(Reminder: Anat Kam is the soldier who, while working in an army office, copied thousands of classified documents and gave them to Uri Blau, a Haaretz leftist newspaper reporter. She was sentenced to four and a half years in prison several days ago.)
A considerable number of paragraphs in Anat Kam's court sentence were blacked out before they were allowed to be seen by the media and public. This is as it should be when a sentence deals with serious espionage.
From the parts that were left for us to read, it can be deduced that among the documents Kam copied were hundreds that are classified as most secret and that she handed them over to Hebrew newspaper Haaretz reporter Uri Blau in a hasty decision made after meeting him for the first time for just a few minutes. This took place after her attempt to give them to another journalist several days earlier was unsuccessful. It is important to stress that the judges rejected her attempts to present this act as one caused by youthful mischievousness with no bearing on ideology.
The first time she was interrogated, Anat declared that the handing over of the documents in order to have them made public was so as to warn about the illegality of of targetted hits by the IDF against terrorists. Sje even pointed out at that stage that in the documents she gave the reporter were issues that should be settled in the international court in Hague.
Tthe judges felt that her belated declarations of youthful mischief and new-found patriotism were ideas thought up with the intention of helping her before the court and were not impressed.
Kam was not accepted for a pilot's training course in the IAF, nor to the IDF radio and was dropped from an officer's training course. The judges felt that some of her actions were motivated by frustration at the failures that happened during her army service. However, they decided that her actions were to be defined as espionage, motivated for the most part as a result of her world view and ideology
ideological criminals must have the book thrown at them even for first offenses, even if they have no criminal record, which is what the esteemed Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia said to jjustify the severe punishments she wished to mete out on those youngsters who protested illegally against the disengagement.
That is why young Kam, whom the judges declared had put Israeli lives as well as those of IDF soldiers in danger with her actions when she handed over operational secret documents to a reporter, is definitely similar to the sentences given the young demonstrators who planned during the disengagement period to burn car parts and were accused of trying to endanger lives on a public thoroughfare.