Ahed Tamimi is now a statistic. Just one of thousands of Palestinians illegally imprisoned by Israel as it crosses the half way point of its fifty-first year of Occupation – 6154 to be exact. 59 of them women, 250 of them children, and now one more. Ahed is in jail because she “slapped” an Israeli soldier who was occupying her house not long after he or another soldier in his squad shot her cousin in the head with a rubber bullet, forcing him into a coma. Ahed, along with her cousin and then her mother, came out and started shouting at the soldier to leave, and pushed him. He seemed to push back. She kept shouting and push-hit him several more times, continuing to yell even more. Her mother filmed and then uploaded the scene.
Apparently, Ahed is an existential threat to the state of Israel, and perhaps they’re right. Israeli commentators went ballistic at the viral video, lamenting how she emasculated the soldiers who showed such remarkable restraint in not beating her with the butt of their guns, or just shooting her like her cousin. Not long after, she was seized by security forces, and has since been charged with assault, and her detention extended. No word yet on what the soldier who shot her cousin will be charged with (nor will it ever come).
The first time I met Ahed Tamimi was about five years ago when she was around 11 years old. She wasn’t yet famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view); it was before the video of her threatening an Israeli soldier with her tiny fists, fearless and filled with fury, hit the internet. But it was already clear what she would become: a fighter. She was a hero-in-the-making; a star at the early stages of going nova. Not quite exploding yet but only a matter of time and nothing could stop her. Not her parents, not the rest of her family, not the Israelis unless they killed her.


Like everyone else who meets Ahed I was in her village, Nabi Saleh, to witness weekly demonstrations against the Occupation. Nabi Saleh is a small and picturesque village in the central West Bank overlooking a valley with an important spring. In a normal world, or at least a better one, I’d be visiting with my kids, hiking in the hills, swimming in the spring before settling down to a nice dinner in a family-run restaurant—most of the West Bank is so stunningly beautiful it could compete with Switzerland for both the vistas and the food. But the world and certainly the West Bank are far from normal; and I wouldn’t take my kids there now, not yet anyway. They’re too young to experience what Ahed and the other kids of the village, and every other square meter of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (not to mention too many refugee camps, from Tripoli to Yarmouk) have lived through for over half a century.