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The image is always the same: surrounded by police officers, a pale young woman, her black hair severely drawn back against her neck, the shadow of a smile in the court room. The regard is self-assured, the silhouette delicate, almost fragile, juvenile. From her past as a secretary in a legal office, Tali Fahima has maintained the strict comportment and black-framed eyeglasses that harden her angular face. That's the image Israelis discovered a little over a year ago when this 29 year-old woman was declared "a danger to the State."
Incarcerated on August 10, 2004, Tali has spent seven months in the most complete isolation, in administrative detention. This exceptional procedure, inherited from the British Mandate over Palestine before 1948, allows the imprisonment for years and without trial of any person supposed to represent a danger to national security. Thousands of Palestinians and a few Israelis from the extreme right have experienced and know this arbitrary procedure. But this is the first time that a young Jewish woman has been subject to it.
In preventive detention today - and for the last five months - Tali now awaits the culmination of her trial, which opened in Tel Aviv in July. The next hearings - to be held behind closed doors, like the preceding ones - are scheduled for the end of October. Whatever the outcome, Fahima's case continues to raise questions about the present state of Israeli society.
At first sight, the charges against the young woman are serious. She is accused of having participated in the preparation of attacks, of having "given assistance to the enemy in time of war," and of having illegally borne a weapon. The accused categorically rejects each one of these charges. She admits only to having gone to Jenine in the occupied West Bank several times between September 2003 and August 2004. Her intention, she swears, was to help children in the local refugee camp who were under particular pressure during these years of the Intifada. That alone is an unusual undertaking, totally incomprehensible for the vast majority of Israeli society. For the military and security institutions, it's treason. For, whether out of obliviousness or naïveté, Tali Fahima did not do things by halves.
Realizing that her "humanitarian" project was doomed without a green light and support from Palestinian activists - the real masters of the camp - she applied to their leader, a certain Zacharia Zubeidi. A local leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a tiny armed group that has claimed credit for several suicide attacks in Israel, the young Zubeidi was presented as one of Israel's most wanted "terrorists." Juliano Mer Khamis, a politically active Israeli film-maker, has known the Palestinian for a long time. In the 1990s, his own mother, Arna Mer Khamis, had founded a theater for children in Jenine and Zacharia Zubeidi, then a teenager, participated in the project. Juliano produced a poignant documentary from this experience in 2003.
"Zacharia asked me what I thought of this Tali," the film-maker remembers. I told him she had the same intentions as my mother, but I recommended he be cautious." After all, unknown to the Israeli left and pacifist movements, this solitary bird Tali could very well have been acting under the direction of Shin Bet, the powerful Israeli domestic security service.
In a few visits to Jenine, the young woman gained the trust of the Palestinians. She worked hard to raise money to buy books and computers for refugee children. "She was full of good intentions," assures Joseph Algazy, a former journalist who, on behalf of a part of the Israeli extreme left, supports Tali against the authorities. "In 2003, an Israeli television team even followed her in Jenine," he emphasizes. "Do you think she would have broadcast her little business if it had not all been 'kosher?'" In the report in question, Tali, all smiles, surveys the streets of the camp alongside Zacharia, heavily armed, as is his custom. A strong image, an unbearable image for a bruised public opinion revolted by the attacks. All the more so as the young Israeli didn't stop there! Some time later, while the lieutenants of Palestinian activism were being eliminated one after the other by the army, she declared herself ready to act as his "human shield." Romanticism or provocation? That behavior definitively placed Tali Fahima in the margins of the society from which she came.
"You talked with Arabs, your place is in jail; that's Israel's sentence," her mother, Sarah Lakhyani, summarizes. For one year, this tiny intense woman has been proclaiming her daughter's innocence. "After her arrest, Shin Bet presented it in the ugliest light possible." A former worker in the textile industry, unemployed for months, Sarah gets upset. "They suggested that she had had an affair with a Palestinian and even that she was pregnant by him. As though that were not enough, they chose the 'worst' one, this Zacharia Zubeidi. But in Jenine, everyone knows, she spent her time with the women and children!"
Juliano Mer Khamis, the political film maker, is altogether as disgusted. "We've heard all kinds of stories about Tali; she's been demonized, accused of having betrayed 'the tribe' [the Jewish people], of having been a whore for the Arabs. In her day, my mother was insulted the same way." For Joseph Algazy, "the fact that Tali is a woman, Sephardic, of modest origins, and, by family tradition, aligned with the right, has certainly aggravated her case." A thousand leagues from the leftist groups well known to the "services," Tali has, in fact, engaged on a solitary battle, atypical and perfectly suited to drive the intelligence services crazy. "If she did that, why shouldn't thousands of people decide tomorrow to go see for themselves the reality of the occupation of the territories?" asks Lin Chalozin-Dovrat, an official with a pacifist organization that supports Tali. "To avoid that, the justice system is going to make an example out of her. The State is always ready to accept a few pro-Palestinian demonstrations to show how democratic it is. But by entering into a dialogue with a 'terrorist,' Tali crossed a red line." Juliano even deems that the young woman "has become the nightmare of the Zionist regime." Her mother agrees: "Tali's never been afraid of anyone. It's the State that's afraid of her right now."
Yet "courage" and "stubbornness" do not adequately explain how and why a young office worker from a modest background, raised in a deprived and conservative city - Kiriat Gat, in the south of the country - could have engaged in such a break. She braved the military roadblocks to go to Palestinian territory - sometimes disguised as a Palestinian woman - she is an affront to her country's justice system and at present runs the risk of copping a heavy prison term. It's an amazing trajectory!
Little known to her "new friends" on the pacifist left, rejected by her former relations, Tali Fahima remains a kind of enigma. "I voted Likud my whole life. I was educated to hate and fear Arabs. I thought the occupation was just. But when I discovered that my freedom was assured at the Palestinians' expense, notably those of Jenine, I couldn't live with it," she explained to the press before her arrest. Sarah herself doesn't seem to have sized up the extent of her daughter's political and intellectual journey. "In my family, we voted Likud habitually, because sometimes that allowed us to find work. Nothing that had anything to do with the Arabs interested us. At the time when they worked in my factory [before the second Intifada], I knew Palestinians, very polite, very nice. But, if you had asked me what I thought of the Occupation, I wouldn't have known what to say. My only politics was to educate my three daughters."
Tali discovered discrimination against "the Arabs" in 2002, in the lawyers' office in Tel-Aviv where she worked up until her curious itinerary was broadcast in the media. Idealism, great curiosity, and the certainty of doing the right thing plunged the secretary into the strange situation she is now in. Paradoxically, her realization came about at the height of the Intifada. "She wanted to understand what pushed young Palestinians to blow themselves up in Israeli buses and restaurants," her mother explains. To go beyond the partial explanations delivered by Israeli television, Tali then bought all the newspapers, surfed the Internet, met Arab internet users that way, with whom she conducted long conversations in English. These communications triggered the suspicions of the domestic security service, which interrogated her about this sudden interest.
Her desire to go see "the other side" did not flag. She decided on Jenine. Arrested the first time, she was released after several days without explanation. "Shin Bet tried to recruit her," Sarah asserts. "She refused, that made them crazy," adds Juliano. "At no time did Tali realize she constituted a danger to the system. She naïvely thought that as a Jew, she would be protected." A mistake.
Even her family has not been spared. In the face of surrounding hostility, her mother Sarah had to leave her apartment. Six of her seven brothers and sisters no longer speak to her. "In this business, I've lost my whole life from before," she summarizes simply. Her new life is entirely devoted to Tali. Zacharia Zubeidi telephones her regularly for news. In November, the energetic little woman will go to Europe to make the "Fahima Case" known. She'll travel with a Palestinian mother whose son is in administrative detention. Of Algerian nationality and holder of a French passport, Sarah intends to ask for a French passport for her daughter.
With regard to the trial itself, Tali's lawyer, Smadar Ben Natan, does not hide his anxiety. "If the judges stuck to the facts of the case, I'd be optimistic: the file is empty. But they're going to take security considerations into account and the pressure of public opinion. That's what makes me pessimistic." The defender, who considers his client to be a "political prisoner," deems that Israel is now a country that puts its opponents in prison." A few months ago, the then-Justice Minister, Joseph Lapid, did not hesitate to render his verdict publicly before the trial: "This woman entirely deserves to remain in jail ..."
The most concrete element of the prosecution is based on a "secret military document" that Tali is supposed to have "translated" for her Palestinian friends. Except Zacharia Zubeidi speaks Hebrew and the papers in question, lost by Israeli soldiers inside the Jenine camp, provided only a few biographical facts about wanted Palestinians and contained aerial photos ... of the camp itself.
"This affair will remain marked by disinformation and lies," accuses Joseph Algazy. The latest rumor? An Israeli television station asserts that Tali Fahima received 300 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority for her canteen - 55 Euros. "No one has called me to verify whether it's so," assures Smadar Ben Natan. "And if it were, what would the problem be? The Palestinian Authority is not a terrorist organization so far as I know!" For the inhabitants of the Jenine refugee camp, in any case, Tali is already the most Palestinian of Israelis. Zacharia Zubeidi has requested that in the event of an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the liberation of Palestinian detainees, the young women be among them. Today, "Tali's portrait is plastered all over the walls of the camp," Juliano asserts. On the same level as those of Palestinian "martyrs."
The articles represent the opinions of their writers,
and not necessarily those of the Coalition.
http://coalitionofwomen.org/home/english/articles/tali_fahima
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