Tears and crocodile tears

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."