Israel's 'Prisoner X2' revealed?

In 2013, the Australian press broke the story of Israel’s “Prisoner X”. Ben Zygier was an Israeli-Australian who had become a Mossad agent. But he was effectively disappeared by the notorious spy agency after allegedly betraying its secrets.

Zygier supposedly hanged himself while in Mossad custody in 2010, though the clouds of doubt and uncertainty still hang low around the case. Such was the secrecy enveloping the case that it was only three years later that the Australian press broke open the story. The Israeli press had been totally banned from speaking about the case, and at first his name was not even known, leading to the designation “Prisoner X”.

Last week details emerged of a “Prisoner X2” – allegedly a double agent working for Iran inside the Mossad.

Ever since the Zygier case reached the world media, talk of a “Prisoner X2” has been ongoing. But this month the American journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, citing an anonymous “knowledgeable Israeli security source”, told some of what is known about his story and revealed that “X2” was allegedly a double-agent for Iran.

The imprisoned agent, dubbed “Aleph Aleph” (Hebrew for AA), was profiled by Haaretz reporter Amir Oren, who interviewed the agent’s wife. But, according to Silverstein, “This story so troubled the censorship unit, headed at the time by Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, that Haaretz was forced to pull it from its website after just a few hours. It was never published in the print edition.”

Silverstein published a copy of the censored story on his website.

“AA” was sentenced in secret to 14 years imprisonment. He had apparently been imprisoned long before Zygier, and was only dubbed “X2” because knowledge of his existence reached the press later.

He was exposed in 2004, the same year that a CIA spy network in Iran was entirely exposed due to a CIA blunder. Silvestein speculates that the two incidents may be linked.

It’s hard to know the facts when we don’t even know the agent’s real name. But what all this does illuminate for us, once again, is the authoritarian nature of the military censorship regime that Israel operates.

While Israel often boasts of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” the reality is quite different. In fact, for Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel operates an entirely undemocratic regime more akin to a dictatorship. Israel is not a democracy. It is more like an ethnocracy, where those of Jewish origin dominate over the indigenous Palestinians.

The murder this week of 18-year-old Hadil Salah Hashlamoun by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in Hebron is only the latest such example of this. The soldiers shot her and let her bleed to death for more than 30 minutes. They then lied about the killing, claiming she had had a knife. Such justifications after the fact are habitual from Israel.

Israel’s media complies with the military censor because of pressures on it from both the state and society. The few decent journalists who work in the Israeli press are treated as outcasts and marginalised. Indeed, the dissident Haaretz writer Gideon Levy is now so often attacked by Israeli citizens angry at the basic humanity he shows towards the Palestinian people, that his paper had to hire bodyguards for him.

The military controls every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank, and it enforces the brutal siege on the Gaza Strip. Palestinian citizens of the state too have reduced rights, albeit in not such as obvious way.

But the military ultimately also controls the Jewish Israeli media too. This is not the behaviour of a democratic state: to be able to withdraw articles that it finds disturbing.

Neither is it the behaviour of a democratic state to disappear its citizens and try them in secret courts. That is how dictatorships act.

As Silverstein puts it well: “Lest we think these two stories have exhausted the list of those guilty of betraying Israeli intelligence, Zygier’s attorney, Avigdor Feldman, insinuates that there may be even more such cases unknown to the Israeli public. Which raises the question: How many people can a nation ‘disappear’ before it sheds the pretext of democracy and becomes a national security state, at best, or a police state, at worst?”

The Mossad, Shin Bet and other Israeli spy agencies are brutal death squads that often act with impunity all around the world, with a long and brutal history of murderous acts targeting Palestinian intellectuals, leaders and resistance fighters. It should come as no surprise then, that it brutality extends further.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.