Today is Ahed Tamimi’s 17th birthday. She spent it in an Israeli prison.
She is Palestinian.
And she has been kept in Israeli prison since mid-December. She’s in jail because she slapped an armed Israeli soldier who had trespassed onto her family property. Her mother Nariman is also due in court on Tuesday for filming the incident.
Ahed alleges that the occupation soldier had shot her cousin in the head with a rubber bullet about an hour before the altercation at her home in Nabi Saleh. She says she felt compelled to retaliate due to the constant harassment and violence perpetrated by the Israeli regime on her family and people. The Tamimi resilience to the Israeli occupation is awe-inspiring. For many, they have galvanized the Palestinian youth resistance.
Ahed and her mother are due in court on February 6, 2018 (my birthday). Ahed is 17. She is half my age. When I was 17, my biggest problems involved homework.
I met Ahed and her family last year when they visited South Africa as part of the Shamsaan (Two Suns) Project. You’d be forgiven for describing her as a sullen teenager, but the manner in which she took my phone for a selfie proved that while she recognized her duty to her people and her land, she was still a teenager who wants to be a soccer player and wear fashionable clothes.
But the Israeli occupation has taken away her dream of one day representing Palestine’s women’s soccer team in the World Cup. Instead, she has to contend with haphazard checkpoints instead of goalposts.
The Israeli skill of corralling, and restricting people’s movement is remarkable. Where else would you see the scale of checkpoints and military personnel, than in Israeli Occupied Palestine?
Now while the Israeli crowd control in public spaces may have been sanitized, the Israelis harass the demonstrators at their homes. Pre-dawn incursions into Palestinian villages, apparent indiscriminate arrests, and the occasional accidental fatal shooting of a Palestinian, have become the sinister partner to the more public crowd control exercises.
The Zionist regime’s military forces raided Ahed’s home at 4am before arresting her. She was 16 at the time. My brief encounter with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) occurred at the same hour, nearly eight years ago, and on international waters on our way to Gaza. The trauma of the Israeli attack on civilians on board the largest flotilla to attempt breaking the siege on the enclave may not compare to the constant reality of Israeli occupation; but it gave us a taste.
Here’s the gist:
- They mess with your communications,
- violently enter your living space,
- accuse you of conspiring and/or acting against ‘the State of Israel’
- use disproportionate response to resistance
- confiscate / steal your belongings
That happened on the morning of May 31, 2010 on board the seven ships, including the Mavi Marmara, which were headed to Gaza. By June 1, we were kidnapped and imprisoned, and nine of our number had been killed by Israelis.
Again, the similarities of an Israeli raid on a Palestinian home, and their incursion on a humanitarian aid flotilla are uncanny. Yet most of us on board those boats were not Palestinian. We were still on international waters (so there could be no claim of trespassing, or being anywhere illegally) and yet that was the accusation used against me and many others.
“Do you know you’re in Israel illegally”, an Israeli official asked me.
“I’m here against my will. We were headed to Gaza”, was my response.
They ask you these kinds of questions to irritate, and provoke an already tense situation. This makes you angry. Which makes me annoyed and sarcastic. But for many others, the response is a physical retaliation.
Perhaps Ahed had had enough of the assault on her people and land. Perhaps this 17-year-old used all that she had to lash out at a violent regime. She used her small hands, her articulate mouth, and the more than 70 years of resistance that runs in her veins, to say she’s not standing for this bullshit occupation anymore.
Ahed’s shock of blonde curls have ignited a movement of protests, and once again highlighted the plight of Palestinian children being incarcerated in Israeli jails. Those curls have become the glimmer of a Palestinian sunrise in the darkness of 4am Israeli raid.
