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

by Ahed Tamimi

It was reported that in 2015 and 2016, at least eighty-one youth in Dheisheh were injured by bullets in the limbs and about sixty of them suffered permanent disabilities. Most were shot in the legs and knees. In this way, the soldiers could ensure that their young victims would never be able to walk again, let alone throw stones in protest. The tactic was barbaric and cruel. Dheisheh’s residents were already struggling with high rates of poverty and unemployment. To have to deal with the costs of medical care to treat the injured was an unfair burden that only added to their hardships.

While I believe that it’s the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I’ve always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can’t serve the Palestinian cause if I’m dead.

Whereas South African apartheid was based on white supremacy and the colonial subjugation of other ethnic groups, with the Black African majority at the very bottom, Israeli apartheid is characterized by Jewish Israeli supremacy over the native Palestinian population. There’s even a similar hierarchy in our oppression. The ’48 Palestinians, for example, who are second-class citizens in Israel, have more rights and privileges than those of us living under military occupation and rule in the West Bank and Gaza, like my family. We have absolutely no political rights over the government that controls us, which is Israel’s. And just as Black people under South African apartheid weren’t allowed to vote for the government that controlled their lives, we don’t get to vote in Israel’s elections. Palestinian citizens of Israel do have voting rights, but they are subject to more than fifty discriminatory laws affecting everything from immigration and family reunification to land ownership rights, simply because they’re not Jewish.

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.

“Thank you for your tears,” I began. “But I don’t want your sadness. Nor do I want your money. Please save that for the people in your own country who need it. My people have dignity and don’t want your pity. We’re not the victims. The brainwashed Israeli soldier who carries his rifle and shoots with no humanity—he’s the real victim. We want you to see us as the freedom fighters we are, so that you can support us the right way.”

We had decades of proof that the United States would always favor Israel’s interests over ours. This much was evident in how America has repeatedly used its veto power at the United Nations to protect Israel from having to comply with various UN and human rights resolutions; in how it has turned a blind eye to Israel’s continued illegal settlement construction despite such construction’s being in violation of long-standing U.S. policy; and, perhaps most notably, in how it has demonstrated its unwavering support for Israel by consistently giving the country more military aid than it has ever provided to anyone else—a trend that shows no sign of ending anytime soon. 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.

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. This was a profound betrayal of Palestinians and a significant break from previous U.S. administrations, which had considered, yet put off, making such a bold move.

Some of the girls who served time with me had been arrested in the uprisings of 2015, accused of possessing knives and trying to carry out attacks against soldiers. But the overwhelming number of children are detained for participating in demonstrations and clashes, for creating social media posts Israel deems as incitement, or for “insulting the honor of a soldier.” Most of the time, they’re accused of throwing stones.

In defiance of Israel’s prison administration, which bans education for prisoners as a form of collective punishment, Khalida began to teach the various subjects that comprised the tawjihi exam, among them business administration, technology, geography, English, and history.

After hours of their fruitless interrogation, they threw me into a cell. Not long after, the same interrogator returned and opened the door to my cell. Again, he shook his head with disappointment and said, “Look at you sitting there in handcuffs.” As if I had forgotten the fact that I’d been shackled for hours. I started laughing. “Okay, I’m in handcuffs,” I said, lifting up my shackled hands to drive home the point. “But these aren’t important.” I went on while smirking. Then I slowly tapped the side of my head with one finger. “What’s important is my mind. Sure, you’ve locked me up in a cell, but don’t think that my mind isn’t working.”

After I hit the soldiers, I addressed the camera off the cuff, still frazzled by the ongoing tensions surrounding my home, saying, “I hope that everyone takes part in the protests, as that’s the only way we’ll achieve something, because our strength is in our stones. And I hope that everyone around the world unites so that we can free Palestine. Trump made this decision, and he needs to bear the consequences of any kind of Palestinian response to it, whether it’s stabbings, suicide attacks, or stone throwing. We have to do something, and we have to get our story out to the world so that we can achieve something. And, hopefully, that will be to free Palestine.”

Gaby provided examples of Israeli soldiers who had committed more serious offenses than I but who had been granted bail. And she criticized the fact that, as a Palestinian minor, I was subject to a completely different legal system from Israeli minors, including the settlers who lived in the West Bank. The military court system, she contended, was inherently discriminatory and denied Palestinians the same protections afforded to Israeli defendants. Israeli children, for example, got interviewed by a probation officer, who was required to seek out alternatives to detention. But like other Palestinian children, I had had no such interview. The denial of bail was just another example of the unfair double standards Israel applies to Palestinian versus Israeli children. Israel’s civil courts deny bail to Israeli children in only 18 percent of cases. But in cases involving Palestinian children, the military courts deny bail 70 percent of the time.

the Great March of Return in Gaza, a series of demonstrations that had begun while we were attending our classes. Beginning on March 30, 2018, which Palestinians commemorate as Land Day, the besieged people of Gaza had protested weekly along the fence separating them from Israel. They were demanding an end to Israel’s crippling air, land, and sea blockade, which had effectively trapped them for over a decade inside the world’s largest open-air prison. And they were demanding the right to return to their homes, which Zionist militias had forcibly removed them from to clear the way for Israel’s creation in 1948. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population are, in fact, refugees. Israel’s response to these demonstrations was deadly. Each week, Israeli snipers opened fire on the protesters, ultimately killing hundreds and wounding thousands over the course of the year-long protests. The scenes of bloodied protesters, journalists, and medics were shocking and heart-wrenching. In our classes, we had learned that, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, it was illegal for Israel to target unarmed civilians like this, and that, in so doing, it may have been committing a war crime.

In fact, in March 2018, the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the interior minister to revoke the residency rights of any Palestinian in Jerusalem on the basis of a “breach of loyalty” to Israel. This was merely one of Israel’s many calculated policies and part of a decades-long plan to maintain a solid Jewish majority in the city.

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

She wrote about the apartheid wall, which, in a nonbinding decision, the International Court of Justice had declared illegal in 2004. We all knew firsthand that the wall cut right through Palestinian towns and villages, dividing communities and separating many farmers from their land. Israel contends that the wall is needed for security, to prevent attacks, but it didn’t construct the wall along the pre-1967 Green Line, which is recognized as the boundary between Israel and the West Bank. Rather, the wall was built deep within the West Bank, enabling Israel to annex even more Palestinian land.

And as we followed the news, we learned that the Israeli government was debating the controversial and racist “Basic” or Nation-State Law, which it ended up passing in July 2018. The law declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as the official language of the country, with Arabic downgraded to “special status.” Finally, the law mandates that the state regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israeli apartheid was now more official than ever.

I also learned more about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that the imprisonment of children must be used only “as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time,” as Gaby cited in my trial. Despite ratifying that convention in 1991 as well, Israel routinely arrests and detains Palestinian children. 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.

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.”

The question that everyone in the course inevitably always came back to was: Why was the international community letting Israel get away with it?

At the same time, as Palestinians, we have to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that our problems won’t be instantly resolved once we end the occupation. That’s why we have to tie our national struggle for liberation to our societal struggle for equality. We must ensure that when we finally do achieve liberation, we’re not left with a society that’s full of corruption and inequity. It’s imperative that we fight for women’s rights, to ensure that we have full equality between women and men. We need to get rid of traditional mentalities that judge girls and women through the lens of shame. We also need to fight for better employment opportunities for our youth and find ways to get them involved in the political process. Why should those holding political office be predominantly old men? They’ve consistently proven themselves incapable and irrelevant. It’s time they stepped aside and handed over the reins to a new generation of Palestinian leaders.

For Palestinians living under occupation, traveling is yet another area in which Israel exercises control over us, and it is just about as difficult as everything else in our lives. We’re not allowed to fly out of the nearby Tel Aviv airport and, instead, are forced to travel from Palestine to Jordan by land, through the Allenby Bridge border crossing. The process is anything but simple and efficient. Though you’re traveling only a very short distance geographically, it’s nonetheless a tiresome multi-hour journey, one that requires being processed by the Palestinian Authority; followed by Israeli authorities, who have the ultimate say over whether you can exit and enter; and then followed by Jordanian authorities. Each part of this epic border saga requires getting on a bus, riding, getting out, putting your suitcase through a metal detector, waiting, getting your identity documents stamped, and then getting on to the next bus with your suitcase. The Israeli side of the Allenby Bridge border crossing is always the most difficult. That’s where uniformed soldiers decide whether Palestinian travelers will be able to cross. In most cases, travelers won’t know if they’ll be able to cross until they get there. If Israel has them placed under a ban, they find out only then.

The rise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was another huge factor behind the internationalization of the Palestinian cause. The BDS movement, which was inspired by South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, was formally launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian grassroots and civil society groups. The aim is to put political and economic pressure on Israel to respect Palestinian rights and comply with international law. The three goals of the BDS movement are to end Israel’s military rule over the Palestinian land it occupied in 1967, full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were driven out of their homes in 1948. Over recent years, the movement has gained momentum internationally and seen some significant victories, like college campuses divesting their endowments of Israeli companies, corporations ending their business dealings with the illegal settlements, and prominent public figures pulling out of events taking place in Israel. This has been one of Israel’s worst fears, so much so that the state launched a vigorous campaign to criminalize BDS through legislation. Its top ally, the United States, has also attacked and criminalized the movement. Since 2014, state and local legislatures and even the U.S. Congress have enacted more than one hundred measures penalizing groups and businesses that boycott Israel. Thirty-two U.S. states have passed anti-boycott laws—this in a country that claims to upho...

But Zionism is a political ideology that says Judaism is not only a religion, but primarily a nationality—and that it needs a country. Not just any country, but our country, and that it needs this country to be for Jews alone. 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. We know that Jews suffered terrible, unimaginable crimes at the hands of the Nazis, and all of humanity should stand against such murderous hatred and make sure it’s never repeated. But how does that give Zionists the right to push us off our own land to make a country for Jews alone? 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. That’s just wrong.

I also believe that in order for the Palestinians to achieve anything meaningful, we first need national unity and strong leadership that actually inspires and mobilizes the people. We currently have neither. I fault all the Palestinian political parties for this, and I don’t pledge allegiance to any of them, despite the respect I have for the roles they’ve historically played in advancing the Palestinian cause. In more recent times, though, Palestinian parties and leaders have caused us to take ten steps backward instead of one single, meaningful step forward. Too many of our leaders have prioritized their personal interests, whether financial or ego-driven, ahead of the collective interests of the nation. They insist on pursuing a doomed two-state solution that’s long been championed by the United States and that consistently puts Israel’s interests above ours, when the majority of our people now reject it. It kills me to see those leaders cling to power when there’s a generation of bright young Palestinians with fresh ideas and charismatic personalities who could steer the course and advance our cause. So long as we remain without real leadership or unity, we will never be free.

Every day, as I pray for God to free us from the occupation and grant us a future that’s safe and prosperous, I also pray for these eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds serving in the army to find their humanity and see the wrongs they’re committing, against not just Palestinians, but also themselves. I pray that, just once, they honestly question what they’re doing, that they think critically about why they’re forced to serve in a military that attacks and kills Palestinians who are simply trying to live on their own land. And while they’re at it, I also wish they’d ask us why we as Palestinians are resisting as we are. I want them to educate themselves honestly about the true history of this land and try to hear a Palestinian’s perspective and experience. I’m hopeful that if they sat down with a Palestinian and listened with an open mind, they’d understand how they’ve become complicit in our oppression and would think twice about continuing to do so.

At the same time, Israel was receiving global praise for leading the world in vaccinating its population, including settlers like the ones living across the road from our village. But not us. Despite its international obligations as an occupying power, Israel did not initially provide vaccines to the millions of Palestinians living under its occupation, a grotesque display of medical apartheid, and something that only added to my mounting frustration.

In April 2021, Human Rights Watch released an extensive report that concluded that Israel was committing crimes against humanity, including apartheid. The organization pointed to Israel’s overarching government policy of maintaining domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and the grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Amnesty International came to a similar conclusion about apartheid in a report it released in February 2022.