Shmuel Yerushalmi

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Yerushalmi Shmuel is an Israeli protest poet and political activist. He was born in 1972 in the city of Bila Tserkva in the Ukraine, and lives in Israel since 1988.

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[edit] Biography and Political Development

In the first years after immigration he was a staunch Zionist and took right-wing political positions. In 1989-1990, Yerushalmi studied at a Jerusalem yeshiva (religious academy) affiliated to the messianic Chabad Hassidic faction.

A fundamental change in his political opinions took place in 1993-1994, under the influence of the Oslo Process and of his increasing interest in the Arabic culture which is developing inside the Israeli society.

Living in the Negev city of Beer Sheba, Yerushalmi established contact with and a growing interest in the problems of the Bedouin population in the city's vicinity, which feels itself to be the subject of gross discrimination by government authorities and of racist attitudes by parts of the Jewish majority population.

Since that time, Shmuel Yerushalmi is a consistent anti-Zionist and Communist, and an outspoken advocate of an International Marxist-Leninist revolution.

He is an active member in various leftist movements, such as the Israeli Communist Forum - whose members broke away from the Israeli Communist Party due to ideological dissent over their "continued support for the Soviet Idea" in the Gorbachev period and its aftermath.

Yerushalmi is also involved in the "Civil Forum" of Hadash, aimed at fostering a non-Zionist Israeli civic identity.

Yerushalmi began writing poetry in earnest in 1998 - in Hebrew rather than his native Russian, and his works were published in different literary and political sites, both in Hebrew and in translation to various foreign languages.

Yerushalmi's poems, many of them outspokenly political, touch on a variety of subjects, such as Marxism-Leninism, social justice, ecology, the great victory over Nazism in the Second World War; and opposition to Zionism. One of the main themes which Yerushalmi tries to express in his poetry is the struggle for letting the Israeli society and policy-makers give account for aggressive policies.[1]

[edit] Investigation by the Security Services

On December 23, 2004, Yerushalmi was summoned to the Be'er Sheba police station, where two operatives of the Shabak, Israel's internal Security Service, were waiting for him.

After conducting a thorough physical search, the two started interrogating him about his poem "They will not break Tali Fahima" - written in support of Tali Fahima, the Israeli activist jailed for her contracts with the Palestinian militant leader Zakariya Zubeidi.

Yerushalmi told the interrogators that he believed Fahima had been victimized for having done nothing more than engage in a peaceful dialogue and that there was nothing illegal in his writing a poem supporting her. Asked why he published this and other poems on Arab websites he said that nobody had the right to tell a poet where to publish his work.

The two informed him that he was "under close observation" and that "any attempted act harmful to state security would be immediately detected". Yerushalmi told them he had no intention to perpetrate any such act, and that the entire interrogation was an anti-democratic act violating his civil rights.

The fact of Yeriushalmi's Shabak interrogation was more widely publicized than any act which he took at his own initiative.[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Much of the material in this section is extracted from an interview with Yerushalmi on 15 June 2006 by the Israeli online journal Sikur Memukad (Focussed Report) [1](in Hebrew)
  2. ^ AFP (French News Agency) dispatch [2], Scoop News [3], Haaretz [4]

[edit] External links

[edit] Author's Website

[edit] Interviews and political initiatives

[edit] Online Poetry

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