Israeli Channel 2 aired on March 17 an investigative report documenting the activists of the Breaking the Silence organization allegedly collecting classified information about Israel Defense Forces (IDF) activity. In one of the high points of the report, former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter makes an appearance. Dichter, who is currently a Likud Knesset member, responds to the investigative material by telling the Channel 2 interviewer in a worried tone, “If you hadn’t told me the background, and told me what I was watching, I would have said it looked like information gathering by the handlers of an agent.” Dichter concluded with the following punchline: “and I didn’t hear a word about Palestinians or Gazans.” The words of the former Shin Bet chief were designed to back up what was presented as a Channel 2 investigative report. But in reality, it seemed like a propaganda clip of the right-wing Ad Kan ("No More") nongovernmental organization (NGO).
The Ad Kan people were the ones to supply the ostensibly incriminating material to Channel 2. In the last two years, the Ad Kan organization planted its activists in Breaking the Silence, an NGO that attempts to fight against the occupation by revealing testimony of soldiers about their army service in the territories, during conflicts and also during daily life.
In an attempt to give the report a serious dimension, Channel 2 correspondent Ofer Hadad said, “At our request, we received all the unedited materials from all those hidden cameras. Unedited, not shortened. Hours of meticulous questioning and, yes, some of the evidence deals with questions regarding IDF activity in the territories.”
On the assumption that Hadad indeed viewed all the long, jam-packed, unedited filmed materials, and all that he succeeded in collecting from them was barely 2 minutes of “transmission of [ostensibly] classified material” on weapons and events that can be read about in any newspaper, it is not at all clear what new details were disclosed by his work, if at all. And what about most of the material that was not broadcast; material that probably featured problematic behaviors of IDF soldiers in the territories? Dichter did not hear a word about Palestinians only because Channel 2 did not air those sections of the evidence.
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