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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ahed Tamimi
Read between
August 27 - October 2, 2024
Getting arrested by the Israeli army was always a matter of when, not if.
Israel declared its statehood on May 14, 1948, but not on empty, uninhabited land. The state was established on the land of my grandparents: historic Palestine. European Jews created a state on territory where the majority of residents were the indigenous Palestinian population. And in order to achieve this state in which they would be the majority, the Zionists had to violently evict the Palestinian majority. Even today, many Zionist thinkers freely admit that without the ethnic cleansing of 1948, they would not have had their Jewish state.
There’s even a color-coded identification system to help facilitate this apartheid. We’re forced to carry green identification cards at all times, which dictate the limited possibilities of our lives. The white license plates that Israel assigns to our cars stipulate which roads we’re allowed to drive on.
“administrative detention.” Israel uses this designation to imprison Palestinians for up to six months without having to charge them or give them a trial. After six months, the state can renew the detention through a military administrative order. Some Palestinians end up serving years under administrative detention without ever knowing why they’re being held.
They put up signs around the area that read Meir Spring, renaming our centuries-old water source after one of their settlement’s founders. And they could do this all because they were protected at every step by the Israeli military—after all, the Israeli military, the settlers, the courts, and the government are all part of the same system.
"we are not our government" bullshit you genocidal maniacs
A stone, for us, is a symbol. It represents our rejection of the enemy who has come to attack us. To practice nonviolence doesn’t mean we’ll lie down and surrender to our fate submissively. We still have an active role to play in defending our land. Stones help us act as if we’re not victims but freedom fighters. This mindset helps motivate us in the fight to reclaim our rights, dignity, and land.
You see it in the armed Israeli soldiers patrolling the Old City, bumping into you with assault rifles flung across their chests. You see it in the young Palestinian men who are routinely stopped by soldiers and forced to endure humiliating body searches simply because they’re Palestinian. You see it in the giant Israeli flags that hang from the balconies of homes that once belonged to Palestinians.
thanks to the ill-fated Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three noncontiguous areas: A, B, and C. Area A, which today constitutes 18 percent of the West Bank, falls under the control of the Palestinian Authority. That means the PA is in charge of education, health, the economy, and policing there. In Area B, which constitutes 22 percent of the West Bank, the PA is similarly in charge of civil affairs, but its police presence exists only in coordination with the Israeli army. In both Areas A and B, the Israeli army can enter whenever it wants to carry out raids and arrests, and it
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Any construction in Area C, whether by Palestinians or Jewish settlers, requires an application process with the Israeli Civil Administration, but virtually all Palestinian applications for building permits are rejected. This means that Palestinian families aren’t allowed to legally expand the homes they’ve been living in for decades to make room for their growing families.
our West Bank home falls within Area C means we can lose it at any time. It also means that when Waed is married one day, he won’t be able to build a home for his new family next to ours. He’ll have to find somewhere in Areas A or B to live.
The endless limitations Israel imposes on us are not just about controlling the present, but about robbing us of dreaming and planning our futures. Confined to the segmented and constantly threatened patch of Palestinian land where we were born, we’re denied the right to choose where to live, work, or study.
At a very young age, most of us learned the hard way that we weren’t any safer inside our homes than we were out on the marches.
“Are we just going to wait for Saladin to come liberate us again, just as he liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders? Why not create a Saladin among ourselves, as a Palestinian society?”
in 2012, when he gave an interview to an Israeli news channel. When asked if he wanted to live in Safed, the village of his birth, which was taken over by Israel in 1948, he replied, “It’s my right to see it, but not to live there…Palestine now for me is the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” With that answer, Abbas betrayed every Palestinian, especially the refugees who hold sacred their right of return.
Before leaving office, President Barack Obama signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel that included a record $38 billion to provide the country with military assistance over a ten-year period. It guaranteed a steady flow of American-funded and -manufactured weapons—which Israel uses, among other applications, to kill us.
With people like Friedman and Kushner guiding Trump, instead of getting an inch closer to peace, we were dealt repeated blows. For example, the Trump administration cruelly cut virtually all humanitarian aid to Palestinians, including funding for Palestinian hospitals and for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, to which the United States was the largest donor. UNRWA was set up after Israel’s creation in 1948 to help Palestinian refugees and had served as a lifeline to millions of Palestinians ever since.
But the true moment of reckoning came on December 6, 2017, when Trump announced plans to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital.
All he was doing was throwing stones to resist the occupation oppressing him, and now he’d end up in jail for God knew how long. More stolen youth. Another life cut short.
the entire house was flooded with soldiers.
To kidnap a teenager? Lmfao these rats are so
They instructed me to sit still and stare straight ahead. I wasn’t allowed to lower my head or lean it back. I closed my eyes a few times, succumbing to my exhaustion, but each time I did, they’d shout at me and bang objects to startle me. “You’re not allowed to sleep! Wake up!” If I moved my feet, the shackles around my ankles would clank, and they’d yell at me to stop moving. So I had to sit locked in a frozen position. They gave me no food or water the entire time. They didn’t even allow me to use the bathroom.
He repeatedly grabbed my father’s chin and flipped his head back and forth with great force. He also shook Baba’s head left and right and twisted his neck around. My father said all the shaking and jolting was so painful that it felt as if his brain were rolling around loose in his head. He was ultimately shaken and beaten so badly that he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell into a coma for ten days. He woke up temporarily paralyzed, with thirty-six stitches in his head.
The Israelis often used physical force and harsh psychological tactics to break down Palestinian prisoners in order to get a confession and collect as much intelligence as possible that might implicate others. But it usually didn’t end there. Sometimes, once they see that the Palestinians’ spirits are destroyed and they are finally willing to talk, the interrogators will apply even more pressure, to get them to become collaborators—spies for Israel.
a female guard led me inside a small bathroom and told me to take off all my clothes, including my underwear. My face flushed with shame as her hands moved up and down my bare skin. I had never been physically violated like this before.
Anjir?? Buat apa coba???
Oftentimes, we’d stare out at the sea and cry together. We were pained by the unfairness of it all. The sea is so close, yet cruelly off-limits to us.
Corresponding through letters isn’t an option, either. Regular mail delivery is one of many luxuries Palestinians don’t have under occupation. Most of our houses and buildings aren’t numbered, which means incoming mail is usually sent to post offices. But that mail first must be processed, and likely inspected, by Israel, and there’s no guarantee if or when it will arrive to its intended recipient.
In fact, each year, between five hundred and seven hundred Palestinian children are tried in Israel’s military courts. The most common charge brought against them is stone throwing, which is punishable by up to twenty years in prison.
I told them that the efforts of the prison administration to kill my spirit had failed. The blow that doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.
Why should Palestinians compensate—lose our homeland, our property, our rights, even our lives—for the Holocaust committed by Europeans? We shouldn’t have to pay for the crimes of the Europeans against Jews.
