For those of you who haven’t been following the local news, the International and Serious Crimes Unit has decided to go after 3 Israeli journalists because, as part of their jobs as reporters, they entered enemy states. All 3 of these journalists hold dual citizenship with other countries and it was on these alternate passports that they went to cover events in countries we aren’t friendly with, such as Lebanon and Syria. It seems that they broke a law that neither they nor the Israeli media for whom they worked and who dispatched them, such as Channel 10, Yediot Acharanot, and so forth, were at all aware of. But why should they be? After all, dozens of Israeli journalists have gone to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and other unfriendly countries in the line of their work over the past 10 years and no one was ever prosecuted for doing so. Indeed, in the just the last 6 months, more than a dozen journalists have crossed those borders in exactly the same manner as the 3 under investigation.

Journalists are not supposed to “report” by passing on second, third, and fourth-hand information to the public. They are not supposed to engage in armchair reporting on events far afield from the comfort of their Tel Aviv or Jerusalem living rooms. They are supposed to investigate, to verify, to go to the source. Journalists are supposed to cover war and conflict and endangering their own lives is part of the job. It comes with the territory. But these three journalists under investigation were not throwing themselves into the middle of a combat zone, and they were not privy to nor reporting about top-secret information. In fact, their reports were pretty darn innocuous. Interesting, certainly, but not exactly a Watergate and deep throat expose. So why them and why now?

Why not the other 11 or 12 journalists who have done exactly the same thing in recent months? Why not the dozens who have done this before?

We have something called freedom of the press. It is something that is highly valued here. I have, over the months, put up numerous buttons decrying the draconian measures taken by our neighboring countries to suppress free speech, to curtail journalists’ ability to report. I put those buttons up and criticized those countries with a sense of superiority and pride that my government and my society would have none of that kind of thing here. We are a democracy and we value free speech and freedom of the press. Or so it seemed. What is happening now though seems to give the lie to that.

One of those under investigation is a journalist of integrity and a person of integrity. I also consider her to be a good and valued friend. And our government should get its head out of its a** and perhaps attend to some of the real problems we have here and leave these journalists alone to continue doing their jobs.

(BTW does anyone know why my screen goes blue and I get an error message about memory parity nearly every time I try to post something? I had a much better piece written and it gotten eaten twice that way.)