In these dark days of the tail-end of winter, what a pleasure it was to have a laugh at the sight of the recent Haaretz headline announcing that evidence from the questioning of the Jewish terrorists who are implicated in last summer’s fatal arson attack in Duma shows that the police staged scenarios in a prison using informers in order to induce the suspects to confess.

Great, I thought, so the Shin Bet security service has pulled out of its moldy bag of tricks the trick that every Palestinian child knows so well. A trick that involves something approaching an elaborate production of Aristophanes’ play “The Birds.” Asfur (“bird” in Arabic) is an old term for an informer — a stool pigeon.

The Shin Bet has used the ruse of prisons run by the terrorist organizations since the 1970s. Avi Dichter or Jacob Perry or Roni Alsheich could probably give a more precise date. The suspect is taken to the Shin Bet interrogation facility in Ashkelon or in Kishon Prison or Petah Tikva, and finds himself in what appears to be an autonomous prison, run by security prisoners affiliated with the various Palestinian organizations. This sort of thing does actually exist. The fake prisoners pressure him for information about his actions, supposedly to prove to them that he is not an asfur who was brought in to get them to talk, just as was done to Yitzhar Klimkiewicz, one of the Duma suspects. Sometimes the questioning is done by the “emir,” the prince, the unrivaled boss in the prison. The suspect is threatened with murder if he cannot prove that he’s one of them by providing the requested information. They will supposedly relay it to the heads of the organization, outside the prison.

I get so nostalgic thinking about all the ploys that were used in the fake prison. All those hackneyed yet quite elaborate schemes in which Shin Bet personnel — frustrated theater majors, apparently — put their creativity on display, though they very seldom yielded results.

But it must be pointed out that as long as the “asfur” productions took place before an audience comprised exclusively of Palestinians, it could not be publicized or cited by the media. And whenever the cases came to trial, the defense minister issued a secrecy order over the entire performance. And the High Court of Justice, which has the sole authority to lift a secrecy order imposed for reasons of national security, repeatedly upheld it. And even when I argued, until I was blue in the face, that the tactics involved threats and violence and the use of moderate and immoderate physical violence, which should affect the admissibility of the confession — if there was one — the court repeatedly upheld the gag order, because it concerned “Shin Bet interrogation methods.” The tired cliche appeared in every secrecy order. And the court approved the order even when I argued that every Palestinian child in the Balata refugee camp has heard the story of the asfur, along with the stories of Jumana, the Palestinian Little Red Riding Hood, who is devoured by the wolf at the Qalandiyah checkpoint.

And then, lo and behold, Chaim Levinson writes about it in a major story in Haaretz. A shiver of excitement runs through me, like someone suddenly coming upon a pornographic picture in the school newspaper. A few years ago, I gave a talk about the Shin Bet’s interrogation methods and the High Court ruling on torture. After the lecture, a smiling young fellow wearing a large kippa came up to me and introduced himself as Itamar Ben-Gvir, a beginning law student, and told me confidently that he was going to become the Avigdor Feldman of the right. I wished him success, and he certainly went on to find it. Ben-Gvir, who is representing the Jewish terror suspects, is managing feats I never dreamed of, and I’m certain he’ll make very good use of the tale of the asfur, now that it has been revealed for all to see. Since one shouldn’t be jealous of his student, I again wish him much luck, on behalf of all the Palestinians who are rotting in jail for “necessary investigations”; Itamar knows just what these are, he knows about the moderate and immoderate physical pressure, the asfur trick and other ploys he will eventually reveal.