Israeli Arab Poet Is Set Free, But Court Silences His Song

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JERUSALEM, July 2 — An Israeli Arab poet charged with inciting violence through nationalistic verse was released from house arrest Sunday night pending trial The poet, 49-year-old Shafik Habib, was arrested in early June for publishing poetry the Israelis said was politically dangerous.

He was put under house arrest in his Galilee village of Deir Hanna for 12 days before being released on appeal. A court in the northern city of Akko ordered Mr. Habib not to write any poetry until his trial, which begins on July 25. Copies of his eight books of verse were confiscated by the police. Mr.

Habib said today that police investigators had mistranslated his poems from Arabic. “There is no incitement in the poems,” he said. “The authorities just didn’t understand them.” He accused the police and the state prosecutor of laying legal groundwork for curtailing freedom of expression.

The poems, written in 1988, were previously published in Arabic newspapers and had been approved by Israel’s military censor.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: [masthead not on clipping] — LABEL ORDER PROBLEM. No masthead, folio or date on the cut; the byline block reads “Special to The New York Times,” which fixes the paper. The dateline is “JERUSALEM, July 2,” and the body says the poems were “written in 1988,” the arrest was “in early June” and the trial begins “on July 25”. That makes 3 July 1990 consistent. But Maria’s four labels for this slide are given in the order “June 9 1982 / July 3 1990 / Oct 17 1973 / June 25 1982,” and this is the first image on the slide, so by position it should be the June 1982 Lebanon one. It is not: it is plainly the July 1990 item, which is her second label. The labels and the image order do not correspond. I have matched each image to the label its own text supports rather than to its position, and flagged the mismatch for Eva. — Complete item as clipped. Printed as set: the first paragraph ends “pending trial” with no period — the full point and the following few characters are a broken impression on the page, showing only scattered dots.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli Arab Poet Is Set Free, But Court Silences His Song," (newspaper unidentified), 3 July 1990. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1990-033. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1990-033