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

by Ahed Tamimi

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.

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.

Growing up under a foreign military occupation means living under the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence. It also means living with the total absence of freedom, which is the case for more than five million Palestinians in the occupied territories today. We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build our homes, to travel, to work—all the basic rights and freedoms you might take for granted living in a civil society simply don’t exist when you’re living under military occupation. It’s not an easy life, and yet, it’s the only one I’ve ever known.

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. The smoothly paved bypass roads—built exclusively for settlers, of course—are off-limits to us. Only Israeli cars with yellow license plates can drive on those.

Between 1988 and 2013, Israel arrested him nine times, and most of the sentences he served were under “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.

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.

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.

But the fact remains that Janna, just like the rest of us, should have been busy playing, not resisting. 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. We shouldn’t have to grow up seeing our parents arrested and fearing they could be shot or killed at any moment. Nor should we children be able to know instinctively whether the blasts outside our doors are from tear gas, sound grenades, rubber bullets, or live ammunition. And yet, we all acquired this skill even before we hit puberty. For example, it didn’t take me long to stop flinching when soldiers fired something in close proximity to me. That’s how normalized the violence in our lives has become.

So, to return to the question our parents are always asked, about why they allow their children to protest: It is the occupation that forces the children to go out into the streets. Of course our parents worry about us, but they raised us to be strong and not to cower in the face of oppression. 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. The occupation seeks to defeat our spirits and rob us of any semblance of a normal or safe childhood, but we refuse to let it. Just as we refuse to let ourselves be controlled by fear.

Instead, I played in streets and on hills and in front and back yards littered with the remnants of bullets and explosives fired at us by Israeli forces, much of this ordnance marked “Made in the United States.”

THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump as president of the United States was one of the worst things to happen to the Palestinian people in recent years. The United States had long tried to sell itself as an honest broker of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, though anyone even remotely paying attention knew this was a farce. 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.

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.

Flagrantly and in an astonishing number of circumstances, Israel was failing to meet its obligations under international law. The question that everyone in the course inevitably always came back to was: Why was the international community letting Israel get away with it? Khalida explained to us that while it was very important for us to use international law and international humanitarian law as a mechanism to advance our cause for self-determination and equality, we had to understand that our fate ultimately depended on politics. Many politicians around the world were willing to sacrifice the rights of people and turn a blind eye to violations, especially when it came to Israel’s occupation. She reminded us that international law had been created by colonial powers and was disproportionately applied to serve their interests. It frustrated me to realize the limitations of international law we faced as Palestinians seeking justice. I now understood that it would never serve as a silver bullet for our cause, given how countries like the United States shielded Israel from any sort of punitive measures. Holding Israel accountable via international law would have to be accompanied by other strategies, like boycotts and divestment.

They had helped me understand the critical role women play in our society and in our struggle for liberation. Women make up half our society, and they raise the whole of it. We have to ensure that they’re strong and empowered with education and political awareness in order to raise the next generation, who will liberate Palestine.

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...

By now, you have reached the end of my story, and you, too, have a decision to make. I ask that you try to put yourself in the place of a 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?