Palestinian Poet Dareen Tatour Sentenced to Five Months in Prison

"Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was sentenced to five months in prison Tuesday by the Nazareth District court," reports Noa Shpigel for Israel's Haaretz. Tatour, 36, has been charged with incitement to violence and terrorism, after being arrested in October following her posting on social media a poem called "Resist, my people, resist them." Tatour's indictment involved a translation done by a police officer:

Initially Tatour had denied any connection with the posts. After changing lawyers in November 2016, she admitted to publishing the poem, but claimed it had been mistranslated.

The police officer who translated it knows spoken and literary Arabic, and speaks Arabic as his mother tongue, the state claimed.

The prosecution highlighted her change in story and wrote in its conclusions that a person "confident of the justice of his path and purity of his intentions consistently admits to publishing the things attributed to him, and explains the underlying intentions. This is not how the defendant behaved." Later the prosecution said that once she admitted to the publications, Tatour cast blame on others for not understanding her properly, or causing her to act in a certain way, ostensibly innocuously, which is unacceptable."

At the time, [Tatour lawyer] Lasky told Haaretz that it is pathetic to put a poet on trial for a poem she wrote, based on an erroneous literal and cultural translation. "In the unfortunate case of Dareen, her poem speaks among other things about the Dawabshe family and others who were hurt by Jews. The police officer who translated the poem unprofessionally took things out of context."

Defense witnesses included Prof. Nissim Calderon, who wrote an opinion on the special status of poets, noting Hebrew poets in tsarist Russia and during the British Mandate in Palestine, such as Nathan Alterman. The prosecution argued that Calderon hadn't seen the full text, or seen it in the context of pictures of the intifada in the background.

"The trial was designed entirely to intimidate and silence Palestinians in Israel, to make them censor themselves for fear of being put on trial and criminalization of poetry," Lasky said. "When the state tries people for poetry, that derogates from the cultural richness of all society."

The full story is here.