An Israeli woman was jailed for three years on Thursday after pleading guilty to meeting one of the most wanted Palestinian militants and spending time in the West Bank town of Jenin.
After a unusual prosecution, Tali Fahima accepted a plea-bargain deal from prosecutors and is expected to serve about 10 months in prison because she has already been in custody for more than a year.
Fahima (29) was arrested last year after repeated visits to Jenin refugee camp to meet Zakaria Zubeidi, the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade responsible for suicide bombings and other attacks against Israelis. She was charged with offences including providing information to the enemy and assisting a terrorist organisation, which carry the death penalty. The prosecution said it would seek a life sentence.
Shaul Mofaz, the Defence Minister, who signed the detention order, said Fahima ”took part in planning a terrorist attack in Israel”.
Following her arrest, Fahima was vilified as a traitor and the security services leaked claims to Israeli newspapers alleging that she was Zubeidi’s lover, prompting stories calling her ”the terrorist’s whore”. But by the time the case came to trial last month, the government had retreated from some the most serious accusations, such as assisting with bombings.
Fahima’s lawyer, Smadar Ben-Natan, said her client agreed to confess to charges of revealing information to the enemy, contact with a foreign agent and a ban on Israeli civilians entering Palestinian towns, in order to get out of prison.
Fahima, a legal secretary who voted for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud party in the last election, began to question the established Israeli view of the conflict three years ago.
”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, particularly those in Jenin, I couldn’t live with it,” she told the Israeli press before her arrest.
She contacted Palestinians through the internet and sought out Zubeidi to ask him why he organised attacks on Israelis.
”I had to ask why a man goes ahead and does this. There is a reason for this. A man doesn’t wake up one morning and decide, ‘OK, I’m going to carry out an attack,”’ she said.
She visited Jenin on several occasions over the year up to her arrest in August last year. The Israeli security service, Shin Bet, realising she had contacted wanted men, tried to recruit her, but her mother said she refused. Shortly afterwards, Fahima was arrested.
”She was an individual acting by herself with no organisation or anyone to support her,” said Ben-Natan.
Jacob Galanti, a spokesperson for Israel’s ministry of justice, said Fahima was found guilty of an act that endangered Israel’s security.
”We found evidence that she was passing important information to the enemy during the time of an army operation in Jenin in contravention of Israeli law,” he said. The judges said the crimes of which Fahima was convicted were very serious and two of them carried a maximum sentence of 15 years.
Fahima’s supporters say the plea bargain was a face-saving measure by the government that revealed the real motive behind the prosecution was to silence a woman who had broken a taboo against trying to understand and explain men such as Zubeidi as driven by something other than blind hatred of Jews.
The case added to the military’s embarrassment because the charge of revealing information to the enemy related to a document lost by a soldier on patrol in Jenin that made its way into the hands of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
Ben-Natan said her client admitted to translating the document for Zubeidi, even though he is a fluent Hebrew speaker. — Guardian Unlimited Â