["In addition to political prisoners, there is the oppression of
Palestinians: freedom of speech, freedom of the press. The suppression
of student protests. It was all part of my daily workload, beyond the
hardcore cases involving armed resistance."] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ANGRY OPTIMISTIC LIFE AND TIMES OF LEA TSEMEL: A REVIEW OF
"ADVOCATE"  
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Lisa Hajjar
June 11, 2019
Jadaliyya
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_ "In addition to political prisoners, there is the oppression of
Palestinians: freedom of speech, freedom of the press. The suppression
of student protests. It was all part of my daily workload, beyond the
hardcore cases involving armed resistance." _

Jewish Israeli lawyer, Lea Tsemel, who has made a career defending
Palestinians in Israeli courts. , Advocate Films

 

_Being someone’s lawyer entails more than appearing in court and
arguing their case passionately. It means being there for them in
their daily life. Especially if they are sentenced to prison for
political reasons. Given the miserable prison conditions, I could not
just say, “Case closed” and drop the client. But in addition to
political prisoners, there is the oppression of Palestinians: freedom
of speech, freedom of the press. The suppression of student protests.
It was all part of my daily workload, beyond the hardcore cases
involving armed resistance._

Lea Tsemel is an angry optimistic woman. That is how she describes
herself to a journalist in a phone interview as she races to the
Israeli Supreme Court to appeal two major political cases that she
just lost. _Advocate,_ by filmmakers and Tsemel’s long-time
friends Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche, offers an intimate
portrait of this Jewish Israeli lawyer who has made a career defending
Palestinians in Israeli courts. To many, Tsemel is a hero, a fearless
and tireless warrior for justice. To others, she is “the devil’s
advocate.” To everyone who knows or has heard of her, regardless of
their political views, she is larger than life, which is ironic
because she is tiny. When she stands beside a thirteen-year-old
client, one of the Palestinians whose case is traced through this
film, her head barely reaches his shoulder. Yet when she speaks, she
roars. _Advocate_ brings audiences into her world and explains why
she roars.

Tsemel’s fearsome reputation is legendary. In the early 1990s when I
began researching the Israeli military court system in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza, it amused me to learn from some military judges
and prosecutors that they had been warned by their colleagues to
“watch out for Lea.” Good advice for people who uphold the
occupation. Tsemel is a human cyclone who, if the playing field on
which she works were actually level, could demolish any adversary
through the sheer force of her will. The playing field is not level,
however, and she probably can count her victories on two hands.
However, that force of will keeps her going, keeps her fighting, and
that angry optimism sustains her faith that maybe the next fight can
be won.

Early in the film, the camera zooms in on files in Tsemel’s East
Jerusalem office that bear the labels “possession of a weapon,”
“accessory to murder,” “suicide bombings,” “stone
throwing,” “case law minors,” and “possession of a knife.”
These types of cases are her bread and butter and her raison
d’être. In a scene with several Palestinian women whose family
member is a client, she explains, “It is not that I like to take
tough cases. I am not afraid not to. I always see the person behind
the case. That is the important thing.” This is one side of a
Rubik’s cube explanation about why Tsemel does what she does.
Another side is presented in a clip of Tsemel on an Israeli
morning talk show in 1999. She explains herself to the confounded
interviewer: “Israelis have no right to tell Palestinians how to
struggle . . . You should try to understand me because I am the
future.”

The filmmakers capture a third side of the Rubik’s cube as Tsemel
explains that, as an Israeli, she benefits from the fruits of the
occupation, bitter and sweet. “On what moral grounds should I judge
the people who resist my occupation? . . . Who gave me that right? So,
in that sense, if the act is intended to resist the occupation, as
such, I will take it on.” She elaborates:

Being someone’s lawyer entails more than appearing in court and
arguing their case passionately. It means being there for them in
their daily life. Especially if they are sentenced to prison for
political reasons. Given the miserable prison conditions, I could not
just say, “Case closed” and drop the client. But in addition to
political prisoners, there is the oppression of Palestinians: freedom
of speech, freedom of the press. The suppression of student protests.
It was all part of my daily workload, beyond the hardcore cases
involving armed resistance.

_Advocate_ is a compelling representation of Tsemel’s biography. We
learn that her mother emigrated from Europe to Palestine in 1933 and
was able to bring her own mother, but the rest of the family was
annihilated in the Nazi Holocaust. Tsemel was born in 1945 and grew up
in the Arab-Jewish city of Haifa. In 1967, she was a law student at
Hebrew University when the war started. She volunteered for military
service. We see a photo of her in a baggy khaki uniform with a gun
slung over her shoulder. When the Israeli army conquered East
Jerusalem, she was the first Israeli woman to reach the Wailing Wall
which, at the time, was in a narrow alley. After the war, dozens of
homes in the vicinity of the wall were destroyed to make way for a
prayers' plaza. She wondered, “What happened to the people who lived
here?” Although she was from a Zionist family, she was unsettled by
what she was starting to learn about the occupation. Soon after the
war, she decided to join the ultra-leftist organization Matzpen
because they had answers to her questions. “From that moment, I
never looked back.”

Tsemel was already a Matzpen firebrand when the man who would become
her husband and life-partner, Michel Warschawski, first saw her in the
thick of a brawl at Hebrew University. At the time he was, by his own
account, “a religious boy in religious attire.” In the midst of
this melee was a “short little woman. Beautiful. Fashionably dressed
in an extra short skirt with extra high boots. She was waving around a
chain with tons of keys, like a prison warden. To this day, she has
tons of keys. God knows what they open.”

Tsemel’s first political trial, in 1972—which coincided with the
birth of her first child Nissan, was representing members of the
Arab-Jewish Underground. In court, the accused described their
interrogations. Tsemel recounts,

It was one after another, always the same. They all described the
shackling, sleep deprivation, deafening music, interrogations day and
night, and the beatings. It clearly was not the whim of a sole
interrogator. It was systematic. There were instructions, like a user
manual. How to cause the human body pain and suffering. How to cause
pain and suffering without leaving marks. How to cause the body pain
and suffering so that the detainee remains conscious and keeps
answering questions. 

Then the voiceover of a judge, “We have no doubt that the
defendant’s claims about torture are a figment of his imagination,
and we do not believe him. We are convinced he confessed of his own
free will, and we approve [the confession] as evidence in this
trial.” Arab-Jewish Underground members Daoud Turki and Udi Adiv
were found guilty of the charges and sentenced to seventeen years in
prison while Tsemel was “faulted” for identifying with Israel’s
“enemies.”

Torture was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, except for the
gullible or craven Israeli judges who, for decades, chose to believe
lying security agents and government officials who denied that violent
and coercive techniques were staples of the interrogation of
“enemies of the state.” Tsemel saw the lies for what they were
because so many of her clients were tortured and so much of her work
turned on judgment-proof confessions that had been beaten or
sleep-deprived out of them. She explains: “The confession is ‘the
queen of evidence’ and they will do anything to get it. With a
confession, be it true or false, his fate is sealed.”

FOR TSEMEL, THE CLIENT WHO DOES NOT CONFESS, WHO DOES NOT BREAK DOWN
AND SEAL HIS OWN FATE OR NAME HIS WHOLE VILLAGE WITH THE FIRST BLOW IS
LIKE A UNICORN—A RARE AND MYTHICAL FIGURE.

For Tsemel, the client who does not confess, who does not break down
and seal his own fate or name his whole village with the first blow is
like a unicorn—a rare and mythical figure. She deals constantly with
clients who confessed, true or false, and in these circumstances, she
strives to minimize the damages by negotiating a plea bargain. The
unicorn client who does not confess, even under duress, gives her
ammunition to fight it out in court. Ahmad, her thirteen-year-old
client, was a unicorn.

Ahmad and his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan were from Beit Hanina.
They took souvenir knives from their homes and went to the neighboring
settlement of Pisgat Zeev. Hassan stabbed and injured an Israeli man
and a boy, and then he was shot, or in Israeli parlance
“eliminated” by the police. As Hassan lay dead in the street,
angry Israelis shouted that the police should put a bullet through his
injured cousin Ahmad’s head too. Ahmad, who became Tsemel’s
client, did not use his own knife, and at the time of the attack, had
urged his cousin not to strike another child. Throughout his
interrogation, in his responses to a screaming security agent who was
trying to frighten or bully him to admit that he had gone to Pisgat
Zeev with the intention to kill people, he maintained that he had not;
he and his cousin had taken the knives in order to scare people
because they were angry that Israel was bombing and killing children
in Gaza.

Ahmad became the youngest person Tsemel had, to that date, ever
represented who faced such serious charges—two counts of attempted
murder and possession of a weapon. She and her co-counsel Tareq
Barghout, a lawyer with the Palestinian Prisoners Office in Ramallah,
began strategizing. Tsemel pointed out that Israel’s Youth Law does
not allow for the detention of individuals younger than fourteen in
adult prisons. Could they work this angle? Ahmad’s looming birthday,
which would transition him to an incarcerable age, was like a ticking
clock. Barghout thought they should try to negotiate a plea bargain
right away in order to ensure that he go to a juvenile detention
facility, whereas Tsemel wanted to take the case to trial because she
believed she could use the fact that he did not confess to the intent
to murder to strike or downgrade the charges. After all, she tells
Barghout, there is precedent for leniency: a Jewish man who attacked a
Palestinian woman got just three months of community service. That was
her optimism speaking.

The arc of the film follows the progress in Ahmad’s case. Remand.
Indictment. Plea. Testimony. Plea bargain negotiations. Verdict.
Punishment proceedings. Sentence. Before the testimony hearing, as she
and Barghout go into the courtroom, she says, “I am ready for
battle, as they say.” When they come out, Tsemel is elated and
impressed that Ahmad has maintained that he never intended to kill
anyone. Outside the courtroom, she gives her unicorn a thumbs-up.

Hanan Ashrawi, the famed intellectual and former negotiator (who
recently was denied a visa to the United States), was once Tsemel’s
client and became her close friend. Ashrawi explains the phenomenon
that is Tsemel: “Every single Palestinian family can tell you: ‘I
have prisoners in my midst.’. . . And it was Lea who was there
saying, ‘I will try to bring him or her back.’ She was very human.
She was the only one really who recognized us in the Greek sense of
anagnorisis. I recognize your humanity and what you are going
through.” Ashrawi elaborates on Palestinian resistance politics and
their effects on her friend’s career choices:

_If you are fighting against injustice and you do not have any other
tools, you adopt the tools that are available; you manufacture your
own tools. Some people turn their bodies into tools. They do not have
warplanes or tanks; they have bodies. It does not mean she condoned
this or she thought it was right, but she said you have to understand
it in the context in which this happened. This is a very difficult and
rare situation where you could look at the victim cum violent person
and understand the motives for violence and understand that this is a
response to a greater form of violence._

The second high-profile case that Tsemel takes during the making
of _Advocate_ involves a Palestinian woman, Israa Jaabis, who is
charged with attempted murder for an act that is interpreted by
Israeli officials as a botched suicide bombing. One morning, Jaabis
loaded a couple of butane tanks in the back seat of her car and drove
into Jerusalem. She set fire to the car, injuring a policeman lightly
and herself severely. As with the case of Ahmad, for Tsemel the
question is what was her intent? Did she intend to kill many people,
or did she intend to kill just herself and if so, why? Tsemel learns
from Jaabis’ relatives that she was a depressed woman in an unhappy
marriage who had attempted suicide twice before but not in a showy
“political” way as the car incident. This time, Tsemel wonders,
had she decided to try “suicide by cop”? The prosecutors were
indifferent to this question of intent; for them, her actions were
enough to make her a terrorist who wanted and tried to kill Jews.

These two cases, Ahmad’s and Jaabis’, are as tough as they get.
The camera focuses on Tsemel’s tired face as she yawns and says,
“What terrible fatigue.” That scene reminded me of something
Warschawski told me years ago about how his wife manages her punishing
workload and hectic schedule. After working till late every night and
knowing that she would have to appear in some court or another early
the next morning, she would drink a gallon of water before bed. That
way, her body would function as an alarm clock; when she woke up at
four a.m. to go to the bathroom, she would not allow herself the
luxury of crawling back between the sheets but rather would stay awake
get ready for the day’s challenges.

Both cases were decided on the same day in the Jerusalem District
Court, and both clients were found guilty of all the charges against
them. Ahmad was sentenced to twelve years in prison, and Jaabis was
sentenced to eleven. According to the court: “Their sole intent was
to kill.” As Tsemel reads the ruling in Ahmad’s case, she mumbles,
“Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Wow, not a sliver of hope.” Looking up
at the camera, she says, “It is as if I live with the illusion that
I can do something in the world, make an impact. That there is someone
to reason with. It is strange. I am not willing to give up trying.”

Outside the courtroom, journalists have formed a scrum. Barghout is so
devastated that he refuses Tsemel’s pleas to stand by her side while
she makes a statement. He leaves and she faces the press alone. She
roars: 

We have been defeated! . . . But our defeat, as a legal team, is
nothing compared to the far-reaching and long-lasting defeat for
Israeli society and its judicial system. The court ignored the fact
that this is a national conflict. It attributed anti-Semitic
sentiments to both defendants, which neither of them expressed at any
stage. But it is convenient to think: “They only want to hurt the
Jews!” Fifty years of occupation were stricken from the record, and
vanished from the judges’ consciousness, unfortunately. I hope it
will not vanish from the public’s consciousness. This is an
occupation! And it must be responded to. And everyone does so
according to their capabilities. The victims, the vanquished, the
children, the women—respond in their own way. The expectation that
Palestinians can find justice in Israeli courts may have been buried
for good. I hope not. I really hope not. The path to the Supreme Court
still lies ahead of us. We will appeal as soon as possible, in pursuit
of justice.

In 2017, the Supreme Court upheld Ahmad’s conviction but reduced his
sentence to nine and a half years. It rejected Israa Jaabis’ appeal
outright.

_Advocate_ ends with a blackened screened and a postscript. “In
2019, shortly after the film’s world premiere, attorney Tareq
Barghout was arrested. After a month of secret service interrogations,
with a gag order and without the right to counsel, he initiated his
own plea negotiations. He was charged with shooting at Israeli
targets.” As of now, we learn, he has not been sentenced or
convicted, but Tsemel has become his lawyer.

EARLIER THIS YEAR 'ADVOCATE' SCREENED AT SUNDANCE AND THE HUMAN
RIGHTS FILM FESTIVALS.  MOST RECENTLY IT WAS FEATURED AT DOC NYC.

_LISA HAJJAR is a professor of sociology at the University of
California-Santa Barbara. Her scholarship focuses on international
law, war and conflict, human rights, and torture. She is the author
of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West
Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A
Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge, 2013). She is a
co-editor of Jadaliyya, and has served on the editorial committees of
Middle East Report and Journal of Palestine Studies. She is working
on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the “war on terror.” In
2014-2015, she was the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the
American University of Beirut, and the following year she served as
the director of AUB’s Center for American Studies and Research._

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