shaky coalition Government has proved unusually united, when it moved swiftly to replace Attorney-General Yitzhak Zamir. He had been demanding a police investigation into the activities of the head of the country’s top-secret security service, Shin Bet. Although Zamir had told the Cabinet as long ago as last February that he wanted to give up his post, political sources in Jerusalem are in no doubt'that the Cabinet’s decision on June 1 to replace him was a direct result of the stand he had taken on the Shin Bet affair. At the heart of the row — one of the most bitter to have shaken -Israel’s political y establishment

since the end of the Lebanon war — is a question which can rarely be easily answered in any democracy. Which is paramount: justice or security?

Prime Minister Shimon Peres, backed by all his senior Government colleagues, says national security comes first; Zamir says that without justice, security is in any case endangered.

Israel has always been obsessed by security, for obvious reasons: it is a small State surrounded by hostile or formerly hostile neighbours. But it also prides itself on being the “only democracy in the Middle East” — and it is the tension between these two national characteristics

which has led to the current crisis.

According to Professor Zamir, there are suspicions that the head of Shin Bet, Avraham Shalom, may have faked evidence, forged documents and suborned witnesses during an inquiry into the deaths in 1984 of two Palestinian hijackers while in the hands of Israeli security forces.

Zamir wants the allegations investigated by the police: the Government says this would unnecessarily damage Israel’s security service.

Actions approved by P.M.?

It has also been suggested that any actions which Shalom may have taken in order to protect his own men — it is alleged that he covered up the fact that the two Palestinians died while in the hands of Shin Bet and let it be thought that tjieir deaths were

the responsibility of the army —- were taken with the explicit approval of the then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir, leader of the Rightwing Likud bloc, is Foreign Minister in the current coalition and is due to take over again as Prime Minister later this year. Asked recently whether he had known at the time of the Sin Bet role in the Palestinians’ deaths, Shamir replied: “I knew what I had to know.” A former senior official in Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, Shamir has strongly opposed the holding of any inquiry into the Shin Bet affair.

The deaths of the two Palestinians have been a matter of controversy since the night in April, 1984, when they and two colleagues hijacked a bus south of Tel Aviv and forced it to drive into the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Their two fellow-hijackers and an Israeli woman soldier were killed when security forces stormed the bus, and Israeli officials at first said all four hijackers had perished in the operation. &

But photographs of the two surviving hijackers being led away, obviously alive, from the bus were later published in the Israeli press and an army commission of inquiry was set up to discover the truth.

The inquiry was told by the senior army officer on the scene, Brigadier-General Yitzhak Mordechai, that he had beaten the two hijackers with his pistol during interrogation because of fears that they had left primed explosives on board the bus. But Mordechai insisted that the two men had still been alive when the army handed them over to the security service for further questioning.

Concealed in national interest

Israeli officials say Shin Bet was concerned that if it became known that the hijackers had died while in the custody of Shin Bet agents, the men responsible would have faced trial and would have been entitled to defend themselves by revealing the operational guidelines under which they work. The agency apparently persuaded Shamir

that it was in the national interest for Shin Bet’s involvement in the affair to be deliberately concealed by whatever means were necessary.

In the early days of the crisis, Israeli military censors tried to prevent publication of any details of the affair, including the fact that it involved the security service. But the foreign media soon got to hear of the story, and Israeli newspapers were then able to report what was being said overseas. Much attention is now focused on exactly what role Yitzhak Shamir played in the cover-up and what precise guidelines are laid down for Shin Bet agents operating in Israeli-occupied territory. According to one unconfirmed report, these guidelines specify that Palestinians seized while carrying out an armed operation in the occupied West Bank or Gaza should be killed on the spot rather than taken prisoner. If this is the case, it could explain why neither Shamir nor Prime Minister Peres wants a police investigation into the affair.

Political sources believe that the appointment of Yosef Harish, a Tel Aviv District Court judge, as the new Attorney-General, will inevitably slow the process down. Harish has a reputation as a methodical and careful jurist, renowned for the lengthy consideration he gives to difficult matters.

“Closed doors” best thing

Bom in Jerusalem 62 years ago of a Russian father and an English mother, Harish has now been handed Israel’s hottest political potato. So far he has given no indication of how he is likely to act, except for saying in a brief TV interview that he believes the whole affair “should have stayed behind closed doors.” Copyright — London Observer T * -