“The phenomenon reflects the crisis of values in Israeli society at that time and the moral panic accompanying it,” observes Prof. Oded Heilbronner, a historian at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan. [...]
Archival documents from this era show that national institutions held contradictory and confusing positions about the subject question – ranging from the desire to allow a degree of freedom and avoid inessential prohibitions, to the fear of the undesirable moral influence of pornographic literature and the damage it was liable cause. [...]
But when Prof. Heilbronner examined the list of books the committee reviewed, he had trouble discerning any consistent logic behind its decisions and found that it had actually approved many pornographic books for publication. In part, this was because alongside the pornography they depicted messages in the content that “suited the views of some of parts of the establishment,” he notes. [...]
The Committee to Combat Obscene Literature was dissolved in 1967, and a year later the Committee on the Matter of Pornographic Publications was created under the aegis of the Justice Ministry. It took a relatively liberal approach to the phenomenon, and even ruled that it is impossible to prove the claim that pornography has a negative influence or to discern any connection between exposure to lewd materials and corruption of public morals. Moreover, it wrote that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have found that pornographic literature “has a positive role in relieving urges that otherwise could have led to perverted and even criminal activity.”
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