Palestinian poet’s arrest this week raises questions about blatant double standards inherent in Israel’s legal system
An Israeli court this week sentenced Darin Tatour, a prominent Palestinian poet, to five months in jail after convicting her of “inciting terrorism” in a poem she posted on social media.
Tatour, a 36-year-old resident of the northern Galilee region, was first detained by the Israeli authorities in 2015 for her poem entitled, “Resist, My People, Resist”.
On Tuesday, she was sentenced to five months behind bars and six months’ probation after being convicted of “inciting violence” and “supporting a terrorist organization”.
The poem that drew the Israeli authorities’ wrath reads in part:
Resist them, my people, resist
Resist the settler’s robbery
Follow the caravan of martyrs
Tear the constitution of shame
They burn the children
Resist them, my people, resist
It remains unclear whether Tatour plans to appeal Tuesday’s court sentence.
In a Wednesday article, Israeli daily Haaretz appeared to criticize the double standards of the Israeli judicial system, which it accused of turning a blind eye to the incitement of violence by extremist rabbis and Jewish groups.
The Israeli judicial system, Haaretz asserted, “cannot discriminate between offenders who commit similar offenses based on their ethnicity or religion”.
The Israeli authorities, the newspaper goes on, appear to have “learned nothing” from their “resounding failure to mete out justice against rabbis who encourage ‘the heroes of the Jewish underground’ [i.e., extremist Jews who call for violence against non-Jews]”.
The jail term received by Tatour, it added, “shows that what rabbis in Israel may do, an Arab poet may not”.
“When it’s Jews [inciting violence], it’s an ‘underground’, not terrorism,” the newspaper states.
According to Haaretz, those who praised the “heroism” of Baruch Goldstein -- an extremist Jewish settler who killed 29 Muslim worshipers in the city of Hebron in 1994 -- “paved the way for the assassination the following year of [Israeli] Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin”.
Haaretz also cited a case from 2012 in which Israeli Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein halted an investigation into the authors of “Torat Hamelekh”, a religious tract that discussed how Jewish religious law viewed the killing of non-Jews.
The newspaper goes on to quote the doctrine of certain extremist rabbis -- verbatim -- who openly call for the murder of non-Jewish infants.
“Even [when it comes to] babies who violate the seven Noahide commandments [that apply to non-Jews], consideration should be given to killing them due to the future danger that will be posed if they are allowed to grow up to be evil like their parents,” it reads, according to Haaretz.
