Students at Glasgow University have elected Mordechai Vanunu as their rector. Members of the Scottish Socialist Party at the University had campaigned hard to get Vanunu elected
Vanunu is a former Israeli nuclear technician, imprisoned for eighteen years for blowing the whistle on his governRoland Rance At the end of December, Israel charged activist Tali Fahima with several offences including assisting the enemy during wartime, passing on information to the enemy, illegal possession of a weapon and maintaining contact with foreign agents.
Tall has been held under administrative detention (the Israeli equivalent of internment without trial) since August - the first Israeli Jewish woman, and the first Israeli Jewish leftist, to be subjected to this measure regularly applied against Palestinian activists, and very occasionally against Israeli fascists.
During this time, she has been subject to ill-treatment, including sexual harassment, sleep deprivation, prolonged periods of painful shackling, denial of food, cigarettes, soap, shampoo and toothpaste, and other forms of low-level torture.
The gravity of the charges, and the severity of her treatment, suggest that Israel views Tali Fahima as s significant
ment's secret nuclear weapons programme. Although he was finally released last March he is still being punished as he is not allowed to leave the country or to speak to foreign journalists.. SSP MSP Rosie Kane said; "I am glad to see that the students threat to Israel's security.
Yet, according to friends in her defence campaign, the substance of the charges is in fact very little, and relates mainly to documents left behind by the Israeli army when it quit Jenin, and which she is accused of translating into Arabic, a language she does not know, for the benefit of Palestinians fluent in Hebrew.
Why then has Israel laid such serious charges against Tall, and so badly treated her under detention? And what sort of threat, if any, does she constitute to Israeli security?
Tali Fahima is a 29-year-old legal secretary from the poor town of Kiryat Gat in southern Israel; a town established in 1955 on the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Faluja and of Iraq alManshiyya, in order to absorb Jewish immigrants from Morocco.
Structurally impoverished, and far from Israel's economic, cultural and political centre, Kiryat Gat has always heen a stronghold of the nationalist
Sports." right-wing.
Tali, who voted for Sharon at the last election, has no history of involvement with protest groups or anti-occupation activity. However, with the intensification of the Palestinian Intifada, she did the almost unthinkable in Israel.
Instead of accepting the daily propaganda lies about Arab blood lust, she decided to find out for herself why so many Palestinians were willing to sacrifice their lives in order to strike a blow at Israel. So she phoned Zakiriya Zbeidi., commander of the Al-Agsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, to ask him.
This conversation led to the first of several visits to Jenin, where she was astonished to be accepted as an honoured guest, and began to see the Palestinians as a people struggling against oppression, rather than the inhuman and unreasoning mass they were portrayed as in the Israell media.
As her involvement with the people of Jenin deepened, Tali declared her willingness to act have shown the internationalist outlook of young people in Glasgow and a determination to recognise the courage and determination of a man who is the Nelson Mandela of the Middle East.
"This is also a victory for the Palestinians, whose cause Vanunu supas a human shield for Zbeidi, the target of several Israeli assassination attempts. This led to her first confrontation with the Shin Bet, who demanded that she spy on Zbeidi and others. Tali refused, and was summoned to several more interrogations, until her detention in the summer. This was followed by crude character assassination, with the Israeli press repeating false allegations of a sexual affair between Fahima and Zbeidi, and of her alleged involvement in Palestinian bombing attacks in Israel. Since her detention, the Shin Bet have not interrogated Tall Fahima about her activity, nor even attempted to find out about her contacts in Jenin. Rather, they have engaged in discussion on whether there is indeed an occupation, in order, one told her, "to convince her to be once again a good Jewish girl". And this, it seems, is Tali Fahima's real offence - that, as a working-class Mizrahl Jewish woman from a poor and neglected development town, she has strayed so far from the national consensus.
As several of her supporters have noted, what can be contained and ignored in a westernised middle-class Intellectual from the wealthy liberal suburbs of north Tel Aviv, cannot be allowed in someone like Tali Fahima.
Like Mordechai Vanunu, who at the age of nine moved from a comfortable life in Marrakesh to the poverty of Beersheba, Tall Fahima was supposed to be grateful to receive the crumbs scattered by the Israeli establishment. Their refusal is potentially a far greater than the resistance of the liberal peace
As a supporter, Lin ChalozinDovrat of the Women's Coalition for Just Peace, has
Tali Fahima commented, "If a good girl of Kiryat Gat and a Likud voter thinks that the occupation is a catastrophe, who knows, maybe more people will awake from the coma and find out we are all being screwed? What if tomorrow some more Tali Fahimas will get up and start thinking independently?"
The lesson which the Israell opposition must draw from this is the need, if they are to build a movement really capable of challenging the establishment, to address the concerns of Israel's oppressed - the women, the poor, the Mizrahis, who form the majority of Israel's Jewish population but who have benefited little from the existence of Israel as "Jewish state" built on the ruins of multi-ethnic Palestine.