Military court at Ofer Camp, 11.4.06Judge Shaul Gordon, President of the Military Court of AppealsDefense Lawyer Lea TsemelAppeal against judgment in the case of N. .The court room in the military court of the Ofer Camp looks like any other court room. There are judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, translators, typists, docks, defendants and witnesses – as anywhere else. Nevertheless the observer gradually detects in the background a whole system of different value judgments, which receive legitimacy by this respectable court. A young woman, N., sits in the dock, in prison cloths, with the black kerchief of a religious Muslim woman, pale, tearstained eyes and helplessly distressed. 11 months she sits already behind bars and another 13 months more she will have to spend in prison, if the appeal against her sentence by defense lawyer Lea Tsemel will not be accepted.N.’s story could have been written by Dickens. N. is a resident of the Territories. An elderly Bedouin man from the Negev promised to marry her as soon as he will divorce his first wife and provide her with an Israeli ID card. But the first wife did not agree to divorce and in the meanwhile N. lived as the second wife without any legal rights with the family and gave birth to 3 children. Her life in the family was hard and the first wife and her children have beaten her again and again. Once she was beaten so badly, that she had to be taken to hospital. After this she seized her 3 children and returned to her parents’ house. Her husband declared that he could not take her back, because he could not guarantee for her safety. The children however he kidnapped and returned them to his home. N. was not allowed to see them. Moreover the husband refused to grant her son a surgery, although he needed it very badly. N. was completely broken hearted and did not know what to do, where to go. She longed to be with her children. She wanted to scream for help, to alert the family to her suffering. In her despair she thought of doing something provocative, in order to make her husband understand that he has to allow her to be with her children. She made a plan. She wanted to be arrested.She took a knife from the kitchen of her uncle, who lived near the checkpoint, put it into her hand bag and walked to the checkpoint. There she insisted to cross and was asked for her ID. She lied she had no ID in the hope the soldier will open her bag and detect the knife and arrest her. But the soldier only cursed her in ugly and humiliating terms and did not pay attention to her bag. Having been deeply offended by his curses she decided to take out the knife. She held the knife with the blade down and the cutting edge to the back. The soldier was not overly surprised to see the knife and did not feel threatened but he suggested that she threw the knife on the ground. Then he will let her go. But she did not want to go, she wanted to be arrested. She had no intentions to stab the soldier, not from the outset and not after she has been cursed and humiliated so badly. Neither did the soldier feel threatened. He was in a 4m distance from her and she never tried to approach him. On the contrary, she even made some steps backwards. Then he shot a warning shot in the air so that she should not run away. Several Palestinians, who were around N. snatched the knife away from her and handed it in. And then she was arrested at last.But how was her definitely unfortunate initial intention to make a provocation turned into an actual crime?! How did it happen, that she was convicted on charges of and of being in possession of a knife” (whereby the last of the charges was the only true one). And despite the fact that not a single person was physically assaulted, she was punished by 2 years of imprisonment!Tsemel’s appeal is founded on the fact that the police extracted a wrong confession because the interrogation was not held in N.’s mother tongue. It seems to be a very frequent occurrence that the police interrogators have no sufficient command of Arabic and the suspects do not know Hebrew. According to the law, however, the interrogation has to be conducted in the mother tongue of the suspect. In the case of N. this did not happen.Sergeant O, who had the longest conversation with N. at the checkpoint, told that he spoke with her half in Hebrew, half in Arabic and that nevertheless he was sure that she had understood him.The police man Y. who conducted the first interrogation did not bother to clear inconsistencies and inaccuracies which turned up during the examination because he was convinced that his questioning was only a primary one. Already the first investigation was based on linguistic inaccurateness. The testimonies taken from the soldiers at the checkpoint and from N. indicate to obvious misunderstandings between them. Nevertheless N’s “confession” was reported by the police and has been accepted as valid. Interrogation procedures are rarely questioned, do not come often under scrutiny, but are readily accepted by lawyers and judges.Later at court N., has given her full testimony with the help of an interpreter and this was, insisted Tsemel, the only reliable one.One of the police men went so far as to suspect N. of “attempted murder”, although no one of the witnesses attested to anything like this. The charge of “attempting an attack” on soldiers has to be invalidated, demands Tsemel, because none of the witnesses ever argued that N. tried to attack them. The charge of “threatening them and of offending their honor” has to be equally invalidated. The soldiers never felt threatened (according to their testimony) and if someone’s honor was offended, then it was N.’s honor. She took the vulgar curses of the soldiers very hard and it is possible, that without these curses she might have even changed her mind and not taken out her knife, but might have left the checkpoint. Tsemel was sorry that unfortunately she could not give solutions to social problems in the Occupied Territories and not to the personal ones of her client. A psychologist or a social worker might have known to avert the hapless idée fixe of N and to give her some comfort. But there were no social services available.The unbearable lightness, with which an unfortunate attempt to arouse attention by an unhappy woman has been turned into a crime which would justify 2 years of imprisonment, is incomprehensible..In response to the Tsemel’s appeal the prosecutor totally dismissed the notion that N’s deed was an unfortunate attempt to resolve her personal predicament. She insisted that N’s misdoing was nevertheless a real threat and offence to the honor of the soldiers. Even though the soldiers themselves have not felt subjectively any threat or danger, the mere fact of having a knife in her hand bag and pulling it out was enough to constitute an objective reason for fear, an objective danger.Tsemel remarked that if we build our arguments on “objective fears”, we will also have to accept the fact, that the Palestinians have “objective fears” whenever they see soldiers and rifles.Today, 25.4.06, Leah Tsemel received the decision of the judge to acquit N. of the charges of “attempting an attack on soldiers, of threatening them, of offending their honor”. Only the charge of “being in possession of a knife” remained and for this N. has already served a long sentence of 11 months. Tomorrow she will be released from prison.In military courts the readiness of defense lawyers to delve seriously into every paragraph of the charges is even more important than in civil courts because the results of the police interrogations are more readily accepted and there are expectations to make plea bargains as fast as possible rather than find out the truth in troublesome detail work.