Note: This commentary is from 2018. Following the October 2023 bombing on Gaza
by the Israeli military, Ahed Tamimi was
arrested by Israeli troops on November 6, 2023
in raids on the occupied West Bank.
It is possible for a single person to engage in an act of
resistance against oppression and change the
world.
A 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Ahed
Tamimi is such an individual. On December 19, in a simple
yet profound act of defiance against the
occupation, she slapped Israeli soldiers who
had entered the yard of her house. Just hours
earlier members of the Israeli armed forces
had shot her teenage cousin Mohammed in
the face with a rubber-coated bullet. The young boy
was placed in a medically induced coma as
doctors operated on him to remove the bullet
fragments embedded in his skull.
Much like American civil rights icon Rosa Parks - who was
arrested six decades ago by breaking the law
for refusing to give up her seat on a
Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man -
Tamimi has become the face of a nonviolent
movement against injustice.
Ahed
Tamimi is from the West Bank village of Nabi
Saleh, where Israelis have confiscate the villagers’ water
source and land and built settlements. The
village of 600 has regularly protested these
encroachments, and the Israeli army has shot,
maimed and killed Ahed’s family members.
The Israeli authorities arrested Ahed, and an Israeli
military court indicted her, with
prosecutors portraying her as
a terrorist. She could remain in prison
until the end of her trial, and, if convicted,
she could serve up to 10 years in
prison. Ahed’s mother, Nariman
faces five
harges, including incitement for posting the incident on
Facebook.
Israeli military tribunals have a conviction rate
nearing 100
percent.
The real crime this 16-year-old Palestinian girl committed
was resisting a hostile and racist military
occupation and its human rights violations,
and having the temerity to challenge
the toxic masculinity of the Israeli military.
This has made her the target of ridicule, with
Israelis giving her the nickname “Shirley
Temper”, and chalking up the incident to
“Pallywood” (Palestinian “propaganda”
discreding Israel). there have been
accusations that the Palestinians such as Ahed
stage hoax incidents wearing “American
clothes” to garner support among Americans and
other Western audiences.
One Israeli journalist, Ben
Caspit, called for her rape and murder, saying: “In the case of
the girls, we should exact a price at some
other opportunity, in the dark, without
witnesses and cameras.” Member of the Knesset
Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the
US, accused the Tamimi family of using their children as “pawns”
in a propaganda war, and suggested that Ahed
may not even be their daughter.
As Martin Luther King, Jr - whose birthday is celebrated
today - wrote in “Letter From Birmingham Jail
(pdf)” an unjust law “is a code that a numerical or power
majority group compels a minority group to
obey but does not make binding on itself.”
Just as people have a legal and moral
responsibility to obey just laws, King argued,
“one has a moral responsibility to disobey
unjust laws.”
On a December day in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to yield her
seat on a public bus to a white man, breaking
the local racial segregation law requiring
black people to sit in the back of public
transportation vehicles. Her arrest
triggered the Montgomery
Bus Boycott, a yearlong boycott of the city bus system by African
Americans, of which King was a leader.
Ultimately, this boycott led to the US
Supreme Court ruling the segregation of
Montgomery public transportation
unconstitutional. Parks’ arrest was the
catalyst for a movement.
“Any law that uplifts human
personality is just. Any law that degrades
human personality is unjust,” King said.
“All segregation statutes are unjust because
segregation distorts the soul and damages
the personality. It gives the segregator a
false sense of superiority and the
segregated a false sense of
inferiority.”
Like Rosa Parks before her, Ahed Tamimi is struggling
against unjust laws, in her case the injustice
of a 50-year military occupation that denies
Palestinians their land, right to travel and
self-determination. Israel maintains an
apartheid system of democracy for Israeli Jews
- and discrimination against Israelis of
colour - second-class citizenship for Israeli
citizens of Arab descent, and dispossession
and disenfranchisement for Palestinian Arabs
in the territories.
Consider that Israel is the only nation that
systematically detains and prosecutes
children in a military court system lacking
the right of due process. The Israeli military
detains hundreds of Palestinian children
between the ages of 12-17 every year (pdf), including many who are locked up for throwing
stones - something that would never
happen to Israeli children. Palestinian
children face mistreatment by the military, according to Defense for Children
International-Palestine, with 75 percent
subjected to physical violence upon arrest,
and 97 percent interrogated without a parent
present.
UNICEF calls the ill-treatment of Palestinian
children in military detention “widespread,
systematic and institutionalised,” (pdf) and according to the US
Department of State, Palestinian children are tortured through “beatings,
long-term handcuffing, threats, intimidation,
and solitary confinement.”
Further, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) found that last
December, at least 345
Palestinian children were injured by the Israeli military, of which over
a third involved live ammunition. The Israeli
military has killed at
least 32 Palestinian children in 2016. This, from a force which calls itself “the
most moral army” in the world.
In Israel’s apartheid system of justice, Palestinians face
the army, but West Bank Jewish settlers face
civil courts. A West Bank settler teen who
beat a left-wing rabbi and human rights
activist at knifepoint received community
service. Yifat Alkobi, a Jewish West Bank settler who
slapped a soldier who tried to stop her from
throwing stones, was released on
bail the same day she was arrested and
sent home. Prior to the incident, she had been
convicted five times for disorderly conduct,
throwing rocks and assaulting a police
officer, yet never faced jail time. And Eliraz
Feiz, another settler who called for violent
action, even lethal force against Palestinians and Israeli soldiers was
sentenced to five months community
service.
Israel threatens Ahed Tamimi with years in prison because
they fear her power, the power of a resistance
movement to the occupation that has gained
momentum. The BDS movement (Boycott,
Divestment, Sanctions) supported by
Palestinian civil society is working, creating
a backlash and a blacklist in which the
Israeli government has banned such human
rights groups as the American Friends Service
Committee - which saved Jews from Nazi
Germany - and Jewish Voice for Peace
from entering Israel.
Meanwhile, the extremist right-wing, ethno-nationalist
settler regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the
white nationalist government of Donald Trump
have no intentions of allowing a just peace
settlement of the conflict. Israel
seized 1012
hectares of Palestinian land in 2017, a threefold increase in
settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem
over the previous year.
At the same time, the Palestinian population is expected
to soon surpass the number of
Jews in Israel and the occupied
territories. With the two-state solution now
impossible, we will be left with only two alternatives: a fully
democratic state in which Palestinians have
citizenship and equal rights to Jewish
Israelis, or what is taking place now, an
apartheid state where one group rules the
other.
The continuation of the status-quo is unacceptable.
Whatever form self-determination takes for the
Palestinians, the injustice of the occupation
must end. And youth like Ahed Tamimi are
leading the resistance that will eventually
make the Israeli apartheid regime crumble.
Ahed is the Rosa Parks of Palestine.
This commentary is
also posted on Aljazeera.com.
