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

by Ahed Tamimi

Similarly, to control our movement as Palestinians in the occupied territories, Israel imposes color-coded identification cards and license plates, has installed an elaborate permit and checkpoint system, and has designated specific roads we’re allowed to drive on—not to mention that Israel erected an apartheid wall. Israel’s continuous annexation and expropriation of our land has divided and fragmented the little that remains of Palestinian territory. What’s left resembles South Africa’s Bantustans, the pockets of land onto which Black farmers were forced as their own property was taken from them—land dispossession that coerced them into serving as cheap labor for white-owned mines, farms, and factories. The South African regime later gave these territories fake “independence,” claiming that all Black people were “citizens” of these fake “countries,” as a way of justifying denying democratic rights to the Black majority.