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 The dispute is rooted in laws requiring online publications to be
submitted for military censorship, which means that as the Israel
State Archive digitizes its vast trove of documents, papers dealing
with national security may undergo new redaction.
In the past, anyone could go to the archive, request documents and
view them in its reading room. Now the reading room's operations are
being cut, and those same documents could in theory appear online
with content scrubbed by the censors.
"I'm all for digitization, but the way it has been handled here
raises serious questions of propriety," said Lior Yavne of the
Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, which,
backed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, has demanded
reassurances that the reading room will stay open.
With the archive technically under the authority of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative lay historian with a less than
positive view of the media, scholars whose business it is to delve
into Israel's past feel they have reason to fret.
For the director of the archive, Yaacov Lozowick, the controversy is
an unwelcome distraction from plans to scan and upload 400 million
documents, a task expected to take 25 years.
He says the archive's website is already active and that any
document not yet there can be custom-ordered by users and brought
online within two weeks.
The reading room - a space that seats around 50 people in a
Jerusalem office tower where the archive is housed - is not shutting
down entirely, Lozowick says. But users who could previously summon
files at short notice for viewing will no longer be able to do so
with such ease, he said, citing staff shortages due to the need to
digitize 100,000 documents daily.
OVERSIGHT
"We had to free up workers to do this other job. Meanwhile, we are
not closing the room," Lozowick said. "We have no intention
whatsoever of using this new stage to hide information that the
public should be able to see - categorically not."
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But he acknowledges that the involvement of the censors has put a
wrinkle in the process by adding an extra level of scrutiny to
national security documents that make up around 5 percent of the
archive - despite the fact that they already underwent internal
declassification.
While deeming the chance of the censors finding something new to
redact as "very small", Lozowick said the backlog of files they have
had to deal with since the mass-digitization began this year has
meant potential hold-ups. Another official briefed on the process
predicted that "less than one percent" of material already
declassified will be newly censored.
That has not assuaged transparency campaigners like Yael Berda, a
Hebrew University of Jerusalem sociology professor.
"Any shift from paper to digital format carries the risk of files
disappearing - though I am not accusing anyone of wanting this," she
said. "What I am saying is that we need stronger guarantees that
paper originals will remain publicly available."
As the former chief archivist for Israel's Holocaust memorial,
Lozowick came to believe that the main threat to original materials
was from unprincipled browsers tearing or writing on documents or
putting them back out of place.
"There are things in the archive that some people would like to keep
away from the public eye, believe me. But we will publish everything
in due course, as required by law, and in the interim everything
will be kept safe," he said.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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