Summary
Israel’s state archive, whose Chief State Archivist heads the archive system under the Archive Law 1955, and whose branches include the Ben Gurion, Begin and Rabin heritage archives and, officially, the IDF and Defense Establishment Archive (Silencing: DSDE’s Concealment of Documents in Archives, PDF p.4-5).
Details
- The DSDE teams that visit archives do not work for or on behalf of the ISA, although archive staff know them as “State Archive declassifiers” (PDF p.2).
- Chief State Archivists named in the report’s history: Avraham Alsberg, who in 1983 and 1986 pressed public archives to close records (PDF p.7); Reuven Yaron, who revisited the issue in 1991 while noting the limits of his powers (PDF p.8); Prof. Tuvia Friling, in office when DSDE operations began in 2002 (PDF p.8); and Dr. Yaakov Lozowick, who signed an authorization for DSDE teams, later concluded with the ISA legal department that their operations are not legally sanctioned, and did not warn the archives (PDF p.2, 9-10).
- The ISA’s legal advisor, Adv. Naomi Aldobi, held in an August 12, 2018 memorandum that access decisions in public archives rest with their directors, that the Chief State Archivist has no powers over access to privately held archival materials, and that the only sanction over a public archive’s bylaws is revocation of its public-archive status (PDF p.3, 11).
- The ISA declassified and cleared for access, at the Akevot Institute’s request, several dozen files on which the report’s history rests, and in 2018 uploaded the 1948-1967 government session transcripts in a form from which Aharon Zisling’s November 17, 1948 statements are absent (PDF p.2, 6).
- The Israeli Military Censor has recently posted an officer to the ISA, presented as a pilot program, to review archival records before they are made accessible (PDF p.13).
Related pages
Silencing: DSDE’s Concealment of Documents in Archives, Director of Security of the Defense Establishment, Yaakov Lozowick, Archives Law 1955, IDF and Defense Establishment Archive