User:Prezbo/Sami Esmail

In 1978 Sami Esmail, an American citizen of Palestinian descent, was put on trial in Israel for membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Esmail, born in Brooklyn to Palestinian parents, was a 24-year-old Electrical Engineering graduate student at Michigan State University. He flew to Israel in December of 1977 to visit his dying father, who lived in Ramallah. Esmail was arrested on his arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport on December 21 and signed a confession after being imprisoned for six days.

Esmail and his supporters in the United States claimed that he had been tortured or mistreated, held without access to a lawyer, and coerced into signing a false confession. The case generated a great deal of interest in the US, especially in the Arab-American community and at Michigan State University. Monroe Freedman and Alan Dershowitz visited Israel to observe the trial and wrote a long editorial in The New York Times defending the Israeli government's conduct in the case and Israel's human rights record in general.

Esmail was represented at his trial by the well-known Israeli radical lawyer Felicia Langer. In June 1978 he was convicted of membership in a hostile organization and sentenced to 15 months in prison, of which he served 10. The case later resurfaced at a 1989 American extradition hearing, at which Esmail, Dershowitz, and Freedman all testified, and was mentioned in books by Dershowitz and his critic Norman Finkelstein.