Attorney Lea Tsemel has defended Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli courts for nearly half a century, insisting on their humanity and their right to a fair trial. Her work has earned her the scorn and reprobation of many Israelis, as well as death threats. A staunch critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Tsemel has long argued Palestinians who carry out politically motivated violence are freedom fighters, not “terrorists.” In 1999, Lea Tsemel won a landmark case in the Israeli Supreme Court, making it illegal for Israeli officials to torture detained Palestinians during interrogations.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
Why? Why do we make any film? Lea is the kind of Israeli I wanted to be. I mean, I grew up in Israel. I left. I came back as a young adult after the First Intifada. I had heard about her. I wanted to meet her. She was one of the first people I met when I went back as a young adult. And she modeled for me the kind of Israeli I wanted to be, somebody completely critical and completely, at the same time, not thinking of going anywhere else, just thinking: How do you—how do you get people to live together in that space, with full equality, and with, obviously, human rights, civil rights, it goes without saying, but just with a basic understanding that the place has to be shared in complete and full equality?
Lea Tsemel talking:
I would see myself as a typical Israeli, Sabra, if you want. I was born there in 1945 and then grew up with the state. And I was studying law in 1967 when the war broke. Until then, I would say, I was a normal, regular Israeli. And once the war broke, I realized that we were—we, the students, the people, were misled before the war to believe that this is a war for peace. Israel didn’t think of creating peace. And I found myself having to decide whether my humanity prevails, when I saw what happened to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, or my Israeli loyalty would prevail.
And I chose my humanity. Therefore, when I became a lawyer, it was only natural that I will try to defend the underdogs, the Palestinians, while thinking all the time of a possible—the only possible solution to the conflict there: one, equality; two or one state—it doesn’t make a difference, really—but freedom for the Palestinians; a recognition of what we have caused to them; and ability to continue together with equality, which is the most important, equality, and freedom, of course, for both people.
I think most of the people that I represent are Palestinians who are acting against the occupation, in this way or another, or that have been tackled with problems that the occupation created. Like, if we talk about Jerusalem, the Jerusalemite Palestinians have difficulties in getting a position, in getting their rights, in getting their identification cards, in getting family reunification, for instance. So, these are the civil aspects of the occupation that I’m also dealing with, beside, of course, people who have committed security offenses, as they call it. And I believe that I’m obliged to defend them. I believe they have the right to act against the occupation, like every person on this Earth has a right to act against any occupation. And I don’t try to condemn them. I try to be near them and have the—my ability as a lawyer and recruit the Israeli law to defend them.
First of all, it’s not my personal win. We were a group of lawyers, we were a group of human rights organizations, that have appealed for many, many years on this subject of torture. And it was a big victory. It’s true. The victory was somehow eaten away during the years. The security services found other ways, that some are also illegal.
In this way or another, yeah, with permission, with authorization sometimes. But the situation continues. And the struggle continues. We know it very, very well. So, it was a highlight in the career, undoubtedly. There are not too many winnings we can talk about. There are many failures. And altogether, I think that the Israeli society has failed to rebut and fight against the occupation as we should.
we all started as young, ambitious, hopeful revolutionaries, believing that we can change, here and now, the situation. And some of our leftist groups then even went further on to join a Palestinian leading group. And then they were, of course, detained and sentenced, with a lot of scandalous reactions, to 17 years in prison, like Udi Adiv, a kibbutznik who was the head of that group, and others. And since then, we didn’t see the repetitive of that phenomenon. We do see cooperation at times. You know, there is now BDS, so it’s more difficult to cooperate. But I still carry the dream of a common future that we share with the Palestinians, and I don’t see ourselves living there without this cooperation.
– represented your own husband, Michel Warschawski famous peace activist when he was jailed as head of the Alternative Information Center.
He was charged with publishing, in his office, a booklet of how to sustain torture by the security forces and what are the security services’ methods of torture. And, of course, this was shoo-shoo. You cannot talk about it. You should not expose it. Especially, it was—they intended to write it in Arabic. So, of course, you cannot tell it to the Arabs. They would know what they are anticipating in the interrogation rooms. So, he was detained. And later on, very little came out of it, but he spent some time in prison.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
Docaviv was a huge surprise. We had five sold-out screenings. Roughly 1,800 Israeli Jews came to see the film in over the course of a week, and not a single person complained. On the contrary, people were crying, laughing, hugging, elated. It was beyond my wildest dreams or expectations for how a film like this could be received in this day and age in Israel.
And we won first prize. Miri Regev, the culture minister, has been condemning films like this since she came into power.
The general feeling that we had was that given the kind of chilling effect that the last four years have had on Israeli Jews—I mean, Israel has always had a big human rights problem and now also has a civil rights problem, or a budding civil rights problem, meaning Israeli Jews have come to feel uncomfortable being—having your cake and eating it, too, being anti-occupation and living a perfectly fine life. And so, there was a chilling effect that came into place. I felt affected by it in the last four years. And it felt a little bit like the audience, 1,800 people in five sold-out screenings over the course of one week, were saying, “You know what? If this is the new normal, we’re pushing back a little bit. We’re going to reclaim some space that feels like these narratives also represent us.”
And Lea represents them—strangely enough, the least representative Israeli out there, so many people felt such deep identification. You know, Lea is one of those people who spoke truth to power, before the term became trendy. And she’s one of the people who will continue to do so after fear makes it unfashionable.
She’s very personable. In Part 1 of the show, she said, you know, “Yeah, we all started as revolutionaries and with big highfalutin ideas. But ultimately I was faced with a choice: Do I go with my nationality or with my humanity? And I chose my humanity.” And I think that’s what’s coming across for people. And that’s what comes across in the courthouse, inside the courtroom, in the hallways. She’s a flirt. She’s naughty. She’s playful. She’s serious. She’s a fighter. She’s honest. She tells everybody what they—what she thinks of what they’re doing. And after that, it’s “How are you doing? How’s your wife?” You know, there’s a kind of a personable way that she deals. Even the bad guys are humans. And she deals with everybody on that level. We observed it while we were filming. And clearly, people love to hate her, but they also hate to love her.
One judge’s—from another project, a fantastic film, if people are interested in this topic, called The Law in These Parts, by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz—
The Law in These Parts. It won Sundance seven years ago. In some ways, it’s a precursor to our film, because it sort of maps out the history of the Israeli military legal system. And in one of his interviews there—he told us this when we were getting started on our film—a judge, a very high-ranking judge, said, “If Lea Tsemel didn’t exist, we would have to invent her.”
Because she plays this really tricky role for Israelis. On the one hand, she’s the boy pointing at the emperor, calling him nude and saying, you know, “The system doesn’t work.” She’s calling out the most fundamental flaw of the system, which is saying, “The occupied—the occupier is judging the occupied. How how could that possibly work?” And she’s constantly reminding the judges of that. “Are you really in a position to judge what this person did? And can you see his individuality?”
The other thing that she’s doing, though, she’s also the boy with his finger in the dam—right?—trying to keep the flood of injustice from drowning all of us. And I think that Israeli Jews today are understanding her role in keeping her finger in the dam, which is also something that has saved their humanity over the years.
The film follows one primary case in real time, the case of a 13-year-old boy who went out with his 15-year-old cousin on a stabbing spree or ran around with knives. It’s not 100% clear what their intentions were. They had very little time to premeditate over it. They came home from school, threw their backpacks in the corner, grabbed knives, the 13-year-old under the influence of the 15-year-old, and ran out to the nearby settlement. What they had discussed among themselves was, “We’re going to scare the Jews. We want to scare them so they stop killing us.”
What happened in practice is two people were stabbed, not killed, a 13-year-old Jewish boy and a 20-, 21-year-old Jewish man. And the 15-year-old cousin was the stabber, because the 13-year-old’s knife was clean. There were no evidence, no DNA findings on it. And the 15-year-old was “eliminated,” as the Israelis call it—assassinated on site. But somebody still had to stand trial for this, because the public needs a trial. So, even if he had faced probably the harshest punishment anybody could face, which is execution on site, somebody had to pay in terms of the Israeli public. And the 13-year-old was accused of two attempted murders. And therein starts a whole saga about how Lea should handle that kind of a case.
Lea Tsemel talking:
I took the case as one of a series of very similar cases of youngsters who take upon themselves the continuation of the Palestinian struggle. In this particular case, he was very, very young. And there was a conflict whether we should grab an immediate plea bargain, to plead guilty for the two attempted murders, although he denies it, totally denies any intention to kill anyone, any feelings, any mens rea of murder in him—but to grab it and try to sentence him before he becomes 14, and by that, he would avoid prison. Together with the family, we decided not to, because he does not plead guilty to attempted murder. It’s against the interrogation. It’s against his values. It’s against whatever he represents, although he was hardly tortured. And we can see it in the movie.
Israeli interrogators are screaming at this point.
Not only are they screaming, they bluff him. They tell him that they have a video of him stabbing the people.
And he says, “I don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember,” because he didn’t stab.
It doesn’t exist, but they insist, “We saw you. We are seeing you. You are there. You did it.” And he doesn’t know what to say. You know, he says, “I don’t remember.” And he really had a brain—his skull was broken, because they called a car to run over him in order to stop to arrest him. And really, a small boy being faced with lies and having to react to it, it was unbearable.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
I think that one of the main reasons that we followed this case were because Lea starts out as a sister to her clients and then, over the years, sort of becomes their mother. Along comes a 13-year-old, and suddenly she’s her client’s grandmother. And if the first clients kind of have an approach to whatever they are doing, which is another world is possible, the kid comes along and tells us the world that we have bequeathed to him is impossible. And she feels implicated by that, presumably, along with everyone else, because why should 13-year-olds be trying to handle anything about this historical mess that we—you know, that he’s born and raised into?
although she’s very devoted to all of her clients, I think that this one really hits her in another place. Another reason it hits her hard is because he stands up to his interrogators, or stands up to the process of interrogation, you know, withstands it, rather, in a way that almost none of her adult clients manage to. So, there’s just something so utterly pure about his insistence that he really didn’t have criminal intent or the kind of criminal intent that is being attributed to him.
And Lea wants justice. It’s almost impossible to come by in almost all of her cases. And here, she felt like it was really maybe doable, which she says in the film, “I start every case thinking maybe this time I’m going to manage.” I don’t think she could play the game otherwise. Does she know that it’s a completely unlevel playing field, and the chances are like this, you know, that if Israel has a 96% or 98% conviction rate with Palestinian defendants, it’s going to be something like 99.9? She knows that. But she has to work on that sliver. She has to work on that sliver of possibility, among other reasons because she also believes in the humanity of the people she’s up against. The prosecutors, the interrogators, the judges are people. And maybe she can get them to see beyond the “terrorist.”
Lea Tsemel talking:
It’s enormous responsibility to take such a case, that could perhaps end up differently, and decide to go to the end, with the—all the bad possibilities that are waiting there. So, the family had to agree. And you can also see some footage in the film, that we’re talking with the family, and the family and the child say. “No, I had no intention of killing anyone, so I will not plead guilty for that, although I am offered some candies if I do.” We continued it. It was a very bad consequence—in the first degree in the district court, and later on, the punishment was vindicated to beat in the Supreme Court. But still he will not be released until he’s 23 years old. a 13-years-old boy. He will grow up in prison. This is the reality. And from time to time, we visit him. We see that he studies. He’s maintaining all right, more or less, with other youngsters his age. And now they become even younger and younger.
– 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested. Forty percent of the male population of the Occupied Territories has been arrested. Almost half the population.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
It’s a people criminalized and incarcerated en masse. And I use those terms because they’re not the ones that we commonly get kind of circulated when you think about Israel-Palestine. Maybe they resonate more with U.S. audiences in terms of criminal justice reform and so on. But I think it’s really important.
And in the beginning of the film, when Lea says to a talk show host 20 years ago, “You should try to listen to what I’m telling you,” because they’re sort of—she says, “I’ll never understand you. I can’t possibly understand. But that’s OK, right?” And Lea says, “Well, maybe you should, because I’m the future.” And when she says, “I’m the future,” what she means is, “If the people that we’re sharing this piece of land with are criminalized and incarcerated en masse like that, and I know what they’ve been through, because basically every”—”I know,” “I” being Lea—”basically every Palestinian defendant has been tortured, one way or another, in varying degrees, anywhere on the scale from 1 to 10, but in varying degrees, it is with these people and with those experiences with whom we’re going to have to share our futures. And I know what that entails. You might want to listen to what I have to say, because security jurisprudence is not solving anything. If anything, it’s making things worse.”
Lea Tsemel talking:
First of all, we have courts all over the Occupied Territories. We used even to have a court in Gaza, of course, that I used to go once a week, at least, and all over the West Bank. Now they concentrated it to two major courts on the borderline. And, of course, there are courts all over Israel.
There is a total separation between the settlers, who live in the same Occupied Territories and act very often against the same soldiers, and—separation between them and their legal procedures in Israeli proper courts, civil courts, and the Palestinians who will be brought from the same territory, same similar actions—they would be brought to a military court. And still there are courts in Israel.
And the court that we are seeing in the movie again and again is the District Court of Jerusalem, which is based on Salah e-Din Street in the occupied East Jerusalem just vis-à-vis the Ministry of Justice, that is also occupying another building of the former Jordanian regime. And that’s where the sceneries are, not far from my office. And this is our reality for the last so many years.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
We were faced with a structural limitation. You know, there is there—as in most countries, there are special laws pertaining to the prosecution of minors, and to minors in legal proceedings. And anonymity, both face and name, are part of those expectations, that youth—that youth can be rehabilitated, and therefore they shouldn’t be known in the world publicly as sort of criminal lost causes. Right? And so, the youth law mandates that the anonymity be preserved.
Israeli media, Palestinian media and international media violated that law left and right. That didn’t make it possible for us to necessarily violate that law. The law still stands. So we were obliged to obscure his identity and his name. But we also felt that it was a necessity, that it was a moral imperative. You take a legal system that has—and I think Lea is the exemplar of this—you take a legal system that has enormous flaws, but you don’t necessarily want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You say some of these structures have the potential to be applied in ways that are progressive. Maybe we don’t let go of all of them. So, we decided to sort of be holier than the pope on this and to obscure his name and obscure his likeness.
We were faced with the possibility of doing so with what? Blurring, pixelation. That would mean also sort of taking away his humanity. That would mean effacing him, effectively. And I had no interest, nor did my partner on the project, Philippe Bellaïche, any interest in effacing him or dehumanizing him. So there was nothing in that law that said you can’t—that obscuring entailed dehumanizing or effacing. So we took it to the other extreme, and we created an animated effect that preserved humanity but obscured the identity.
we illustrated it with artifacts, basically, from Lea’s desk, if you will—laws, charge sheets, decisions, press clippings, 50 years’ worth of visual and material culture around litigating the occupation, that are applied to the characters in a way they start to wear the weight of history. You understand that they are historical constructs, that a woman who wakes up in the morning and does X or a boy who comes home from school and does Y are not doing so out of history, out of context, that there’s a political story here that they have been cast into.
A minor, more minor, secondary case that we follow is the case of a woman named Israa Jaabis, a 31-year-old mother of an 8-year-old, who—her car—it’s hard to speak at—my understanding, she sets her car on fire at a checkpoint.
With herself in it, lightly injures a policeman, an Israeli policeman, and burns herself. Maybe 60% of her body is burned. So, mutilates herself, effectively. As Lea says in the film, “Was it a suicide bombing? Wasn’t a suicide bombing?” One thing is clear: The woman didn’t want to stay alive. Suicide by cop, for sure. OK, something along those lines.
But she survives, and she’s in prison. She’s sentenced to 11 years. The boy is sentenced to 12. And they were sentenced on the same day, back to back, which we couldn’t have known in advance. We could only thank our lucky stars that we were following both, because both sentences somehow become part and parcel of the same collapse of—as Lea says in the film, “I fear that the expectation that Palestinians can find justice in the Israeli legal system may have been buried today for good.” We don’t know if that’s indeed the case, but that’s how she feels on that particular day.
Lea Tsemel talking:
I thought that we have to appeal and put all our energy into the appeal, and perhaps we—we won, partly, only the case of the boy. But that’s how I could pull myself with my own hair out of this dam.
– working with a Palestinian lawyer named Tareq Barghout.
It seems we only revealed it much later, just recently, when he was detained three months ago by the Israeli security services, that that case really broke for him the ability to continue his work as a lawyer and seeking for justice in the Israeli courts. And here and there, during those—the two-and-a-half years that passed since that day, he shot at Israeli targets in the Occupied Territories, some roadblock and then buses of settlers. Nothing happened, really. Nobody was injured. But that’s how I understand he could live together with his one failing profession, on one hand, and his life as a Palestinian patriot.
He is now charged with shooting at places where people could be, according to the defense regulation and according to the military law in the Occupied Territories, military orders.
he’s naturally also my client. And there are many other lawyers who are supporting him and us in this case.
some years in prison. More than 10, I believe.
– Great March of Return
We should see the real picture. The real picture is that this enormous refugee camp, Gaza, has refugees from all over that area exactly surrounding Gaza, whether it was Ashkelon, Ashdod, and all the places around it, Be’er Sheva. And those people want to return, and they want their freedom, and they want their democracy, and they want the self-rule, not being ruled by Israel, as the situation is now. And although Israel withdrew from Gaza, it still controls it and controls the sea, as we saw, and the fishermen’s possibility to make a living. And they come in only demonstration. They have nothing but stones or balloons in their hands. And Israel treats them as they used to treat, recently, and more and more so: shooting in order to kill.
Paramedics, journalists, children. that’s what we are living in.
We are going with this movie all over the world, in different countries. We came here to the Human Rights—Human Rights Watch. And we were in other festivals in Europe.
when we talk to the people, we believe that they would wake up somehow and—if they’re not—I believe many of them know the reality. But they will be recruited into some kind of a reaction. And we have to react. We don’t react enough.
Rachel Leah Jones talking:
Listening to Lea describe Gaza, it’s—and listening to you ask the questions, the extent to which the Israeli public just is shut down to that reality and doesn’t understand the way in which we are implicated in it, presently and in the past, is something that we, for the most part, can only just scratch our heads at in bewilderment.
And I think that one of the reasons that the film is gaining the popularity that it has is because Lea represents a conscious, eyes-wide-open, ears-wide-open, active, wanting-to-do-something person. And she never left the country, although she could have, like many other people. She never gave up, as other professionals sharing, you know, the work that she does did. Something in that dogged tenacity and insistence on continuing to sometimes, unfortunately, say the exact same thing, not only year in and year out, but decade in and decade out, is inspiring to people, and people are taking taking notice.
You know, Lea often says to the audiences when we go to festivals around the world, “Take what you saw, and speak about it and act on it.” And I often say something slightly different, not that I disagree with her. I say, “Take what you saw, and look at this exact—these cases and the roles that the various people in the film play, and look at your own society. Who are you in this story in your own society, be it Hungary, be it Brazil, be it the United States, be it Russia, be it Turkey, be it all of the places that are part of that tidal wave of moving further to the right and eroding basic, basic notions of civil rights and civil liberties?” I think that this film is very much about Israel-Palestine, obviously, but it’s—it goes way beyond that. And we have lessons to draw from it.
Lea Tsemel talking:
It’s very difficult to say what I see as a solution. Whatever they will achieve that brings about honor, equality to both people, I will take as a solution.
What do I hope? As she said, I did represent those who are now grandfathers, and later their sons, that are fathers, and already I did represent the third generation, the grandchildren of those people, in a chain. I don’t want to represent the grand-grandchildren child. I don’t want. That’s it. I think it’s time for a solution. And it depends so much on also your audience, on the Americans, on others. So, I hope it will bring them to do something also from their point.
– And your view of yourself as an Israeli lawyer, a Sabra, a person who was born in Israel, what that means?
It means, you know, I did what I could do. And I still keep doing it. And I hope others will not have to do it again and again. I think I did the right thing, and I have no regrets. And if I have to start from the beginning, I will, probably.
_________
Rachel Leah Jones
director of Advocate.
Lea Tsemel
longtime Israeli human rights lawyer.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 14, 2019