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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ahed Tamimi
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February 7 - February 7, 2024
I SIT SHIVERING IN the tiny, freezing cell of an Israeli interrogation center, my wrists and ankles sore from the tightly clasped shackles digging into them.
But Halamish wasn’t always there. It was illegally established on our village’s land in 1977.
Palestine. For the past century, the Palestinian people have been fighting Zionist efforts to take more and more of our land.
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.
during World War I, the Zionist movement secured significant help fro...
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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.
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.
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.
Zionists wanted the British gone and made it increasingly dangerous and costly for them to stay.
1947, the British decided they had had enough and handed over the problem of Palesti...
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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.
1948 as Al-Nakba, or “the Catastrophe.”
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.
Israel justifies controlling us and denying us our rights by claiming it’s about security.
One of the most egregious ways Israel carries this out is by imposing an apartheid regime. The word apartheid originated in South Africa in 1948 to describe a system of white-minority rule.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
main street at the entrance to the village. “Mama!” I cried in a frantic, high-pitched shriek as I searched for her, afraid I’d lose her forever. “Maaaaamaaaaaa!”
courtroom. “Be strong!” he said. “You’re strong, and we want you to remain that way! We love you, and we’re all very proud of you!”
it. I knew that, historically, Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted prior to Israel’s establishment, living side-by-side as neighbors and friends.
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.
Were you around in 1948, during the Nakba? What was your experience like? What was life like when you were my age? Are there any martyrs or prisoners in your family? What did you do during the First Intifada? How did you confront the occupation?
THE DEATH OF MY uncle was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I CONTINUED TO BE alarmed by the new levels of ruthlessness Israel’s army exercised against us.
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.
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.
Nothing pleases me the traveler on the bus says—Not the radio or the morning newspaper, nor the citadels on the hills. I want to cry / The driver says: Wait until you get to the station, then cry alone all you want / A woman says: Me too. Nothing pleases me. I guided my son to my grave, he liked it and slept there, without saying goodbye / A college student says: Nor does anything please me. I studied archaeology but didn’t find identity in stone. Am I really me? / And a soldier says: Me too. Nothing pleases me. I always besiege a ghost besieging me / The edgy driver says: Here we are almost
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“I just left Hasharon Prison, where twenty-nine female political prisoners remain. Among them are three minors, Lama Al-Bakri, Manar Shweiki, and Hadiya Arinat, as well as the administrative detainee Khalida Jarrar. In addition to that, there are twenty other female political prisoners in Damon Prison. Within these prisons are injured detainees who are serving long sentences.
school. My personal message to you all is that we must tie our societal struggle to our national struggle for liberation. We must boycott, isolate, and pursue Israel as a war criminal.
I was most moved by a giant mural of my face painted on the apartheid wall in Bethlehem. It was right next to a mural depicting Razan Al-Najjar, the beautiful young nurse who was murdered during one of Gaza’s marches.
Khalto Yasmeen held my hand in hers and said, “Our hope is in you.”
A large international media campaign blasting Israel for banning me from travel became just the latest public relations nightmare for the Zionist state.
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.
lived. In late October 2019, barely nine months after her release from prison, Khalida Jarrar was snatched from her home in the middle of the night and jailed under administrative detention yet again.
My vision is for us to live in a single democratic state where everyone is equal, Muslim, Christian, and Jew. Judaism is a religion, just like Islam. It is a different way of worshipping the same God we call Allah, and we respect that. But Zionism is a political ideology that says Judaism is not only a religion, but primarily a nationality—and that it needs a country.
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.
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.
When I open my eyes, I see the Israeli soldiers patrolling the area by the spring on the street below. We’re the same age now, me and them, but our lives couldn’t be any further apart.
The occupation has brainwashed them, both the men and the women. It threatens to rob them of their humanity and their conscience, and once you’ve lost those two things, you’ve lost everything that matters in life.
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.
Palestinian. Imagine that my story is yours and that all this has happened to your family, on your land. What would you do if your country, the only place your family has known for generations, were occupied by a foreign military? How would you respond if your land were continually being stolen? What would you do if you grew up repeatedly seeing your home raided? Your parents arrested? Your mother shot? Your uncle killed? Try, for just a moment, to imagine that this was your life. How would you want the world to react?
Until that day comes, part of me will continue to live in the free Palestine of my imagination, the one where all our burned olive trees are revived, blossoming and bearing fruit once more. Where Mustafa and Khalo Rushdie arrive home in the evening to join their families at the dinner table, and where Mohammed Abu Khdeir makes it to his Jerusalem mosque safely and in time to perform the fajr prayer. Where little Ahmed Dawabsheh is reunited with his parents and baby brother, their burned skin unblemished and immaculate. The four of them are laughing and embracing as they stand beneath the
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By the end of Israel’s eleven-day assault, 260 Palestinians were killed. Sixty-six of them were children. Twelve people in Israel were killed by the rocket fire from Gaza.
People of conscience everywhere were no longer remaining silent about Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. In the United States, for example, Black, indigenous, and various other communities that understood state violence and systematic oppression saw our struggle as an extension of their own.
