They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom

by Ahed Tamimi

There I am, a five-year-old, sobbing in the middle of the night because Israeli soldiers have once again barged into our house to arrest my father. I see my mother falling on the concrete road after being shot by a soldier in a jeep; my younger brother pinned to the ground by another soldier, who is squeezing his little neck in a chokehold; my favorite uncle bleeding to death on the rocks behind our home.

But Halamish wasn’t always there. It was illegally established on our village’s land in 1977. It’s one of hundreds of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in violation of international law.

The partition plan gave 55 percent of the land of historic Palestine to the Jewish state and only 42 percent to the Palestinian Arab state. But Palestinians at the time made up 67 percent of the population and owned the vast majority of the land, while Jews made up 37 percent of the population and owned only 7 percent of the land.

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.

Expecting our oppressors somehow to deliver us justice was a fool’s errand.

It always is

The 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave that Israel has blockaded by air, land, and sea since 2007, are literally trapped there, in what’s called the world’s largest open-air prison.

Even more infuriating is knowing that practically any Jewish person in the world can immigrate to Israel and get citizenship, even if they had never previously stepped foot in the country. And that so many tourists from around the world can easily see more of your country than you’ll ever be able to, despite the fact that you’re indigenous to it.

Of course our parents worry about us, but they raised us to be strong and not to cower in the face of oppression. They also taught us that while it’s important to resist, we must never hate, because hatred will eat us up from inside.

Sometimes, within just minutes of our demonstration starting, the soldiers would open fire on us without any warning. They also began deploying snipers, who fired live .22-caliber ammunition at protesters, aiming for their legs. We all knew they were aiming for a particular nerve in the lower leg that can leave a victim paralyzed. This wasn’t just happening in Nabi Saleh, but across other cities in Palestine, too.

They called me “Shirley Temper,” a name originally given to me by an Israeli right-wing blogger. On social media, some Israelis called me a terrorist and incited others to find and kill me.

Unless you’ve experienced a foreign army occupying your land, imprisoning your parents, killing your loved ones, and shooting you and virtually everyone you’re related to, you’ll have a hard time understanding the rage with which I was overcome—seeing the entitlement of these soldiers as they walked around our property like they owned it.

One of the more surprising things I learned is that as a population living under occupation, we are granted by international law the legal right to resist through armed struggle. It’s protected under the Geneva Conventions, reaffirmed in a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution. The resolution reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

Zionism has taken our country, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims have lived for centuries, and made it a country that is ruled by and for Jews alone. Zionists’ ideology claims that they have the right to take other people’s land, to push them out. And I can’t accept this. No Palestinian can accept this. No human should accept this. It’s not racist to say this—it’s the opposite. We need a country where Jews and Christians and Muslims can live together as equals, with the same human rights and democracy. Zionism rejects this vision, demanding that all of Palestine be a “Jewish” state. And some Western countries sympathize with this because of the Holocaust.