Ahed Tamimi is 16 years old. She lives in the town of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank. Eight years ago, armed Israeli settlers abetted by the Israeli military and the Israeli state stole land and a freshwater spring from the village. Residents of the village have held non-violent protests ever since, every Friday.
The Israeli military has responded to their protest marches with unrelenting violence. Ahed’s cousin Mustafa Tamimi was killed when a tear-gas canister was fired by Israeli soldiers directly at his face. It lodged in his skull and exploded. Her uncle Rushdie Tamimi was murdered by Israeli soldiers at a protest where the Israeli army itself found soldiers had violated procedures by firing live ammunition. The soldiers did not report the killing till questioned by journalists, and the Israeli army has quietly let the investigation die.
Two years ago, Israeli soldiers held Ahed’s 12 year old brother in a chokehold at a protest. Ahed fought back, biting the soldier’s hand. That altercation generated this picture that went viral.
Two weeks ago, Ahed’s 14 year old cousin was shot by an Israeli soldier. The hard rubber bullet lodged in his skull and the child remains in a medically induced coma.
Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza routinely kill Palestinian children. In 2015, 31 children were killed by Israeli forces. In 2016, 35 were. On average, every two weeks, Israeli soldiers kill a Palestinian child. And we’re talking about a population that’s smaller than New York City. In 2014, the Israeli military killed 546 Palestinian children, many were killed in their homes by US made “precision bombs”.
At any given time, Israeli forces have 300-400 Palestinian children in military detention. Israeli soldiers routinely beat and physically abuse children in detention and during arrest. This includes the use of chokeholds on young children. This is of course, not unexpected in an apartheid state. Israel controls the lives of over 4.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza. These people have no say in the government that controls their movement and territory. As with all apartheid/segregation regimes, the oppressed are abused with abandon.
This is the context in which heavily-armed Israeli soldiers entered the Tamimi home, hours after they had shot her cousin in the head with a rubber bullet. Israeli forces have made it a habit to to harass the family. And then this happened:
Ahed Tamimi and her mother were kidnapped from their home at night by the Israeli military, to face a military tribunal.
For the crime of slapping an armed soldier sent to harass her family, cabinet level Israeli ministers are calling for Ahed to spend the rest of her life in prison.
Right-wing activists demanded the teenager’s arrest. Israel’s education minister, Naftali Bennet, said Ms. Tamimi and the other women who scuffled with the soldiers alongside her — her mother and an older cousin — “should finish their lives in prison.” — www.nytimes.com/...
Bennet is famous for immediately calling for pardoning/releasing Israeli soldiers who kill Palestinian civilians. This warped, racist person also believes Palestinian children who slap armed Israeli soldiers should be imprisoned for decades. Naftali Bennet is also a war criminal. In 1996, troops under his command fired on a UN compound in Qana, killing 106 Lebanese civilians sheltering there. Bennet later boasted “I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that”. He is not the only Israeli cabinet minister who has openly called for massacring Palestinian civilians. They are joined by Israeli Prime Ministers who have been elected after war crimes, or acts of terrorism against civilians.
As with all things related to Israel, a full-fledged propaganda war is playing out over this incident. Israeli “hasbara” (propaganda) specialists are hard at work trying to portray Ahed’s protests and those of her family as “acting”.
The outrage was stoked by Israelis, who claimed that the confrontation with the soldiers had been staged to generate sympathy and made no mention of the fact that the incident took place after an Israeli soldier shot Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet during a demonstration against the ongoing military occupation. The girl’s father, Bassem, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that his daughter, who will be 17 in January, was angry because her cousin Mohammed had been shot, and it was unclear at the time if he would survive. (Over the weekend, doctors removed the bullet from the boy’s skull and he was placed in a medically induced coma.) — theintercept.com/...
Exactly how does one “stage” a confrontation with two heavily-armed soldiers from the IDF who have entered your home as part of a 50 year occupation? Soldiers who are part of an army that has already killed your brother and cousin?
Meanwhile, the right-wing extremist Israeli government is displaying its fully-evolved sycophancy towards the right-wing extremist US president by naming a train-station in Jerusalem for Donald Trump.
Please don’t make Ahed a hero. Heroes, when they are Palestinian, end up dead or behind bars. Let her be a kid. Fight to set her free, so that one day she can be an ordinary woman, in an ordinary land. — www.thenation.com/...