They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
This is a true political story from the prospective of a young girl who became a victim of geography with the result that her entire family and country live in constant terror and fear of their occupiers.
Read this fast moving story that is excellently written. Form your own opinion...but read it!
EXCERPTS;
First impressions don’t tell the whole story. To get that, you’d have to look across the main road of our village, to the hill on the other side of the valley. There sits the Jewish Israeli settlement of Halamish, a gated community with neatly arranged red-tile-roofed homes, manicured lawns, playgrounds, and a swimming pool. But Halamish wasn’t always there. It was illegally established on our village’s land in 1977. It’s one of hundreds of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land in violation of international law. These settlements are essentially Jewish Israeli colonies, and they continue to multiply at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. Over the years, we’ve watched the creeping expansion of Halamish, its settlers confiscating more of our land and resources with the full approval of the state of Israel. Not just approval, but facilitation, too. Israel installed a military base right next to the settlement, to protect its residents and to make our lives in the village a living hell.
In 2002, Israel began constructing a massive separation wall under the pretext of security. Palestinians call it the apartheid wall because it’s meant to separate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from Israel “proper,” but also from occupied East Jerusalem and from the Israeli settlements built inside the West Bank. The wall is several hundred miles long and, in some areas, made of imposing concrete slabs that stand over fifteen feet tall. If that’s not egregious enough, the majority of the wall was not built along Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 boundary, but rather on Palestinian land inside the occupied West Bank. This means its path was deliberately planned to swallow up more of our land and cut right through our villages.
Two weeks after my birthday, on February 13, my trial officially began. I entered the courtroom to see, in addition to my relatives, scores of journalists, NGO observers, foreign diplomats, and activists pouring in. But as soon as the judge entered, he ordered everyone but my immediate family out of the courtroom, saying it was for my own benefit, as a minor, that the trial be held behind closed doors. What a joke, I thought. If they cared about my benefit or protection to any degree, why did they ensure that their cameras were rolling on the night of my arrest? Probably to appease an angry Israeli public that felt humiliated by my confrontation with the soldiers and to humiliate me.
If the judge was concerned about what benefited me, surely he should factor in my and my family’s preference. But he didn’t, instead insisting that the trial remain closed, most likely because a public trial meant more negative press for Israel.
A trial carried out in the dark guaranteed that the world would not continue to see how my rights, like the rights of so many other Palestinian children, were being infringed upon.
My personal message to you all is that we must tie our societal struggle to our national struggle for liberation. We must boycott, isolate, and pursue Israel as a war criminal.
Whatever their agenda was had totally backfired on them. They had embarrassed their country, not thinking that the whole world would turn against them and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. They had tried to make an example out of me, but really, they had only exposed their country as the brutal human rights violator it so unabashedly is.
If educating the world about our nation’s struggle was my mission in this life, I vowed to carry it out as honorably and as effectively as possible.
Crimes at the hands of the Nazis, and all of humanity should stand against such murderous hatred and make sure it’s never repeated. But how does that give Zionists the right to push us off our own land to make a country for Jews alone? Why should Palestinians compensate—lose our homeland, our property, our rights, even our lives—for the Holocaust committed by Europeans? We shouldn’t have to pay for the crimes of the Europeans against Jews. That’s just wrong.
We need to find a way to live here in one country, with everyone as equals, not in this apartheid state where Palestinians are forced to live on shrinking pieces of our homeland while the best land is reserved for one group. The world did not accept this in South Africa. Why would they accept it in Palestine?
Jewish settler named Jacob Fauci was captured on camera telling a young Palestinian woman named Muna El-Kurd, who was standing in her own backyard, “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.” The video of Fauci, who spoke perfect English with a Long Island accent, went viral. His brazen sense of entitlement to steal a home he knew belonged to a Palestinian family highlighted the decades-long struggle residents of Sheikh Jarrah and other Jerusalem neighborhoods were facing just to remain in their own homes.
No comments:
Post a Comment