Israeli court gives 5 months sentence to female Arab poet for incitement

Arab poet Dareen Tatour was sent to 5 months in prison on Tuesday, after being convicted few months ago of incitement to violence under the Terrorism Law over a poem she posted online calling for violent resistance. The indictment against her cited the poem, which she posted on Facebook, and several other posts, one of which quoted an Islamic Jihad call on Palestinians to rise up to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. In another, which referred to an attempted stabbing attack in the Afula bus station, Tartour declared, "I am the next martyr." A accompanying a reading of the poem "Resist My People, Resist," uploaded to YouTube by Tatour in October 2015 at the height of a wave of Palestinian attacks against Jews, shows masked Palestinians attacking Israeli soldiers with rocks and Molotov cocktails. The poem included such lines as, "I will not succumb to the 'peaceful solution,' Never lower my flags, Until I evict them from my land," and "Resist the settler's robbery, And follow the caravan of martyrs." The state claimed that the defendant could have provoked fans to carry out attacks. Prosecutors said her post was a call for violence. Tatour, who denied the charges, said her poem was misunderstood by the Israeli authorities. She said there was no call for violence in the poem, rather for a struggle. The judge delivered a 52-page verdict that went into a detailed literary analysis of the text and , and of the Arabic word "shahid"-which means "martyr" in English. Language experts called by the defense as witnesses included a famous Israeli poetry professor and an expert in Arabic-Hebrew translation. The translator told the court that "shahid" meant different things to people on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The Israeli hears 'shahid' and sees an aggressor. The Palestinian sees a victim. That's a big difference. One sees an attacker blowing up a bus, the other sees a child shot by soldiers," the expert, Yonatan Mendel, told the court in March 2017. Her lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said Tatour would appeal both the verdict and the sentence. Photos,vid: Dareen Tatour, and her poem clip (Press play, it can be watched)

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