by JEAN SHAOUL
The documentary Advocate, produced and directed by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche, tells the story of Lea Tsemel’s life in an unsentimental, sober and engrossing way.
The film premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York. It was named best picture in Tel Aviv’s annual Docaviv Film Festival, a decision that met with condemnation from Israel’s Minister of Culture Miri Regev.
It has opened in several cities in the US and UK.
Tsemel, a remarkable Israeli human rights lawyer, has defended Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli courts for nearly 50 years, insisting on their humanity and right to a fair trial. Her untiring work has earned her enormous respect among Palestinians. A staunch critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories seized in the 1967 war, she argues that Palestinians who carry out politically motivated violence are freedom fighters, not “terrorists.”
Advocate weaves the story of Tsemel’s life in between her work defending two young Palestinians in two separate and terrible cases, following them through their remand, indictments, pleas, testimonies, plea bargaining negotiations, verdict, punishment proceedings, sentencing and appeals that illustrate the nature of Israeli “justice.”
The daughter of a woman who had emigrated with her mother to Palestine in 1933 and had lost the rest of her family in the Nazi Holocaust, Tsemel was born in 1945 and grew up in Haifa. She was a law student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University during the 1967 Israeli-Arab War that saw Israel defeat its Arab neighbours and seize land from Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Israel annexed East Jerusalem and still occupies the West Bank, Syria’s Golan Heights and Gaza, which it has subjected to a punishing 12-year blockade.
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