Amid the intifada, a courageous friendship
MARK MACKINNON

Globe and Mail, Toronto, Jan. 6/07

JAFFA, ISRAEL - Even strapped to a chair with her
hands and feet bound, as agents from Israel's Shin Bet
domestic intelligence interrogated her for 18 straight
hours about her contacts with the al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigade, Tali Fahima never doubted she had done the
right thing.

Once an unknown legal secretary who supported Israel's
right-wing Likud party, Ms. Fahima earned the
adoration of her country's left, and the suspicion of
the Shin Bet, by repeatedly travelling to the West
Bank refugee camp at Jenin during the worst violence
of the intifada to try to better understand
Palestinians and their cause.

Over the course of her repeated trips to Jenin, Ms.
Fahima struck up a friendship with Zakaria Zubeidi,
the local head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an
organization that dispatched dozens of suicide bombers
into Israel during the Palestinian uprising. It was a
relationship that eventually landed her in prison.

"It took a little while for me to absorb that I was
standing in the middle of Jenin, an unarmed Jew during
the height of the intifada. [Mr. Zubeidi] said to me
'you're crazy.' I think he was, too," the 30-year-old
said in an interview, recalling her first trip to
Jenin. Yesterday was her third day of freedom after
being paroled following 28 months in jail.

Tali Fahima was imprisoned for 28 months after defying
a military order banning Israelis from visiting the
West Bank. She was there to visit al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigade local leader Zakaria Zubeidi. She was arrested
after she declared a willingness to act as a human
shield for him. (Ariel Schalit/AP)

  Ms. Fahima describes her friendship with Mr. Zubeidi
as "courageous" on both their parts. Many Israelis
describe it as treason.

In May of 2004, she defied a military order banning
Israelis from visiting the West Bank in order to visit
Mr. Zubeidi, one of Israel's most wanted men. After he
survived an assassination attempt, Ms. Fahima declared
her willingness to act as a human shield for him. She
was arrested in Jenin shortly thereafter.

She says that during her first year in prison, before
she was convicted of any crime, she was kept in
isolation, and frequently was interrogated from dawn
until midnight. She eventually made a deal with the
prosecution, under which she pleaded guilty to passing
information to the enemy and of maintaining contacts
with a foreign agent with the intent of harming state
security.

Sitting in a café near her home in the port city of
Jaffa, Ms. Fahima said she has no regrets about what
she did, even though it made her one of the most
polarizing figures in Israel. She believes she was
silenced not because she was a threat to Israel's
security, but because she was challenging the idea
that people like Mr. Zubeidi were murderous terrorists
who couldn't be dealt with except by force.

"I went to meet with the enemy. I broke the walls that
the state built. And I'm not a lefty; I come from the
Israeli mainstream. It's something that really scared
them," she said, black-rimmed glasses perched on her
thin nose. She added that she was only arrested after
she refused an offer to work for Shin Bet.

In Yafa, the café at which she chooses to meet, she's
clearly seen as a hero. Her drinking of a Turkish
coffee is repeatedly interrupted by admirers and
well-wishers.

She says that her journey to Jenin began several years
before, at a conference she attended in Tel Aviv
shortly after the outbreak of the intifada in the fall
of 2000. An Israeli Arab who was there complained that
Jewish repairmen refused to visit his home because
they were scared to travel to Arab towns.

Ms. Fahima says she told the man that she wouldn't go
there either because she was afraid she'd be killed,
and was caught off guard when the man responded by
challenging her to visit his city, Umm al-Fahm. She
decided to face her fears and take him up on his
invitation.

"I said, 'Okay, I'm going to do this,' and I went by
myself, by bus," she recalled. "I was scared. But I
went and when I got there I called him and said, 'I'm
here,' and he hosted me beautifully."

The experience changed her entire outlook, and Ms.
Fahima began reading Palestinian websites and
attending anti-occupation political conferences.
Later, she read an interview Mr. Zubeidi gave to an
Israeli newspaper in which he recounted his childhood
involvement in an Israeli-Palestinian theatre project
and his desire to live a normal life.

The two were the same age, she realized, and she
decided she wanted to contact him. At Mr. Zubeidi's
invitation, she travelled to Jenin in 2002, shortly
after dozens of Palestinians were killed in an Israeli
military incursion.

She felt partly responsible for what she saw: "This
army was my army, acting in my name." When she
returned to Tel Aviv, she started giving interviews to
Israeli newspapers that were harshly critical of
Israel's 35-year occupation of the West Bank.

Now that she's served her sentence, she says she'll
continue her work, though she intends to respect the
conditions of her release, which prohibit her from
visiting the West Bank, or from having any contact
with Mr. Zubeidi.

She plans to work from Jaffa to help the children's
theatre in Jenin, and says she will fight to improve
the conditions of those categorized as security
prisoners, as she was. Once her court-imposed,
one-year travel ban is over, she says she wants to
take advantage of her celebrity and go on speaking
tours to raise international awareness of the
Palestinian cause.

"I touched a very sensitive point in Israeli society,
causing a lot of excitement and a lot of anger," she
said. "As an Israeli citizen, I'm just fighting for my
future and my children's future. We have to stop the
occupation."

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