#FreeAhedTamimi
Speech on International Women’s Day by Leila Abdennabi
“She is not a little girl, she is a terrorist” These were public comments made by the Israeli culture minister Miri Regev about Ahed Tamimi, a 17 year old activist from the village of Nabi Saleh in Palestine.
Ahed and her mother Nariman, were arrested in December after a video of Ahed slapping a heavily armed Israeli soldier went viral. Missing from mainstream media’s reports on Ahed is the fact that the Israeli soldier had assaulted her earlier and would not leave her family’s property after harassing and intimidating them including shooting at the head of Ahed’s 15 year old cousin.
Ahed is one of hundreds of Palestinian children being held hostage by the illegitimate Israeli forces. I say illegimate because Israel is a settler colonial state and indigenous Palestinians have every moral right to resist colonizers and the colonization of their homeland however they see fit. Children are not spared from Israeli brutality. The Zionist entity also known as Israel, regularly targets and kidnaps Palestinian children in order to curb justified Palestinian resistance. Their tactics including dragging children from their beds in the middle of the night, then beating and torturing them into confession while they’re in detention.
Here is what a prominent Israeli Journalist Ben Caspit thought should be done with Palestinian girls who protest: “In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras” Ben Caspit’s “idea” isn’t exactly new. In fact, the sexual violence he alludes was one of the tactics used by Zionists to drive out Palestinians from their villages during the Nakba- the 1948 mass exodus of Palestinians from Palestine. Comments like Ben’s and Miri’s further exposes the moral bankruptcy of zionism.
And by the way in case you were wondering- zionism and feminism are not compatible unless u believe there’s room in feminism for genocide, racism and the displacement of indigenous people.
Despite attempts to silence and squash resistance, Palestinians continue to rise up and resist. With the world watching, Israel can no longer hide. The Zionist entity or Israel will not survive my lifetime, within our lifetime we will see a liberated Palestine. You can show support for Palestinian political prisoners by writing letters to your representatives, writing letters to prisoners themselves and uplifting their stories.
I also wanna echo Cece’s sentiment regarding abolishing the prison industrial complex and the police state. ICE operates in similar ways to the Israeli occupation forces by targeting women and children in their homes late at night or while they are at school. Down with the police state, free Palestine and liberation for all!