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

by Ahed Tamimi

Days earlier, I slapped a fully armed Israeli soldier in the face in front of my house, a slap that reverberated around the world. It wasn’t the first time I hit one of them; nor was it the first time it was captured on film, but it was certainly the most noticed. In a state that controls every aspect of my life, I have become the object of widespread enmity. Some even want me dead for daring to insult the central symbol of their occupation. But what I did was a natural reaction to seeing belligerent foreign occupiers on my family’s land, an immoral army that had just nearly killed my cousin and was now shooting at children from the entrance of my home.

Only a handful of Jews took up the call then, but during World War I, the Zionist movement secured significant help from the British Empire. In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. 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.

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. Some Palestinians managed to stay, retaining their land and houses inside what would become modern-day Israel.

Israel’s campaign to ethnically cleanse the land of its native Palestinian population didn’t stop in 1948. It has never stopped. 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. Some Palestinians still hold on to the old iron keys of the houses from which they were expelled, in the hope of finally being granted the right of return—a right that is supported by international law but vehemently denied by the state of Israel.