Varied interests

THE POLICE did not find anything in any of the places Samar or Jawad frequented that could connect either of them with any bombings anywhere. But what they did find was a huge number of books, magazines, pamphlets and papers reflecting their wide and varied interests and involvements over the years. The prosecution selected only a few and insisted that they indicated only that Samar and Jawad were part of a conspiracy to explode bombs in the United Kingdom.

In reality, however, the three long police searches of Samar's shared family flat merely demonstrated what an obsessive hoarder she is. There were thirty boxes worth of materials and papers. These covered a wide variety of subjects and included items as diverse as Amnesty International magazines, books on various artists, paintings, sculpture, poets, costumes and embroidery, publications from the UN Division of Human Rights on the Palestinian Issue, the Registrar of Engineers for Disaster Relief, the Journal of Palestine Studies and reports from the World Health Organisation on Women's Health and Development. There were also many materials connected with Samar's MSc thesis on Water Resource Management in Lebanon.

Samar also had, amongst all this paperwork, some correspondence with the Jaffa Research Centre. The prosecution made a lame attempt to connect this 'Jaffa' Research Centre with the 'Jaffa' team/unit that claimed responsibility for the bombings. However, if they had checked they would have discovered that the Jaffa Research Centre was actually a small research bureau, a media NGO, which was established at the start of the Intifada in 1987, but was defunct by 1991/92.

In relation to Samar, there was also a continuous police presence for two months in her uncle's flat, across the road from the flat she lived in with her parents. They found nothing whatsoever connected with the Israeli Embassy and Balfour House bombings, and in fact all they did find was even more chemical and political memorabilia and note-like jottings.

As Gareth Peirce explains:
The jury had an extraordinarily difficult task in this case. These two have left a litter of their private thoughts, political beliefs and their experimentation. Courageously both gave compelling evidence in the witness box. But for a jury to have to begin from scratch, to have explained to them the history of Palestine, the history of Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian resistance, to have all that explained before you even get to the facts of the case is a major educational process.

Some of the enormous collection of clippings that Samar had hoarded about the Palestine-Israel struggle included, inevitably, some from Jewish publications such as the Jewish Chronicle. It is quite normal for Palestinians and Arabs, particularly those with political interests such as Samar, to be interested in reading Israeli points of view. But, sadly, the prosecution used this to suggest that Samar was anti- Jewish and had an unhealthy interest in Jewish affairs. They even tried to make an issue out of an old single record she had that had Jaffa on its cover.

Considering all of Samar's tireless commitments to anti-racist and human rights groups over the years, to try and label her as anti-Jewish was not only a desperate and unfair prosecution tactic but it is also a slur on the entire Palestinian solidarity movement. Her interest in supporting Palestinian human rights and her opposition to the brutal practices of the state of Israel have nothing to do with religion or anti- Jewish feelings. Indeed, in over ten years of campaigning this was never once even raised as an issue, not even by the Zionists whom she opposed.

Similar insinuations were also made regarding her visit to a public meeting at a north London synagogue in 1992 at which the former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was making a speech. This meeting was advertised in the press as " All Welcome" Yet, when Samar attended she found herself being asked questions and photographed, thus reinforcing the 'paranoia' that she and Jawad had to try and explain to the court was the cause of some of their 'secretive' behaviour. This 'paranoia' was further demonstrated during the trial when an Israeli journalist was caught actually trying to influence a member of the jury, but then the judge chose not to take any action against either.