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

by Ahed Tamimi

There sits the Jewish Israeli settlement of Halamish, a gated community with neatly arranged red-tile-roofed homes, manicured lawns, playgrounds, and a swimming pool. 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. These settlements are essentially Jewish Israeli colonies, and they continue to multiply at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Zionism is a nationalist movement that began among some European Jews in the late nineteenth century. Its founders believed that the answer to mounting anti-Semitism in Europe was for Jews to settle in Palestine, which was still a territory of the Ottoman Empire at the time, populated by Arabs who were majority Muslim, with Christian and Jewish minorities, too.

By the time World War I was over, the British had taken control of Palestine from the Ottomans. Under their colonial rule in the years that followed, a period known as the British Mandate, they made good on their 1917 promise by facilitating the immigration of thousands more European Jews to Palestine. In doing so, the British gave away land that wasn’t theirs, with no regard for the indigenous-majority population living there: the Palestinians.

From 1936 to 1939, Palestinians waged a massive nationwide uprising against the British and their pro-Zionist policies. It was called the Arab Revolt,

Beginning in 1944, several armed Zionist groups comprised of European Jewish settlers launched violent attacks against the British, who by then were trying to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Zionists wanted the British gone and made it increasingly dangerous and costly for them to stay. By 1947, the British decided they had had enough and handed over the problem of Palestine to the United Nations.

The Holocaust resulted in hundreds of thousands of survivors, traumatized and imperiled, fleeing Europe—tens of thousands of them to Palestine.

In 1947, the United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state, with Jerusalem remaining under international control.

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.

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.

Palestinians painfully commemorate the events of 1948 as Al-Nakba, or “the Catastrophe.” That’s because, upon declaring its statehood, Israel unleashed its militias to force 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes and destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages.

the Arab countries that went to war with Israel in 1948 couldn’t defeat the newly established Zionist state, which had secured millions of dollars in aid from donors in the United States. Jordan managed to capture East Jerusalem and the West Bank (where Nabi Saleh is located), and Egypt took control of Gaza. But in the end, Israel had seized way more of Palestine than the United Nations’ partition plan ever gave it.

Today, generations of Palestinian refugees, more than seven million of them and their decendants, live across the globe. It’s the longest unresolved refugee crisis in the world.

Israel captured even more Palestinian land in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. After swiftly defeating neighboring Arab armies in a matter of days, Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and began a military occupation of these Palestinian territories that, to this day, has no end in sight.

Growing up under a foreign military occupation means living under the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence. It also means living with the total absence of freedom, which is the case for more than five million Palestinians in the occupied territories today. We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build our homes, to travel, to work—all the basic rights and freedoms you might take for granted living in a civil society simply don’t exist when you’re living under military occupation.

It refers to legalized segregation and discrimination whereby people living in the same territory are subject to different policies and protections by the state. Israeli apartheid is characterized by Jewish Israeli supremacy over the indigenous Palestinian population. Jewish Israelis, including the ones living in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, all enjoy full democratic rights and the privileges of citizenship. But as Palestinians in the occupied territories, we get none of that. While they’re governed by Israeli civil law, we’re ruled by Israeli military law. 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.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel saw the birth of a Jewish settler movement made up of religious-nationalist zealots who claimed that the West Bank was their God-given land dating back to ancient biblical times.

“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.

We cursed these so-called peace talks because they served only to legitimize Israel’s theft of our land and oppression of our people. Every Palestinian knows that there can never be peace in the absence of justice—so this false concept of “peace” wasn’t just elusive; it was farcical.

By 2008, they had built an additional fence around the settlement that took in even more of our land. Palestinian farmers were cut off from their crops and grazing pastures, jeopardizing their livelihoods. Although the Israeli government protects the settlers and treats the land they steal as if it were part of Israel, this time an Israeli court actually ordered the fence to be taken down. It was, but the courts did nothing more to stop the settlers of Halamish. Undeterred, they took our precious Ayn Al Qaws spring and built a pool to collect the springwater. They added a shading structure, benches, and a swing set. 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.

They had critically examined Palestine’s history and determined that there were two distinct moments when the people were able to mobilize everyone to work toward a common goal and unite in a grassroots national movement. The first was in 1936, during the Arab general strike under the British Mandate, which had been ruling Palestine for well over a decade by then. Palestinians launched a nationwide strike to protest many British policies—most notably, the policy of allowing unrestricted Jewish immigration from Europe into Palestine.

The strike lasted three years, but it failed in the face of the British Empire’s overwhelming military and political power. British forces ultimately killed hundreds of Palestinians during the protests.

The second incidence of proper mobilization took place during the first uprising against Israel, or the First Intifada, which broke out in 1987 after an Israeli military truck killed four Palestinian laborers in a refugee camp in Gaza. That was the spark that led to Palestinians everywhere exploding in protest against decades of Israel’s brutal occupation and ongoing colonization of Palestinian land.

The First Intifada officially ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, a peace agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian leadership (the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO) that was brokered by the United States. Oslo, as the agreement is called for short, saw Israel officially recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people in exchange for the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist. It was intended to lay the groundwork for a two-state solution. Instead, what resulted was Palestinians giving up more of their land and their rights and Israel conceding nothing. Oslo also created the Palestinian Authority, or PA, which was meant to serve as an interim governing body until a final status agreement could be reached—something that never happened. And so, the PA has instead functioned as a subcontractor for Israel, carrying out security coordination and taking on the responsibilities of administering the occupation, a heavy and expensive burden that international law says Israel should shoulder.

A Second Intifada erupted in September 2000, a few months before I was born. But unlike the first uprising, this one ultimately took an armed approach. The Second Intifada was sparked when Ariel Sharon, who would soon become Israel’s prime minister, stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem with a thousand heavily armed police officers. Al-Aqsa is the third-holiest site in Islam, and Sharon’s deliberately provocative move was meant to cement Israeli claims over all of Jerusalem at a moment when negotiations had been proposed to make part of Jerusalem the Palestinian capital.

What started out as peaceful protests morphed into an armed rebellion, characterized by suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians and soldiers.

In 2002, Israel began constructing a massive separation wall under the pretext of security. Palestinians call it the apartheid wall because it’s meant to separate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from Israel “proper,” but also from occupied East Jerusalem and from the Israeli settlements built inside the West Bank. The wall is several hundred miles long and, in some areas, made of imposing concrete slabs that stand over fifteen feet tall. If that’s not egregious enough, the majority of the wall was not built along Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 boundary, but rather on Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank. This means its path was deliberately planned to swallow up more of our land and cut right through our villages.

The residents there decided to organize against the construction of the wall and used their bodies to stop Israel’s bulldozers from uprooting their precious olive trees to clear the way. They were joined by Israeli and other international solidarity activists in weekly nonviolent demonstrations to block the wall from being built. The villagers adopted a strategy of nonviolence, but the Israeli army’s response was anything but. Soldiers regularly shot at the demonstrators with rubber bullets, tear gas, and even live ammunition. Many protesters were injured, beaten, and arrested. Eventually, though, the people of Budrus succeeded in forcing the Israeli government to reroute the wall away from their village. They managed to save their olive trees and almost all the land Israel had intended to annex. It was a significant victory. Other villages followed suit and also won.

Luckily, Nabi Saleh has always been exceptionally egalitarian gender-wise. Starting from when we’re children, boys and girls play together equally, with no discrimination between the sexes. We all learn the importance of cooperation at a young age. This certainly helped our cause, as women (including my mother and Amto Manal, my aunt) took on key organizing roles in the movement.

The problem has never been just the wall, or the uprooted olive trees, or the settlements, or even the confiscation of Ayn Al Qaws spring. These are all manifestations of the root problem, but not the root problem itself. The root problem is Israel’s colonial settler project, which seeks to control us, steal our land, and ethnically cleanse us from it. The problem is the occupation itself. And so, exposing the injustices of the occupation for the world to see was one of the most important goals of our movement.

We wanted to pursue this approach and ground it in the principles of human equality, justice, and inclusivity. To do that, my dad and the other leaders of our resistance movement knew they would need to foster a type of awareness in everyone in the village and in those who wished to join our cause. Revolution, they believed, required first and foremost a level of consciousness, not just strategies for fighting or protesting. They raised people’s consciousness through holding teach-ins and putting on cultural events. We planted olive trees on Israeli-confiscated land—such as the area around the spring—and we advocated boycotting Israeli products. We also discouraged Palestinians from working in Israeli settlements, where they often take jobs as laborers due to the lack of other employment opportunities. We were proud to boast that, ultimately, no one from Nabi Saleh worked in a settlement.

The main rule was that our grassroots resistance movement had to be unarmed. The aim was to struggle and resist without hurting or killing anyone.

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.

This was the first of many instances where I learned that courage can be contagious. It is both observed and transferred. I never saw my parents cower or crumble in the face of the Israeli military’s intimidation and abuse, and this taught me that I, too, could withstand anything.

But today’s apartheid system has all but ensured that we have no civil interaction with Jews. And so, it blew my mind to be meeting, for the first time ever, Jewish Israelis who had traveled to our village, in defiance of their own government’s policies, to stand in solidarity with us. They condemned the occupation with their words and their actions, and they fervently advocated in support of Palestinian rights. They weren’t simply allies in our struggle. Many of them, like Jonathan, Sarit, and Yifat, grew so close to us that my parents considered them some of their best friends. Jonathan Pollak, for example, is a well-known Israeli activist who became one of the pillars of our movement and a rock for our family.

Getting to know Jonathan and the other Israeli activists gave me tremendous hope, perhaps for the first time in my life. I began to think that if they could stand in solidarity with Palestinians and criticize their own state for the injustices inflicted upon us, perhaps, in time, other Israelis would as well.

Through them, I learned that our problem was not with the Jewish people but, rather, with Zionism. It’s not a religious problem, but a political one. Zionism is the ideology that says that historic Palestine must be a country for Jews only. Zionism is what led to the dispossession of our land, which continues to be seized and occupied. But more dangerous than that is how Zionism has occupied the minds and the humanity of far too many Israelis. That occupation is truly more frightening and intractable.

One of the many horrible consequences of the Oslo Accords is that it gave Israel full control of the water supply in the West Bank. At best, we get only about twelve hours of running water a week, compared to the twenty-four-hours-a-day supply of water (plus swimming pools) enjoyed by the settlers of Halamish, across the road.

The nighttime military raids were a particularly cruel and terrifying method of punishing us, and they took place hundreds of times. It would typically be past 1 a.m., with everyone fast asleep, when a unit of fully armed and sometimes masked soldiers banged on our doors and barged in without a warrant. They’d rummage through all our belongings as if they owned the place, turning the house upside down and breaking things in the process. Sometimes they even brought dogs with them. It was scary enough to be children witnessing everything we did in the daylight hours. But to then have our slumber interrupted by an invading army pointing their weapons at us while we were still half asleep was beyond traumatizing.

In fact, out of 739 complaints filed by the Israeli nonprofit human rights organization B’Tselem regarding the death, injury, or beating of Palestinians, only 25 resulted in the implicated soldier being charged. Expecting our oppressors somehow to deliver us justice was a fool’s errand. The outcome would always be consistent with what the Palestinian people had experienced for decades: Israel can murder us, displace us, ethnically cleanse us, and usurp our land and resources—all with impunity.

When speaking of the villages and cities stolen from us in 1948, most Palestinians will hardly ever refer to them as “Israel.” Instead they use ad-daakhil, which means “inside”; “the 1948 lands”; or, more simply, “1948” or just “ ’48.” It’s an affirmation of our continued claim to the land and a constant reminder of the tremendous losses we suffered just decades ago—a still-fresh wound.

One of the greatest pains to our existence as Palestinians is that despite living in such a geographically small area—historic Palestine is roughly the size of New Jersey—we’re cut off and isolated from one another. Palestinians from the West Bank, like my family, must remain only in the West Bank. 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. Those of us in the West Bank and Gaza are disconnected from one another and from our Palestinian brethren who live in occupied East Jerusalem and in the cities within ’48. The Palestinians of ’48, the ones who managed to stay in their villages despite the Nakba, now make up 20 percent of Israel’s population. But, thanks to Israel’s systemic discrimination and the institutionalized racism that defines Palestinians’ existence there, they live as second-class citizens. Most of us in these disparate territories cannot visit one another. This form of divide and conquer is imposed by Israel as yet another method to control us. As a result, we’re fragmented as a Palestinian nation and lack the social cohesion and unity needed to achieve self-determination and, ultimately, liberation.

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.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish quarters are home to some of the holiest sites of the three major Abrahamic faiths. There’s the Western Wall, sacred to the Jewish people; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians believe to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus; and the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Muhammad prayed with the souls of all the other prophets and ascended to heaven. Jerusalem is the third-holiest city in Islam and preceded Mecca as the first qibla, the direction toward which the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community faced to pray. Beyond that, the city is central to the Palestinian struggle and integral to the soul of every Palestinian, Muslim and Christian alike. It’s our eternal capital.

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.

As part of the Zionist state’s long-standing plan to claim the whole city as its undivided capital, Israel is undertaking a steady ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem’s Palestinians. This systematic attempt to demographically alter the makeup of Jerusalem by increasing its Jewish population plays out through the impossible set of conditions it imposes on Palestinians, which force many to leave or punish them if they stay. This includes revoking Palestinians’ residency permits, forcibly displacing them, banning the construction and expansion of homes to accommodate growing families, and demolishing homes to clear the way to build more illegal Jewish settlements. Israeli courts have even recently ruled that Jewish settlers can move into Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan and forcibly expel the Palestinian families that have been residing in them for generations.

Additionally, since 1948, the United Nations and most of the international community have refused to recognize any country’s sovereignty over any part of the city until a permanent peace agreement is reached. This was also the United States’ position until 2017, when the Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, an inflammatory move that had far-reaching repercussions for the Palestinian people, the region,

as Palestinians, simply by residing in our homes, we practice a form of resistance. That’s because the Israeli government is continually seeking to secure maximal land for Israel and its Jewish settlers with a minimal Palestinian population on it. This strategy plays out differently in the various territories. The fact that 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. These densely populated areas weren’t very big to start out with, and over time they’ve only gotten smaller. That’s why many Palestinians in predicaments like Waed’s resort to moving to another country: They simply can’t find anywhere in Palestine to live.

It breaks my heart to witness how the city believed to be Jesus’s birthplace has been strangled, cut off from its historical sister-city Jerusalem and isolated from the rest of the West Bank. And it enrages me to know that twenty-two illegal Israeli settlements have been built on the occupied Palestinian land belonging to Bethlehem. Now, only 13 percent of Bethlehem is available for Palestinian use.

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.

But the fact remains that Janna, just like the rest of us, should have been busy playing, not resisting. No seven-year-old should ever feel she has to shoulder the burden of documenting the human rights abuses taking place in her own backyard. We shouldn’t have to grow up seeing our parents arrested and fearing they could be shot or killed at any moment. Nor should we children be able to know instinctively whether the blasts outside our doors are from tear gas, sound grenades, rubber bullets, or live ammunition. And yet, we all acquired this skill even before we hit puberty. For example, it didn’t take me long to stop flinching when soldiers fired something in close proximity to me. That’s how normalized the violence in our lives has become.