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

by Ahed Tamimi

This was the first of many instances where I learned that courage can be contagious. It is both observed and transferred.

Through them, I learned that our problem was not with the Jewish people but, rather, with Zionism.

Jerusalem’s Old City feels like a portal to the past and, at the same time, an elusive glimpse at a possible future. It’s one in which Palestinian Muslims and Christians can once again peacefully coexist with our Jewish brothers and sisters in a single state.

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.

They also taught us that while it’s important to resist, we must never hate, because hatred will eat us up from inside. We resist to live because, ultimately, we truly love life.

We’d plant flowers in empty tear gas canisters. I’ve transformed bullets fired at us into necklace pendants,

Even though I was a child, I understood that my life had to be devoted to a cause greater than myself.

The camera was our weapon and our shield—the most powerful way we could educate the world about the barbarity of Israel’s occupation. So long as their immoral army continued firing its weapons at us, we’d continue aiming ours right back at them.