Israel Prize winners call for release of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour
Haaretz.com | Gili Izikovich and JTA Oct 11, 2016 6:41 AM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.747015
Four Israel Prize laureates are among about 170 intellectuals and cultural figures who have recently signed a petition calling for the release from custody of Israeli Arab poet Dareen Tatour.
Tuesday marks a year since she was detained amid allegations of incitement. She is currently under house arrest at her parents’ home.
The signatories, who include writer A.B. Yehoshua, poet Tuvya Ruebner, philosophy professor Avishai Margalit and artist Tzibi Geva, are also calling for pending charges against her to be dropped.
Tatour, who in the past published a book of poetry in Arabic, was arrested in a police raid on her parents’ home, where she also lived, in the village of Reineh near Nazareth. She was accused of incitement primarily over a poem that she wrote following the 2014 murder by Jews of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the murder of three members of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family in the West Bank town of Duma last year when their home was torched, allegedly also by Jews.
The poem, written in Arabic and posted on YouTube, is called “Resist my people, resist them.” She was charged with incitement to violence and terrorism. Although not directly referring to violence, some lines of the poem allude to joining martyrs and not “succumbing to the ‘peaceful solution.’”