A yellowing, framed newspaper article on fortune teller Sana Kuma hangs in her Jaffa waiting room.

We are sitting in a cramped white room across from the witch with the lemon yellow dyed hair who is drinking a Red Bull knock-off and fidgeting in her chair.

She narrows her eyes and looks at me: "Right now I see something in your eyes: You have been close to death. Twice, you have been close to death."

I've been closer to death more times than that, I think to myself without saying a word or betraying my skepticism.

We have come to meet Sana Kuma, fortune teller to the Israeli stars, the 40something Arab-Israeli soothsayer who looks into the future for beauty queens, models, TV stars and scores of Israelis searching for meaning in their lives.

We have come to see Sana because she is one of the few people to be charged with witchcraft under an archiac Israeli law.

Sana is best known for reading coffee grounds, an art known to its practitioners as tasseography, a term that suggests that there is more to it than looking for meaning in small ceramic cups.

Sana doesn't put on the airs of a Hollywood witch. There is no ethereal music playing in the waiting room; American Motown is coming from the stereo speakers as pensive customers hold small coffee cups and wait their turn.

There is no incense burning. No beaded curtains to pass through. No crystal ball.

Sana does her readings while sitting cross-legged on a large cushion set on top of her leather swivel office chair that is pressed between the white wall behind her and the small IKEA style prefab wood desk in front of her.

"I see that you are troubled by a woman," Sana tells my Palestinian colleague, a fact which is true, but which could no doubt apply to virtually any man walking the earth.

I'm not one to discount the mysterious and mystical. I'm walking in with an open mind. Sana has a cult Israeli following. Her clients include Israeli model Miri Bohadana and Israeli TV host Dan Shilon.

While we are sitting there, a former Miss Israel, Nicole Halperin, stops by with a friend for a reading.

"She has special abilities," Halperin tells me after her reading. "She gives you ideas, names and events and when she gives you specific names and events it makes you know that she is special."

That's not what Israeli policeman Avraham Beihou thinks. Avraham went to Sana for advice on the eve of his marriage in 2004. Sana told him his wife-to-be was cursed. It took $1,000 and the help of a special "Jordanian sheik" to remove the bad juju.

Avraham then enlisted Sana to help his ailing father. But the amulets she told him to dip in honey, burn or throw into the sea didn't do any good. Neither did the $2,000 he paid Sana.

So Avraham got the Israeli government to charge Sana with fraud and illegal magic, charges that could have sent her to jail.

"She has no talents," Avraham said. "If you know how to read people you can talk like you know their horoscope or can read their future. Every person can figure out a person, but only a doctor can heal someone. She can't."

In her office/home south of Tel Aviv, Sana tells us that she has seen saints and dwarfs that no one else can see. She has been protected by a mystical horse and carriage. She looks into my eyes again and sees more.

"You talk too much," she tells me. "You shouldn't be such a blabber-mouth. People stab you in the back."

It is then that I know that the policeman may be closer to the truth than the former Miss Israel. I doubt that you could find one person who knows me that would describe me as a blabber-mouth.

Most people would tell you that I don't talk enough. People might stab me in the back, but find someone in the world who wouldn't claim to have been betrayed at some point in their life.

Even if Sana can't see the future, Israel has to do more to convict her of illegally practicing magic. The government must show that Sana is a fraud, that she knows she isn't a sage and that she is deliberately misleading people for money.

That is a high hurdle for the government, so prosecutors decided to drop the charges after Sana agreed to return all the money to Avraham. Still, the policeman says it's not enough and is planning to sue Sana in civil court.

With Israeli entertainment agents still bringing her customers and normal Israelis showing up for advice, Sana takes it all in stride. She urges my colleague to return so she can help him with his problems, something I am certain he will never do.

"Life is enemies and friends," she says with a shrug before we leave. "I have to accept the good and the bad."