A well known method which Israeli reporters use to bypass the military censorship is to take the story to the foreign press, (at the price of losing exclusivity, but sometimes journalists just want to get the stuff out). In the New Yorker profile of former Mossad head Meir Dagan, this paragraph appears:
Far from everything is known about Dagan’s career. Two reporters for Yediot Ahronot, Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir, once investigated a story that, before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which was aimed at rooting out Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Dagan led a secret unit across the border whose mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion. Military censor killed the story, Sarna told me. Dagan acknowledges the censorship but denies the thrust of the story.
I posted this paragraph in Hebrew on my Facebook wall. Sarna commented:
Indeed, the censorship [on these stories] has been on for years. Horrifying things were done there, not just planned.
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Joel
Nice shaggy dog. Can I pet it?
sh
No shaggy dog, Joel. Such stories have been circulating for years, but from the wrong side of the border for them to be widely believed. Hearing confirmation from this side seems a significant development.
Joel
Who confirmed what?
It’s all speculation.
Jack
Interesting, hopefully more information will be gathered. Anyway the provocations isnt really anything new, Dayan claimed Israel deliberately provoked Syria with incursions on the eve of 67 war.
Joel
Incursions of farming equipment into the DMZ.
sh
And if they had made incursions into the DMZ with tractors we would have sat there with our arms folded?
“”Look, it’s possible to talk in terms of ‘the Syrians are bastards, you have to get them, and this is the right time,’ and other such talk, but that is not policy,” General Dayan told Mr. Tal in 1976. ”You don’t strike at the enemy because he is a bastard, but because he threatens you. And the Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”
According to the published notes, Mr. Tal began to remonstrate, ”But they were sitting on the Golan Heights, and . . . ”
General Dayan interrupted: ”Never mind that. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.””
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/11/world/general-s-words-shed-a-new-light-on-the-golan.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Joel
I’m well aware of Dayan’s quote and equally aware that Syria had tried to divert Israel’s water supplies, a causas belli, in the early ’60s.