Cheryl A Rubenberg. Women in Law: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Editor: Rebecca Mae Salokar & Mary L Volcansek. Greenwood Press, 1996.
Tamar Pelleg-Sryck, a human rights lawyer and an Israeli Jew, has devoted her legal career to the defense of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. While her early education was not in the area of law, her political activism prompted her to seek such a degree at the age of 60, and she has used this education to challenge the human rights abuses of the Israeli occupation. Pelleg-Sryck has helped to enlarge the scope of the occupation officials’ accountability and narrowed the gap between the law and its practice in the Occupied Territories. Through her tireless efforts, she has sought to improve both prison conditions and the treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In addition, methodologically, her unique practice of “being there”—being present when human rights violations were occurring; her cooperative work with Palestinian lawyers, organizations, and individuals; her regular publications in the Hebrew press; her cooperation, advice to, and reports to human rights organizations around the world; and her infinite filing of complaints with the Israeli authorities—have been hallmarks of Pelleg-Sryck’s work to alleviate human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
Family Background and Education
Tamar’s mother, Lydia Unkovskaya, was a Russian Christian from Moscow who converted to Judaism when she met her husband, Jacob Eliasberg, from Pinsk. After marrying, they settled in the Jewish shtetel in Pinsk, then part of Poland. Tamar, the only child of this union, was born in 1926. Religion played no part in Tamar’s home life, yet both Christian and Jewish holidays were observed in a rather idiosyncratic way. While Zionism was not stressed at home, Jewish consciousness, pride, and values were strongly advocated. Tamar recalls that in her youth she felt alienated from her schoolmates and friends because she was the only child in the community who did not speak Yiddish; because in this exclusively Jewish enclave, her family had a Christmas tree and painted eggs at Easter; and because her family was well-to-do, owned a large house and summer home, and had one of the two existing automobiles in Pinsk. As Tamar described it, she was, “a minority inside a minority…. All through my life I have been exposed to seemingly conflicting norms and values.” She adored her father, and he apparently returned the sentiment.
Father has been my beloved hero and protector, the only authority I accepted besides my own. He did not make compromises when his moral principles were involved … and yet he was a man of status, highly valued in the community. He was also a true humanist, very considerate, sociable, and admittedly charming, witty, and wise. From my father, I learned the lesson that has been the guiding creed of my life: that principles must be taken seriously and lived by, and that life per se is nothing, it is how you live it that matters.
In September of 1939, Tamar’s young life was severely disrupted by the events of World War II when the family was deported to Kazakhstan. There, in order to attend school, Tamar had to live with a strange family. The experience involved many deprivations and was not pleasant: “What made me [most] miserable and unhappy was the sudden and so complete absence of love.” But in June of 1941, her family began a complex three-year journey that took them through Yangi-Yul, Batumi, Teheran, Abadan, Karachi, and Port Tawfic before they finally arrived in Palestine in 1943. Of her arrival, Tamar recalled, “I felt like I was coming home. My only wish, which reached the point of obsession, was to become assimilated, to belong … I refused to speak anything but Hebrew … and also I wanted to make up the time I had lost in studying.”
With regard to the Palestinians, Tamar recalled that she was simply unaware of them; it was as though they did not exist. “Of course, I went to war with them in 1948, but as an abstraction, they didn’t have faces. This is so typical in Israel and in the beginning, I wanted to be more typical than typical … The Zionist spirit and ideology were all that I knew and it took a long time for the realities to penetrate.”
In 1945, Tamar joined the Haganah (the regular Zionist underground military), and when hostilities broke out in Jerusalem in November, 1947, she became actively involved in secretly transporting arms to Haganah outposts. Later, Tamar became a company welfare and culture sergeant stationed in the mountains outside Jerusalem. “These were absolutely my cups of tea, and very much so, due both to my feelings for the cause (Zionism) and to my temperament.”
In the mid-1940s, Tamar began her collegiate education at the Hebrew University. She studied history, psychology, and philosophy and received a Master of Arts degree, magna cum laude, in history, with psychology as a second area. On graduating in December, 1950, she was awarded a scholarship from the French government at the Institut de Paris where she chose to pursue a year of studies in psychopathology and clinical psychology.
In 1951, Tamar married Eli Pelleg, an envoy of the Jewish Agency in Paris on behalf of Mapam (a leftist political party in Israel), and in 1952, she gave birth to their daughter, Orna. Five years later, their son, Danny, was born.
While studying in Paris, Tamar came into contact with a number of leftists and radicals—students and others. Her husband, Pelleg, became a communist and Tamar joined the Communist party in 1953, remaining a member for 12 years. The party was legal in Israel and tended to attract mainly Israeli Arabs and dissident Jews. Within the party, Tamar was active in the Association of Democratic Teachers, an Arab-Jewish organization within the National Teachers Union. Of her experience with the Communist party, Tamar recalled that she hated the discipline, but that the episode gave her a “rare and practically nonexistent opportunity in Israel to meet the Arabs as equals. (They did not call themselves Palestinians at the time.) My contacts with the Arabs went beyond the party. We worked together, visited each other, and friendships developed on a personal basis some of which have survived until the present.” After Tamar quit the party, she joined a loosely organized movement, the New Israeli Left (SIAH), whose main focus was on the Palestinian issue. That was her last organizational involvement; later, she became what she describes as a “free lance leftist.”
The same year that Tamar married Eli, he was thrown out of the kibbutz (agricultural collective), of which he was a founding member, as a consequence of his political views. Eli took a party job but was so poorly paid that Tamar essentially became responsible for the financial well-being of the family. “I had to take a job, any job.” Eli died in 1965, and for a short time, Tamar truly had full responsibility for their two children.
In 1966, Tamar married the Czech film critic, Joseph Sryck, and had a daughter, Aya, in 1967. In 1970, she again entered a psychology program (psychohistory) at Tel Aviv University where she earned high honors and a scholarship. However, after three years of intense study and reading and just as she was preparing to begin writing her dissertation, differing theoretical and intellectual perspectives between Tamar and her major professor left her without a dissertation sponsor and as a result, without the much-desired doctoral degree.
Tamar’s first full-time position, in the early 1950s, was teaching mentally retarded children; in addition, she began teaching psychology at night at a teachers training college. Some years later this college became an important institution for the study of art—the State Art Teachers Training College—and Tamar became a full-time teacher there. The school was very humanistic and liberal, and Tamar found the work rewarding. In 1975, she was appointed vice headmaster and remained in the position until 1983, when she chose early retirement. During her tenure at the college, Tamar was active in sponsoring, organizing, and encouraging political events—lectures, demonstrations, exhibitions—many with emphasis on the Palestinians. Between 1979 and 1983, Tamar both worked at the Teachers College and studied psychohistory at Tel Aviv University. Joseph, her second husband, died in 1982.
In 1979, Tamar entered law school at Tel Aviv University and passed the bar examination in February, 1986, at the age of 60. She did her practicum with Avigdor Feldman, a highly respected Israeli lawyer dedicated to human rights. When Tamar received her attorney’s license, she practiced for a short time in her own office representing Bedouins, leftist demonstrators, workers, and other similarly disenfranchised persons. While these were, for the most part, very important civil and human rights cases, the work did not provide an adequate living. Subsequently, in October, 1987, Tamar joined the staff of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). The Intifada (Palestinian uprising) erupted two months later, and she became exclusively absorbed in defending Palestinian human rights, even though this was not ACRI’s principal focus. As a salaried employee for ACRI, her services to the Palestinians were always without charge.
Achievements and Contributions
Consider the obstacles faced by an attorney defending Palestinians under Israeli occupation, an occupation where military commanders legislate Military Orders (MOs) to suit any situation they come up against (there are more than 1,000 such MOs), where they have the right to change any law that they feel contradicts “security,” and where, in practice, there is virtually no rule of law. What can one realistically accomplish in the practice of human rights law in such a situation? According to Tamar Pelleg-Sryck,
Legal practice is needed because you do improve the lot of these individuals. How much so is for them to judge. But if you can get a permit for a sick child to go to a hospital or if you can shorten the length of administrative detention, I think this not only justifies but obliges you to practice law. Law is never a way to improve society but it can certainly make individuals less miserable.
Pelleg-Sryck has been basically a “field lawyer,” working primarily in the Gaza Strip and at Ketziot prison (in Israel’s southern Negev), but also in other prisons and in other places in the West Bank. For the most part, her work has not been in the formal courtroom setting except for those occasions when she has filed petitions in the military courts for releases on bail and appealed administrative detentions and deportations. Because of the intensity of her fieldwork, Pelleg-Sryck rarely appeared before the Israeli High Court of Justice, preferring to leave such appeals to her colleagues at ACRI.
Pelleg-Sryck opted to be where things were “happening”—torture, deportations, arrests, shootings, house searches, and house demolitions. She felt that it was important “to see with my own eyes the jails, the jailed, and the jailers; to meet the beaten and the shot; to bear witness to the haughtiness and brutality of the occupier and to the humiliation and suffering of the occupied; to see and listen and to have the immediate knowledge of the effects of the occupation.” As a result of her constant presence in the field, individual cases gave birth to projects that were part of her larger struggle against specific human rights violations.
While working for and out of ACRI, Pelleg-Sryck initiated a variety of interventions to help her clients that have enlarged the scope of ACRI’s activity. For example, ACRI policy had been to take only test cases to court. Thus, if there were 15 cases of men denied a lawyer, ACRI took only one and tried to get a favorable ruling. But even when they succeeded in obtaining a positive outcome, it would never be known by the Palestinians. Someone, specifically an Israeli, had to implement the ruling and had to make the Palestinians and most especially their lawyers, aware of it. The test case approach simply did not solve the unique problems in the Occupied Territories. As a consequence of Pelleg-Sryck’s wide-ranging fieldwork, ACRI expanded its conception of appropriate interventions in the Occupied Territories beyond the test case approach.
I think that my role in changing ACRI was in part due to the extent I got involved and was in such close touch with so many cases and so many Palestinian lawyers, and so many Palestinian organizations. It’s a question of being persistent, persistence of will, not intelligence. The situation is that after eight years of constant, relentless involvement, I have learned a lot and have become relatively effective. Of course, everything is relative!
Pelleg-Sryck’s primary focus has been on administrative detention (the practice of arresting and holding individuals in preventive detention without charge or trial), and on Ketziot prison (Ansar 3) in the Negev (southern Israel). Administrative detention allows the incarceration of thousands of individuals without any due process, and Ketziot was opened in March of 1988, explicitly to accommodate such prisoners. Although administrative detainees in the Occupied Territories are granted the right of appeal, the appeal is heard in camera by a military judge in the prison; there is no privilege of reviewing the evidence, and there are no witnesses. A General Security Services (GSS) representative brings the secret file of the appellant, but the contents remain hidden from the appellant and his lawyer. Most of the questions asked of the state by the appellant’s lawyer remain unanswered on grounds of “security.” According to Pelleg-Sryck, “These are very frustrating proceedings. And yet, quite a few terms of detention are reduced by the judge. Also, physically being there makes it possible to supervise the proceeding and to insist that the law, harsh as it is, be observed.”
During the Intifada, there could be as many as 3,000 prisoners at Ketziot at any given time. Pelleg-Sryck has represented over 200 administrative detainees a year. She has traveled once each week from her home in Tel Aviv to Ketziot to represent detainees at their appellate hearings, and to attend to the problems and regular complaints of her clients and the general prison population. While most of her work has centered on filing appeals for administrative detainees, additional problems often arise, such as the health of a person in prison, general problems relating to the conditions of incarceration, or the problems a released prisoner faces, for example, in the matter of his identification permit, his freedom of movement, or harm to his family. Pelleg-Sryck has consistently intervened on behalf of Palestinian prisoners on all these issues. “All of this [representation and intervention] does not change the system of administrative detention but it changes peoples’ fate. And I think I have made a difference here, by being there every week for eight years.”
At one point, ACRI doubted the necessity of continuing administrative detainee appeals, but Pelleg-Sryck persuaded the organization otherwise:
I need these representations for two reasons: (1) to supervise prison conditions. That’s how I get information. That’s how I know—how I can take care of human rights issues like health, torture, and prison conditions. (2) Also, with regard to the proceedings themselves, I may improve them by being there and constantly intervening and complaining in detail. Palestinian lawyers are, by definition, under occupation like everyone else and often, because of curfews and closures, they cannot reach the prison. In addition, they are treated as inferiors and without respect.
ACRI relented, and Pelleg-Sryck continued her work at Ketziot.
Pelleg-Sryck has been very involved in the issue of prison conditions for the administrative detainees. She has written extensive reports on the deplorable conditions and distributed them widely.
This [Ketziot] is a prison in which people live in tents, sleeping on a narrow, thin piece of mattress, close to the ground, and around the tent are more and more tents, and beyond them is a paved plot with no greenery and that’s all. There are no tables and no chairs. Each tent has between 24 and 28 people so that the bunks are very close together. This past winter was very severe and cold. People didn’t sleep nights as there were no heaters. Tents leaked, tents were inundated, conditions were very difficult. In winter there is also the problem of light. Because of the cold, it’s necessary to shut the tent, and then it’s dark inside. It is almost impossible to function under such circumstances. People aren’t able to sit and read or write. The prisoners have no transistors, they have no radio. They do not have easy access to books. Getting a book into Ketziot is like crossing the Red Sea. Newspapers arrive after a long intentional delay; letters arrive after a long delay and after being censored; and basically the food is inedible.
After observing these conditions, Pelleg-Sryck stated:
It was my responsibility to follow through. In the beginning, I was so shocked that I had to get it out of my system and so I wrote many reports and mailed them to as many people as possible including government and military officials. Some were published in the Hebrew press. I believe that if I had not been there, if I had not published things, the situation would have been much worse. Also, the deprivations were so severe, so extreme, perhaps my work speeded up somewhat the improvements, maybe it was more than that. You never know, you really never know. But I feel in my heart that I made a difference—judging by concrete changes and by the way the administrative detainees and also the establishment treated me.
Pelleg-Sryck also worked on the issue of deportations, representing three groups of deportees from Gaza before the Appeal Committees. Additionally, she has been involved and concerned over the matter of torture.
Raji Sourani, a Palestinian lawyer who later became the director of the Gaza Center for Rights and Law, and I started a project on torture. We began interviewing people recently incarcerated who had been subjected to interrogation. I did this in close cooperation with many Palestinian lawyers and other Palestinian individuals and organizations. But with the Gaza Center it was more than cooperation; it was genuine teamwork. That’s one of the differences between me and other lawyers who work at ACRI—my receiving information and being approached by Palestinian lawyers, individuals and organizations. We were mutually dependent and complimented one another. None of us working alone could have achieved the results we did by working together.
Indeed, Pelleg-Sryck’s collaboration with Palestinians has been a highly significant strategy to her work. Because of the estrangement between Israelis and Palestinians, it is very unusual for an Israeli to ask a Palestinian for assistance in helping another Palestinian. But for Pelleg-Sryck, “It never occurred to me to treat Palestinian lawyers as less than equal. As a matter of course, on certain issues they know more than I do. I never think of them as ‘them’ and I believe the joint work that I have done with Palestinian lawyers—the common front we’ve sometimes been able to face the authorities with—has enhanced the outcome of several cases.” Because of her willingness to work with Palestinian legal counsels, she has managed to enhance the access that the Palestinian lawyers have to their clients. “In one particular case, a miracle happened. The Palestinian lawyer and I spent four hours with the prisoners. It was without precedent—so far from what a Palestinian lawyer could do alone, not because he is incompetent, but because as an Israeli I can approach and am tolerated by the authorities in a different manner. Of course, it does not always work for me either.”
Consider the following example that illustrates Pelleg-Sryck’s point about the innovations that come from cooperation. A 22-year-old man who had just finished his studies in Jordan had returned home and was ordered to present himself to the Civil Administration. Twenty-fours hours later he died in Tulkarim (in the West Bank) prison. Pelleg-Sryck heard of the death from a lecturer at a local university who took her, a fieldworker from the Palestine Human Rights International Center (PHRIC), and a lawyer from Al Haq (Law in the Service of Man, the West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists) to the village where the young man had lived. Together, they began an investigation of his death.
I had reliable information from a confidential source who trusts me. I wrote the initial report and the formal complaint in such a way that no one would ever know my source. PHRIC took care of the forensic pathology, arranging to have the body taken to the Israeli Forensic Pathologic Institute. Everyone did what he/she could without a formal organization. We all met with the pathologist following the examination and then PHRIC organized a press conference. The night before, we had a meeting on how to present the case publicly. I tried to set the tone in a factual, objective, nondefensive manner. We never received any real answer to our complaint but I assume from general reports about subsequent incidents of deaths under interrogation, that our work had an impact.
Pelleg-Sryck has continued monitoring and writing reports about maltreatment and torture, disclosing the General Security Services (GSS) methods of interrogation. For instance, some of the methods include keeping detainees for long periods in a “cupboard,” a tiny, suffocating, stinking, closed space; denying sleep; playing unbearably loud music to which detainees are exposed for days and nights on end; and putting detainees in “frigidaires” where they are held for extensive periods in extremely low temperatures, being allowed to wear only a cotton overall. Pelleg-Sryck takes affidavits from the prisoners who have been subjected to these conditions, and in turn they have been included in the torture reports of Bet Ts’elem, an Israeli human rights organization.
Pelleg-Sryck has also provided data and information on torture and other human rights abuses to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch/Middle East Watch, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the Israeli press, the foreign press, Cable News Network, and other fact-finding commissions coming from abroad. Regrettably and with no justification, some organizations are much more likely to believe an Israeli than a Palestinian source, and thus, Pelleg-Sryck’s efforts in this regard have been very important. She has also written numerous articles for the Hebrew press.
The policy of destroying houses with mortars, rockets, grenades, and machine guns, initiated in the summer of 1992, gave rise to multiple human rights violations. (The Israeli authorities allege that there were wanted people inside and destroying the houses facilititates their capture.) For Pelleg-Sryck, the experience was unforgettable.
When I saw it for the first time, it was one of the worst experiences of my life—11 houses in Khan Yunis. Usually when I write letters to the authorities, I do so politely and without agitation and it usually works very well. This time, I just couldn’t. I didn’t know it was official policy. I wrote a letter demanding to investigate, to charge people, and to punish those who planned the operation, carried out the attack, everyone involved. I wrote details—how many windows, how many this, how many that…. Maybe this is my invention, to write, to complain, in such detail that even the GSS say I am a credible person; it has come back to me that my complaints are credible. When you are in a minority position you must bring facts. And here I am in a terrible position, I represent the enemy. And the enemy lies (by definition, in the view of the Occupation Authorities), so I have to prove my credibility. Thus, I sent extremely detailed letters to everybody—the Judge Advocate or Attorney General of the Army, to everyone.
Actually, Pelleg-Sryck’s practice of writing reports and complaints to the authorities has been quite important. Israelis and the Israeli authorities like to present a positive face to the outside world; thus, the constant complaints and reports had some effect. The officials could not ignore facts and continually feign ignorance. Quite often, they would attempt to do something, to change practices, within the limits of their power. This is how the rule of law—the Military Law of the occupation—could be sporadically enforced.
Pelleg-Sryck believes that style is always important in dealing with the authorities. “I remember the first time I wanted to visit the prison in Gaza (Ansar 2), they tried to fool me. I got from the authority, ‘He’s not there, he’s there,’ … all those tricks. When I went to the prison there was another order that forbade me from meeting with other lawyers—everything they do to every Palestinian lawyer and to inexperienced Israeli lawyers.” But her persistence and experience have paid off. “They won’t do it to me now; they cannot fool me. But, after so many experiences I know that with some prison authorities, I can be humorous, polite, even friendly. One develops a style of work. And it should perhaps be mentioned that Israelis perceive Israelis as Israelis—we are one, we are together.” Pelleg-Sryck has even managed to earn the respect of those who imprison her clients. “A year ago I received a Rosh Ha’shannah (New Year’s) greeting from the commander of Ketziot and he wrote: ‘I learned to know you and I wish you to continue with your humanistic work.’ This kind of relationship makes all kinds of things possible.”
Pelleg-Sryck received a prestigious award in December, 1991, from the New York-based Human Rights Watch for her legal work in human rights. Together with 15 other human rights monitors from around the world, she was invited to New York and Washington, where she met with officials from the State Department, Congress, and the media to discuss the human rights situation in the Occupied Territories.
On a different, but equally important level, a Muslim Arab from Gaza, who spent years in prison and was very active in resisting the Israeli occupation, named his only daughter Tamar, a distinctly Hebrew name. When I asked him why, he replied that he wanted to honor in some way Tamar Pelleg who had helped him greatly and whose work on behalf of the Palestinians was unparalleled.
Pelleg-Sryck’s work with the Palestinians began with the Intifada in 1987. At this writing, the political situation is very different, with a Palestinian “Authority” sitting in Gaza. This has meant something of a change in the demand for Israeli human rights lawyers. Nevertheless, as Pelleg-Sryck notes, “My phone keeps ringing and people keep asking for help. Lately, it has been mainly for the arrested, administratively detained, and imprisoned. There is a change in my work but so far I have no reason to fear unemployment. It is too early to analyze the new political situation and predict future developments.”