Justice Without Borders

Leah Tzemel was well on her way to losing another case before the Israeli Supreme Court.

The judges listened tolerantly, but they clearly believed that Tzemel’s Palestinian clients knew more than they admitted of their brother’s attempts to blow up Jews. Spectators in the courtroom had no doubts whatsoever.

“Murderers! Murderers!” screamed the mother of a boy killed in a suicide bombing late last year. And more to the immediate point: “Take away the ugly face of Leah Tzemel!”

For three decades, Tzemel, an Israeli Jew, has been representing Palestinians in Israeli courts. The people she defends have ranged from terror suspects to refugees to the hapless and sometimes unwitting families of murdering militants.

Her work and her extreme-left politics make Tzemel one of the most despised women in Israel. She has been accused of treason, physically attacked and called a “Palestinian-loving whore.”

Despite it all, she continues to fight what is essentially a losing battle and, in her view, defends the fundamental rights of even those her nation considers the enemy.

Tzemel, 57, was the pioneer. Today, a cadre of Israeli attorneys has emerged to specialize in human rights and represent Palestinians. Human rights work has gained a modicum of prestige and respect, they say.

“I used to be the ‘lawyer of Satan.’ Now I’m a ‘human rights defender,’ ” Tzemel said. She didn’t change, she says, Israel did. But in the current atmosphere of war, she and other attorneys worry they will once again be regarded as the devil’s accomplices.

That Tzemel and her colleagues do the work they do is a testament to Israel’s democracy. That the work is increasingly difficult testifies to an erosion in basic democratic values.

In the last two years of conflict, a horrific spate of suicide bombings targeting Jews has created a climate of fear and hate that leaves many Israelis believing that human rights and due process for Palestinians are a luxury the country can ill afford.

Consequently, the caseload for Tzemel and attorneys like her is full of controversial issues and questions of international law: home demolitions, deportations, alleged torture of prisoners, assassinations. They rarely, if ever, win a case.

Thousands of Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli troops in just the last six months of conflict, swelling the population in military prisons and makeshift jail cells. It keeps the attorneys very busy.

Among the new generation following in Tzemel’s footsteps is Michael Sfard. The Jerusalem-born 30-year-old attorney comes from an activist family and would describe his politics as leftist. But he also served enthusiastically in the army and is willing to perform reserve duty -- as long as it’s not in the occupied territories. Many of his clients are Israelis.

Sfard remembers the abuse heaped on Tzemel as he was growing up and credits her with helping to shatter taboos. For instance, she years ago challenged army officers and security agents in a country that traditionally reveres them.

“It took a lot of guts,” he said. “Back then, defending a Palestinian meant only one thing: You were associated with the enemy and against Israel. Today, there’s a little more skepticism toward security arguments.”

Sfard, who studied international human rights law in London, is working on a class-action case challenging the government’s policy of hunting and killing suspected Palestinian militants without the benefit of trial or legal proceedings. So far, about 70 suspects -- and about 50 bystanders -- have been killed in such attacks, according to Israeli human rights organizations.

Another in this new crop is Shamai Leibowitz, grandson of renowned scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was both leftist and an Orthodox Jew. The younger Leibowitz recently joined the defense team of Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the Palestinian Fatah movement accused by Israel of ordering attacks that killed 26 people. Wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, Leibowitz argued in a district court in October that Barghouti was a “freedom fighter” not unlike Moses.

That comment got him thrown out of his synagogue and showered with death threats. Bodyguards helped him escape from a crowd of angry spectators at the courthouse.

Many of the Israeli attorneys who represent Palestinians these days are more mainstream than Tzemel. Shlomo Lecker, for example, will not represent Palestinians accused of violent acts. Instead, he focuses on pure human rights cases, and in the last two years has been involved in defending Palestinians from radical Jewish settlers in the Hebron area of the West Bank who want to evict them from their homes.

Although Lecker has been an attorney for many years, human rights work has gradually taken over his practice. Among even the closest of his friends, he finds it harder and harder to explain what he is doing and why. People tend to be obsessed with the traumatic events of the last two years and forget the background of occupation.

“The climate is less supportive,” he said. “There is less interest, less involvement, less empathy.”

Furthermore, it is next to impossible for Lecker to travel to his clients in the West Bank, because the Israeli government now bars its citizens from Palestinian areas. Instead, Lecker said, he has a “virtual law practice,” in which most business is conducted by e-mails, faxes, digital photography and maps, and telephone calls.

Tzemel will represent just about any Palestinian, but on rare occasions she draws a line. She declined the case of four East Jerusalem Arabs accused of orchestrating bomb attacks that killed 35 people, including seven at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University on July 31.

One of the dead was Daphna Spruch, 61, who for more than a decade was Tzemel’s companion in a weekly feminist support circle.

“I told the [Palestinians’] families that I might not be able to give them the best defense,” she said.

Generally, though, she believes that everyone is entitled to representation.

A court recently appointed her to defend Nasser abu Hmeid, a top commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade militia based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, against charges of murder and belonging to a terrorist organization. She also represented him a decade ago in an earlier conflict; he was sentenced at that time to nine life terms for killing collaborators but was later released as part of a deal.

In Tzemel’s most recent Supreme Court appearances, she tried to help the families of such men.

The brother and sister of Ali Ajouri were fighting the government’s precedent-setting, much-criticized decision to deport them from their West Bank homes to the Gaza Strip. Israel charged that Ajouri was responsible for several suicide attacks. Soldiers tracked him down and killed him in August near the West Bank town of Jenin.

Tzemel argued that people cannot be punished for the sins of their brother; the state said families provide the support network that enables terrorists. Tzemel lost the case, and the two were deported in September.

In a recess during the hearing, relatives of victims charged the defendants, expressing their outrage that the Palestinians had been given their day in court. One, Miri Avitan, confronted Tzemel, blocking her on the stairs of the courthouse.

“How can you defend the murderers of my son?” shouted Avitan, whose 15-year-old boy, Assaf, was killed with friends in a suicide bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall on Dec. 1, 2001.

Tzemel remained calm. “Let’s sit,” she said.

“I don’t want to sit!” Avitan cried, in her hand an album with pictures of slain Israeli children. “They were celebrating their birthday. What was their crime?”

Finally, Tzemel countered: “Ask yourself one question. What makes children, the age of your son, blow themselves up in the middle of a bunch of people?”

Avitan did not seem to hear.

“He didn’t stand a chance,” she said of her son. “Nobody asked him if he had a last request.”

Tzemel ended the exchange, turning on her high heels and marching back to the courtroom.

In an interview later, a tearful Avitan said she was appalled that the state wastes its money on trials for Palestinian suspects and grants them recourse to an extended appeals process.

Tzemel “has a long record of defending such monsters, such creatures that were raised to become bombs, while still in their mothers’ wombs,” Avitan said.

Tzemel falls on the opposite side of the argument, believing that Palestinians, especially, deserve an advocate in a judicial system that relies heavily on the secret testimony of spy agencies and clandestine collaborators.

“You play against the evidence, against the prejudice and the hatreds and the racism -- of the prosecutors, the judges, everybody,” Tzemel said in an interview at her 90-year-old home in Jerusalem’s bohemian Nahalot neighborhood. “I think I’m quite a successful lawyer. It’s just that my cases are generally unwinnable.”

Tzemel, the mother of two grown children, is barely 5 feet tall, short-tempered, tireless and passionate. She favors lots of jewelry and mascara, and speaks in a gravelly voice that she does not hesitate to raise against Supreme Court justices, government prosecutors -- or her own tiny staff.

Under the Israeli system, cases can go to the Supreme Court on the first appeal of any lower court or military court ruling. Consequently, attorneys like Tzemel end up before the highest judges in the land with frequency.

In the sleek, calming halls of the Supreme Court building, an architectural gem carved 10 years ago from indigenous limestone into striking geometrical shapes, a certain decorum is maintained despite the diversity of the visitors. Arab women in head scarves wait on benches not far from kippa-wearing men: relatives of the accused, relatives of the victims. Army generals and secret agents are also not uncommon participants in the doings of the court.

Across town, at Tzemel’s office in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, there is a steady commotion. The phone rings constantly, Tzemel calls out to her assistants sans intercom, coffee cups are scattered on the waiting-area table. An aide shuffles in with the latest petitions filed that morning at the Supreme Court; she carries them in an old plastic shopping bag.

Born in the mixed Jewish and Arab city of Haifa to European immigrants whose families perished in the Holocaust, Tzemel became disillusioned with Zionism after the 1967 Middle East War, when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights and the now-returned Sinai peninsula. Giddy like most other Israelis with the stunning victory, Tzemel assumed the army would quickly pull back and peace would reign. Instead, Israel’s long occupation began.

She also became disillusioned as she read accounts of Arab villagers being forced from their homes by the Israeli army during the 1967 war and during Israel’s 1948 war for independence.

In the early 1970s, she joined the Matzpen, a Trotskyite Communist political organization, and the Black Panthers, a radical protest movement that denounced discrimination against Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern or North African countries.

“I finally began to ask the right questions ... about our existence, about Zionism, about all the Zionist myths,” Tzemel said. “After years of sitting on the fence, I finally jumped over.”

Despite their strong beliefs, Tzemel, Sfard and other like-minded attorneys sometimes wonder whether they are doing more harm than good. Are they accomplices of a system that grants the appearance of justice without truly making it available? Are they allowing Israeli society to pay lip service to respect for human rights?

“I love this place, and I still feel I make a difference, a very small one,” Tzemel said. But at some point, she said, the mere act of going to court will be misleading and futile, and create a false sense of fair play.

“At that point, I will not do this anymore,” she said.