Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La storia di Tali Fahima

From the moment she left prison, Fahima started working, as though she
didn't need a moment to herself, to digest the transition from
incarceration to freedom. At the beginning of the week, she took part
in two conferences, one on the High Court of Justice and the targeted
assassinations, the other entitled "Security prisoners or political
prisoners?"
What are your plans for the near future?
"I'll join Juliano's Freedom Theatre in Jenin; I'll do fund-raising
from here. I want to organize conferences and legal advice for security
prisoners and to bring about an investigation of the liquidation of Abu
Halifa [Mahmoud Abu Halifa, Zubeidi's deputy, was killed in September
2004, when an Israeli missile struck his car in Jenin]. In the next few
days, I intend to hook up with left-wing organizations and associations
to work to change Israeli public opinion about the targeted
assassinations and to appeal the Supreme Court decision on the
subject."
Before changing Israeli public opinion, do you have a place to stay?
"At the moment I'm staying with friends in Jaffa. I'll rent an
apartment very soon. I have no personal needs."
And do you have a personal future?
"That's private."
Why do you run away from personal subjects?
"Obviously everyone is motivated by personal interests, but I feel that
my private life is moving aside, because I devote the whole day to this
activity. There's no fun. Two and a half years ago, I was stopped at a
checkpoint just as I was trying to enter Tul Karm. A group of mistarvim
[Israeli troops disguised as Arabs] stormed me and shouted 'Jish, jish,
army, army,' and arrested me, and I was taken to a Shin Bet
interrogation and to detention. From my point of view, I have now left
prison and I'm continuing from the same point at which I was arrested.
I'm now standing at the entrance, on the threshold of Israeli society,
and continuing what I have to do."
Do you sometimes reflect on the path you took?
"I don't look and observe and ask myself where I came from and where I
am now. I'm not that kind of person. I don't have that. As I see it,
people undergo processes in life, that's natural, there's no reason to
wonder about it. There is what lies ahead. I don't look back, only
forward."
You yourselves are Arabs
Tali Fahima's journey from the south and from the right wing to Tel
Aviv and the radical left remains an unanswered puzzle. She was born in
the Negev town of Kiryat Gat 30 years ago to a traditional Mizrahi
family - one of Middle Eastern descent. "To this day, I am
traditional," she emphasizes. "I very much like the Jewish tradition,
the belief and the holidays." Fahima has two sisters, one older and one
younger; her parents were divorced when she was seven.
"My father was a drug addict," she says. "I grew up in a single-parent
home, with a mother who had to provide for us and also do the
housework. But why is that important?" Again she stops, opting for the
political over the personal. "That's not important, that's not what
took me to Jenin," she says, and then agrees to relate that she went to
a regular school and then to a boarding school and served in the Israel
Defense Forces as a clerk and afterward as a noncom in the
Transportation Corps. After her service she frequently visited New
York, where her sister lives.
Were you political as a girl?
"No, definitely not. I was far removed from that. I grew up in a home
that was busy surviving. I wasn't occupied with ideology and I had no
ambitions to save the world - I didn't have time for that. Politics was
a luxury in the home I grew up in. You have to bring food, raise
children, there's no time for thoughts like that."
At the age of 23, she moved to Tel Aviv. "I held two jobs for a long
time," she says. "I worked as a clerk in a lawyers' office until 4, and
at 5 I was on the job as a waitress. After that I focused on the office
job: I became the office manager and I didn't need another job. I was
ambitious. I wanted to get ahead.
"I came to Tel Aviv with nothing. I moved into an empty apartment and I
told myself: Only new things will enter here. My ambition was to save
up for law studies, because I was fascinated by that field, and things
went pretty well - I kept up an apartment by myself. I had a good life,
a life of comfort, with the possibility that the emotional place, which
was cluttered with childhood and adolescence, would open up to new
horizons."
It was just then, however, that the second intifada erupted and suicide
bombers started to blow themselves up in the streets, and Tali Fahima
started to become political. "I felt that the fear was paralyzing. That
had a powerful effect on me; I had a hard time with the atmosphere. I
grew up in a right-wing home where Arabic was spoken - my grandmother
watched the news in Arabic and the culture was Arabic, but we hated
Arabs. We were afraid of them. My reaction to the suicide bombings was
a desire for vengeance - I wanted God to wipe out the Arabs.
"At that time I looked at everything through typical right-wing eyes.
They're killing us, we will kill them. But something happened in my
life. I felt that reality was infiltrating my life. At work I was
exposed to the human rights issue and after work I would go home and
watch current events programs obsessively. There was a moment when I
started to ask questions to try to understand what made people do such
a monstrous thing. I didn't understand why a person would take that
attitude toward his life, why he would give up his life, why they were
such nullities. It didn't make sense.
"This was where the process began, from my point of view: from the
place where I started to take an interest not at the level of left or
right, but at the human level. I started to feel that I wasn't getting
information from all the television channels, that actually I wasn't
able to learn anything about those people. I went to the Internet, to
left-wing and Palestinian sites. That was rough. I was sure that what I
was seeing there was fabricated, because we don't shoot children."
Fahima started attending gatherings of socially oriented left-wing
groups, while at the same time becoming personally acquainted with
Palestinians via the Internet. On YNet, an article by Ali Waked about
Zakariya Zubeidi, describing his life story from the manager of a
theater at age 14 to the commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades,
and about the killing of his mother and his brother by the Israeli
army, moved her.
Fahima called Waked and told him she wanted to talk to Zubeidi. "Within
five minutes he was on the line. I was in shock. I was so afraid that I
thought the phone would blow up. But he was nice. He spoke good Hebrew
and he was funny, pleasant.
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"The conversations with Zubeidi became more frequent. We spoke at
length over a period of a few months. No one knew, because what was I
going to tell people? 'I'm on the phone with the commander of the
Al-Aqsa Brigades'?"
Fahima asked Zubeidi if she could visit the Jenin refugee camp. "I was
really afraid, I was shaking with fear. I saw him for the first time, I
looked into his eyes and I had the feeling that it would be all right.
He was very emotional and in shock that I actually arrived. He shook my
hand. He told me, 'Tali, you are insane. I never believed you would
come.'
"I wandered around and saw the destruction caused by [Operation]
Defensive Shield, the ruins, the poverty, the children running around
aimlessly. I saw what we had done and I felt shame."
Was it an adventure, an 'action' thing?
"Action? The shooting was real. It really was life and death. It wasn't
a game or an adventure."
Some time later, Zubeidi was wounded in an IDF assassination attempt.
Fahima decided to go public. In an interview to the Tel Aviv weekly
Ha'ir, she described the development of their relationship and declared
that if the assassination attempts continued, she would act as a human
shield for him. The article appeared on Friday. On Sunday, Fahima was
fired from her job. "I couldn't believe they were firing me over
something like that," she says. "That was the first time I let the
events around me hurt me - and the last. But at the time it hurt. I
felt that my surroundings were changing, that I was a target. The pace
of events was not in my control. My mother was frightened at the
exposure and was no longer really behind me. I felt very much alone."
Influenced by Juliano Mer Khamis's documentary film "Arna's Children,"
which tells the story of the theater group founded in Jenin by the
director's mother, Fahima decided to work with children in the West
Bank city. She returned to the refugee camp and was there during the
Israeli army's Operation Crocodile Tears in May 2004. "People told me
appallingly how the army and the Shin Bet went from house to house and
said, 'Where is Tali Fahima, the tramp? Which bed is she lying in?'
People were ashamed and stunned at the way they talked about women.
That was also the first attempt to hint at an affair and to make waves
with that subject."
The Shin Bet asked Fahima to go to Salem checkpoint. "I got there and
within seconds a whole army showed up, closed the gate and surrounded
me with jeeps. People came from the Palestinian side and also United
Nations representatives. The army sent the robot [a device that can
detect explosives] to check me out. The soldiers spoke to me via
megaphones.
"I had a bag and they asked me to pick it up. I understood that they
were afraid I had come to blow them up. I was insulted that someone
could think that I wanted to kill him. They negotiated with me and
asked me to lift my blouse. I refused. I was surrounded by men. They
asked me to enter a jeep and undress in it. I said no. In the end they
sent a female soldier who checked me out and saw that I wasn't carrying
explosives.
"A week before I was arrested, an interrogator [from the Shin Bet]
called me and invited me for a conversation. I asked whether it was
formal and he said no. I said 'There's nothing to talk about.' A week
later I was arrested. The Shin Bet interrogation lasted a month. I was
handcuffed to a chair for lengthy periods, and the light in my solitary
room was on 24 hours a day. The interrogators called me a terrorist and
a saboteur and said they would turn me into a good Jew. I was cynical,
and that's what preserved me. They did everything to break me, and with
what intensity! There was a case of sexual harassment. I was sitting
handcuffed and an interrogator approached me with his legs far apart
and touched me. It was horrible. Absolutely bloodcurdling.
"Once they brought me a present in wrapping paper. I thought it was
chocolate, but when I opened it I found a pregnancy test. He asked me
whether I intended to name my boy Mohammed and whether he would be a
little terrorist. 'Why a little terrorist?' I replied. 'He'll be a big
terrorist.' I wasn't upset. I told myself and them that they were a way
station and that there would be a court afterward. I didn't imagine
that they would dare place me in administrative detention" - arrest
without trial.
You didn't crack? You weren't hurt?
"No. I know I didn't sell my soul to the Shin Bet. Despite all the
pressure around me, it was important for me to be okay with myself."
And the personal price doesn't hurt?
"That's a price I will always pay, and that's perfectly fine with me. I
accept that. What does hurt me at the personal level is my conviction
for offenses of harming the state's security."
But at the public level that strengthens your image as a freedom
fighter.
"Forget that, I'm speaking at the personal level. That hurts. It's hard
for me to live with that, and I have to live with it day in and day
out. It's true that the indictment was also described in the press as
'a mountain that became a molehill,' but I, as a citizen who respects
the court, feel that this is a conviction I have to carry with me.
Prison is a means of punishment, but that was not the real difficulty."
The apple doesn't fall far
In the car, on the way to Kiryat Gat, her hometown, something gives way
in her restrained demeanor and she admits, "The hardest thing for me
was the heavy price paid by my family. It was hard for me to see my
mother taking curses and people telling her that her daughter was a
terrorist. But even if I had known that it would hurt them, I would
have gone ahead."
"This is where my dad lives," she says, pointing to a building, and
three buildings away she points to her mother's home. A Sabbath-eve
atmosphere envelops the neighborhood. Everyone is at home and it's
pouring rain. "I preferred to come here on the weekend and rest," she
says.
Sara Lahiani, Fahima's mother, opens the door with a warm smile.
Fahima's younger sister, Dikla, 28, is setting the table in the center
of the living room for the first family meal since Tali's release.
There is a feeling of tranquillity here, but not of happiness. They are
moved by Tali's return but preserve a certain distance, trying to
digest her presence.
There are quite a few phone calls here, too, many of them from inmates
at Neveh Tirza, the women's prison, who are calling to congratulate her
and ask how she's doing. "The prisoners there held me in very high
regard," she says. "At first they really did hassle me and curse me,
but afterward they got to know me and appreciated me for my struggle
against the Prisons Service. I also wrote letters for them and
sometimes tried to get them to join in appeals against the Prison
Service, but they were afraid of the consequences. They don't have the
backing of the Israeli left, which demonstrates outside the prison and
files petitions to the court until the Prisons Service gives in. They
are abandoned women, lonely and weak."
Fahima lights up a cigarette and plays a CD in Arabic. "That's from
prison," she laughs. "All the women there listen to Arabic music."
Asked about the difficulties of serving a prison term, she adopts the
image of the freedom fighter: "I don't understand why everyone thinks
that prison is a nightmare. I accepted prison, I accepted the fact that
I was in detention. It wasn't hard for me, from that point of view."
Fahima opened a new front, against the Prisons Service. "I was in
solitary for nine months. They put me in a cell alone, with two hours
of going out to the yard, and forbade me to talk to prisoners. I went
to the High Court of Justice against that and they gave in. The Prisons
Service treated me as though they were holding bin Laden's wife. They
were influenced by the reports. They harassed me all the time. Warders
behaved badly to me, taunting me. All I had to do was say a word and
right away I was punished. I was on the alert the whole time because
they kept close watch on me and tried to use collaborators."
Did you really say "Itbah el Yahud" ("Kill the Jews")?
"I did say that. I was in a bad state. That week a friend of mine died
and a few days later Abu Halifa, Zubeidi's deputy, was killed by an IDF
missile. They came and told me that deliberately, to get my goat. His
death hurt me. I wanted to say 'Itbah al Shabas' [Prisons Service], but
it came out 'Yahud.' And the next day I saw that it made the headlines
in the papers."
"People here are asking if Tali is looking for publicity," Sara
Lahiani, her mother, says, "but my daughter was not looking for
publicity for herself. She's a person who thinks deeply and sees the
Palestinians as human beings, just like her. And for that she paid a
price, for her humanity."
Lahiani was born when her family was on the way from Morocco to France
and came to Israel at a young age. She works as a housekeeper and
barely makes enough to get by on. "The only thing that interests the
people here is the work they have and the state of their bank account,"
she says. "Anything beyond that is of no interest. They think it's
strange for someone to sacrifice himself for others. That doesn't make
sense to them."
What did you feel when she entered prison?
"In my life, I never believed that would happen. It was very painful
for me to see her paying a price like that. How did I educate my
daughter? To go to jail for thoughts? What was she locked up for? For
activity to stop people from being killed? So people would think about
what is going on in the territories? Or for activity with children so
they will see that there are also good and humane Israelis?
"You have to understand that when a child goes to jail, the mother has
a feeling of failure. But I didn't fail. I know that I brought up my
daughters in the best possible way. What do you think, that Tali is the
only one who went into the territories? Because my daughter went there
alone, without an association or a left-wing organization behind her,
she paid a heavy price. You know, next to Jenin there are settlers who
have more rights than any other population in the country, and they
wander around and go into forbidden areas, and there are many Israeli
businessmen who enter the territories as well as associations that care
for the sick and bring medicines."
Many people were astonished at the firm stand you and your daughters
took in support of Tali.
"My connection with my daughters is based on love. I said all along
that if we stay together, that is the true foundation of the home.
That's what unites families, not the structure of the walls of the
house. Tali told me about Jenin and said the wants to go to the media
with it. She shared it with me. I told her, 'You want to help? Help
quietly, don't go to the media. We'll pay a heavy price.' She told me,
'Mom, I want to change things. It's stronger than me. If you want,
break off relations with me.' I told her that's something I could not
do.
"This was a period in which I didn't back her in the sense of going to
the media. That is exposure. You're an ordinary citizen and suddenly
your life changes. I have a trauma from journalists. It was a
nightmare. There was a feeling that they displayed us naked before the
whole world. But I'm strong. I'm not a coward. I succeeded in coping
with all the people who shouted and raised their voices, cursed and
spat."
"Why hold her up as a traitor?" Lahiani continues, linking politics
with a well-articulated class consciousness. "To tarnish her name, ruin
her life and hurt the family. Let us examine the [Elhanan] Tenenbaum
affair for a moment. That man is a disgrace to the country. He is a
senior public figure, the salt of the earth, deeply implanted in the
defense establishment, who went to an Arab state. I'm not talking about
Jenin, which from my point of view is under our responsibility. People
can think what they want, we still have responsibility for the
population there. So Tenenbaum goes to a hostile country and strikes
criminal deals for plenty of money with Arabs. And when he is in
Hezbollah captivity, the state blocks true information about him and
doesn't expose his disgraceful true face and concocts a deal and frees
Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands to get him back.
"Why? Because he's an Ashkenazi male? Because he was apparently close
to [then prime minister Ariel] Sharon or to someone in his bureau, and
in the end he comes out of the whole thing without imprisonment. This
is a person about whom there is more than a reasonable suspicion that
he gave information to the enemy. What did Tali do, by comparison? She
came from Kiryat Gat, from a Mizrahi family, without ties with the
military elite and with the government.
"The Mizrahi communities reacted very badly to Tali's story. That is
the worst thing about the Mizrahim: the state taught them to be
submissive. And the attempt to turn them into Ashkenazim was done by
making them ashamed of their origins, of their identity, and for them
to also to hate Arabs along the way."
She admits that she developed a political-social-class consciousness
through the struggle she waged over her daughter. "I was a woman who
had to cope with complicated situations, and to get up in the morning
as a single mother and provide for three little girls. Do you think I
had time to deal with problems of Palestinians? People are not
encouraged to think. It's convenient for the state that we are busy
just surviving, busy with our economic situation, and not think that we
are doing wrongs and immoral acts in the territories. In light of Tali,
I had to wake up, to come out, to express my opinions and speak them
without fear."
In the past two years, Lahiani has taken part in many gatherings to
cleanse Tali's reputation. "In one of the gatherings," she relates, "a
woman got up and asked, 'How do you describe Zubeidi?' I said, 'A
soldier.' She said, 'No, he is not a soldier; my son is a soldier.' I
replied, 'Zubeidi lives in Jenin and is guarding the place he lives in,
and you should ask your son what he is doing in the army.'"
Tali Fahima sits by the side and looks at her mother. "We laugh that
you could be recruited into the Popular Front. A leader has sprung up
here," she laughs. When she is asked to help clear the table, she
responds like any true revolutionary: let her reflect on the values of
humaneness and changing the world, just don't ask her to wash dishes.
"I just got out of prison," she reminds her mother, who quickly clears
the table and laughs, "Prison? You didn't do a thing. You just sat in
prison."

Tali Fahima e' un'Israeliana condannata a 3 anni di galera per aver
*CONFESSATO* e *SI E' RICONOSCIUTA COLPEVOLE* di
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1673156,00.html
"providing information to the enemy and assisting a terrorist
organisation"
-Stefano

 organisation"
Si, far confessare qualcuno e' cosi' facile quando questo qualcuno:
a) E' gia' in galera, senza processo, con maltrattamenti quotidiani da
parte dei secondini
b) Lo stato ha il potere di farlo restare in galera per sempre, sempre
senza processo
GT

senza processo
Puttanata.
-Stefano

 Si, far confessare qualc
E sparare cazzate è ancora più facile, quando esistono infinite organizzazioni 
di fratellanza ebraico-palestinese, ma non necessariamente dedite al sostegno 
logistico del terrorismo, eh giorgino?
Tb
-- 
[Tb] :
Il dovere di un comunista sarebbe quello di formare un cordone sanitario
attorno alla feccia nazi
[.sergio.]
No [...] se posta articoli che condivido      |     
http://snipurl.com/11s9a
--------------------------------------------------
Il mio blog: 
www.tonibaruch.blogspot.com

 wrote in message
45A9ED92...@people.it...

Lunogled si dimentica volutamente che ISRAELE è uno Stato VERAMENTE
democratico, come gli Usa, del resto, in cui se i suoi militari, funzionari-
che sono uomini e come tali possono sbagliare e non fare cose lecite, li
punisce secondo la Legge, non uno STATO DITTATORIALE, iniquissimo, razzista,
corrotto al Potere dei VIP politici e ricchi, come è L' ITALIA che permette
ai suoi uomini e donne di vessare, picchiare, calunniare offendere
IMPUNEMENTE...il Lunogled come cazzosichiamainverità dimentica che in
Israele, vera democrazia, l' avvocato fu fornito anche ad Eichman, il
criminale immondo nazista, scovato in Argentina dal Mossad e dagli uomini
del grande e giusto Simon Wisenthal, mentre in Italia, a Grosseto, a me
picchiata con mia figlia in Questura, poi io sottoposta dalla CRI Grossetana
ad una narcosi fortissima per endovena a tradimento in un pubblico bar dove
ero andata per bere un'aranciata-presenti due vigili urbani e tre
poliziotti, oltre a due immondi e criminali "crocerossi" e risvegliatami in
semi-coma in psichiatria dove i medici avevano l' ordine del Commissario di
Pubblica Sicurezza di somministrarmi farmaci perchè dovevo essere dichiarata
inferma di mente, mia figlia sbattuta in carcere a Livorno, dopo essere
stata pestata a sangue in quella Pubblica Questura, con illiberalità
assoluta, senza neppure essere-come era suo diritto ascoltata- da un
maledetto ed iniquo Magistrato, tale Paolo Calabria, assistita, si fa per
dire, da tale Avvocato Bertolini che poi l'ha offesa e minacciata...bene MI
è stato rifiutato UN AVVOCATO del FORO GROSSETANO per costituirmi parte
civile e per qualsiasi difesa legittima ...lunogled sputaveleno contro la
democratica Israele dimentica in perfetta malafede che pur nello Stato di
guerra in cui Israele si trova- e non per colpa sua- è e resta uno Stato in
cui la Legge Civile ed UMANA viene comunque rispettata, mentre nella
incivile, indemocratica, schifosissima ITALIA i Tribunali vengono usati,
come è stato per ben due volte usato quello di Grosseto con me, come teatro,
in cui io-vittima innocente di spalla, denti, costole ed un dito rotti da
poliziotti/e e un tale Franco Righini, pure mio immondo calunniatore, e
rimastomi lesionato a vita,sono stata insultata, derisa, offesa, dileggiata
da Avvocati e Magistrati, Pubblici Ministeri.
Ed una Magistrata  Donna , sempre lì, in un'Aula del Tribunale,mi disse
anche di andarmene ,tanto a Grosseto nessun Magistrato, nessun Avvocato mi
avrebbe mai cacato, anche se mi avessero spezzato l' osso del collo.
Luciana Cencioni