An Israeli court on Thursday convicted an Israeli Arab poet of online incitement to terrorism for using a poem as the soundtrack to images of Palestinians in violent confrontations with Israeli troops.
Dareen Tatour, 36, posted on Facebook and YouTube a video of herself reading out her poem "Resist, My People, Resist," accompanied by footage of masked Palestinian youths hurling stones and firebombs at Israeli soldiers.
The poem was published in October 2015 during a wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.
Tatour, a resident of Reineh, a village near the northern city of Nazareth, was arrested several days later, and prosecutors said her post was a call for violence.
After three months in detention, Tatour was released to house arrest.
Her case drew international attention after Israel put her under extended house arrest. More than 150 literary figures, including authors Alice Walker and Naomi Klein, called for Tatour's release and critics said her arrest was a violation of freedom of expression.
Tatour denied the charges and said her poem had been misunderstood by the Israeli authorities. It says: "Resist, my people, resist them / Resist the settlers' robbery / And follow the caravan of martyrs."
She said there was no call for violence in the poem, rather for a struggle, which Israeli authorities had cast as violent.
The Nazareth Magistrates' Court convicted her, delivering a 52-page verdict that went into a detailed analysis of the text and video, and of the Arabic word "shahid," which means "martyr."
Language experts called by the defense as witnesses included a respected Israeli poetry professor and an expert in Arabic-Hebrew translation.
Translator Yonatan Mendel told the court that "shahid" means different things to people on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The Israeli hears 'shahid' and sees an aggressor. The Palestinian sees a victim. That's a big difference. One sees an attacker blowing up a bus, the other sees a child shot by soldiers," he said.
Tatour's case sparked controversy among freedom of speech advocates in Israel. It drew attention to the advanced technology used by Israeli security agencies to trawl through social media to identify and arrest users suspected of incitement to violence, or of planning attacks.
The ruling came down against the defense's interpretation, pointing to a separate post in which Tatour had used "shahid" to describe a Palestinian assailant who had stabbed a 15-year-old Israeli.
"The combination leaves no interpretation of the word 'martyr' other than a violent interpretation that incites to terrorism and to follow martyr-attackers," the verdict said.
In another post, Tatour called for another intifada, or uprising, within Israel's pre-1967 borders. She also posted a picture of Nazareth resident, who was shot and injured after brandishing a knife in the northern city of Afula's central bus station, with the caption: "I am the next martyr." The posts received many online responses.
Tatour was also convicted of supporting a terrorist group. Prosecutors said she had expressed support for Islamic Jihad's call for an uprising.
She is expected to appeal the verdict, her lawyer said.
"I am ready for everything and do not regret anything I have done. I have done nothing wrong," Tatour said at the court.
Israel says the wave of Palestinian stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks that began in the fall of 2015 was fueled by online incitement and has launched a legal crackdown to curb it.
Indictments for online incitement have tripled in Israel since 2014.
The maximum term in incitement cases is five years, although the average sentence is nine months. The court has not issued a date for Tatour's sentencing.
