Show trial and jail sentence for mocking a soldier
AVAAZ open letter to sign plus two articles from Al Jazeera
“We demand that Ahed and all Palestinian children are released from Israeli prisons now.
The international community must put an end to the ill-treatment and detention of Palestinian children. Enough is enough.
To Ahed and all the children in Israeli jails: We stand by your side, and are holding you in our hearts. We will not give up until you are free. You are not alone.”
More information:
Ahed Tamimi was dragged out of her bed in the night and arrested.
Ahed is a child, and like thousands of Palestinian children she could be humiliated and abused if we don’t get her out fast.
Ahed’s been on the frontline defending Palestine since she was 7 years old. Now Ahed needs us to stand up for her.
Add your name to free Ahed and all child prisoners, it will be delivered to leaders worldwide and to Ahed’s lawyer, to give to Ahed in prison to give her strength as she faces the Israeli military’s terrifying interrogation tactics.
Palestinian activist Ahed with her mother Nariman. Photo by Al Jazeera
Why is the West praising Malala, but ignoring Ahed?
By Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Al Jazeera
December 28, 2017
Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl, was recently arrested in a night-time raid on her home. The Israeli authorities accuse her of “assaulting” an Israeli soldier and an officer. A day earlier she had confronted Israeli soldiers who had entered her family’s backyard. The incident happened shortly after a soldier shot her 14-year-old cousin in the head with a rubber bullet, and fired tear-gas canisters directly at their home, breaking windows.
Her mother and cousin were arrested later as well. All three remain in detention.
There has been a curious lack of support for Ahed from Western feminist groups, human rights advocates and state officials who otherwise present themselves as the purveyors of human rights and champions of girls’ empowerment.
Ahed, like Malala, has a substantial history of standing up against injustices.
Their campaigns on empowering girls in the global South are innumerable: Girl Up, Girl Rising, G(irls)20 Summit, Because I am a Girl, Let Girls Learn, Girl Declaration.
When 15-year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a member of Tehrik-e-Taliban, the reaction was starkly different. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, issued a petition entitled “I am Malala.” The UNESCO launched “Stand Up For Malala.”
Malala was invited to meet then President Barack Obama, as well as the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and addressed the UN General Assembly. She received numerous accolades from being named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine and Woman of the Year by Glamour magazine to being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013, and again in 2014 when she won.
State representatives such as Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard as well as prominent journalists such as Nicholas Kristof spoke up in support of her. There is even a Malala Day!
But we see no #IamAhed or #StandUpForAhed campaigns making headlines. None of the usual feminist and rights groups or political figures has issued statements supporting her or reprimanding the Israeli state. No one has declared an Ahed Day. In fact, the US in the past has even denied her a visa for a speaking tour.
Ahed, like Malala, has a substantial history of standing up against injustices. She has been protesting the theft of land and water by Israeli settlers. She has endured personal sacrifice, having lost an uncle and a cousin to the occupation. Her parents and brother have been arrested time and again. Her mother has been shot in the leg. Two years ago, another video featuring her went viral – this time she was trying to protect her little brother from being taken by a soldier.
Why isn’t Ahed a beneficiary of the same international outcry as Malala? Why has the reaction to Ahed been so different? There are multiple reasons for this deafening silence. First among them is the widespread acceptance of state-sanctioned violence as legitimate. Whereas hostile actions of non-state actors such as the Taliban or Boko Haram fighters are viewed as unlawful, similar aggression by the state is often deemed appropriate.
This not only includes overt forms of violence such as drone attacks, unlawful arrests, and police brutality, but also less obvious assaults such as the allocation of resources, including land and water. The state justifies these actions by presenting the victims of its injustices as a threat to the functioning of the state.
Once declared a threat, the individual is easily reduced to bare life – a life without political value. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described this as a time/place sanctioned by sovereign power where laws can be suspended; this individual can therefore now be made a target of sovereign violence. Terrorists often fall within this category. Thus, the execution of suspected terrorists through drone attacks without due judicial process ensues without much public uproar.
The Israeli police have deployed a similar strategy here. They have argued for extendingAhed’s detention because she “poses a danger” to soldiers (state representatives) and could obstruct the functioning of the state (the investigation).
Casting unarmed Palestinians like Ahed – who was simply exercising her right to protect her family’s wellbeing with all the might of her 16-year-old hand – in the same light as a terrorist is unfathomable. Such framings open the way for authorising excessive torture – Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett, for instance, wants Ahed and her family to “finish their lives in prison.”
Ahed’s suffering also exposes the West’s selective humanitarianism, whereby only particular bodies and causes are deemed worthy of intervention.
Anthropologist Miriam Ticktin argues that while the language of morality to alleviate bodily suffering has become dominant in humanitarian agencies today, only particular kinds of suffering bodies are read as worthy of this care.This includes the exceptionally violated female body and the pathologically diseased body.
Such a notion of suffering normalises labouring and exploited bodies: “these are not the exception, but the rule, and hence are disqualified.”
Issues of unemployment, hunger, threat of violence, police brutality, and denigration of cultures are thus often not considered deserving of humanitarian intervention. Such forms of suffering are seen as necessary and even inevitable. Ahed, therefore, does not fit the ideal victim-subject for transnational advocacy.
Relatedly, girls like Ahed who critique settler colonialism and articulate visions of communal care are not the empowered femininity that the West wants to valourise. She seeks justice against oppression, rather than empowerment that benefits only herself.
Her feminism is political, rather than one centred on commodities and sex. Her girl power threatens to reveal the ugly face of settler-colonialism, and hence is marked as “dangerous”. Her courage and fearlessness vividly render all that is wrong with this occupation.
Ahed’s plight should prompt us to interrogate our selective humanitarianism. Individuals who are victims of state violence, whose activism unveils the viciousness of power, or whose rights advocacy centres communal care, deserve to be included in our vision of justice.
Even if we don’t launch campaigns for Ahed, it is impossible for us to escape her call to witness the mass debilitation, displacement and dispossession of her people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Ahed Tamimi and her parents Nariman (also now arrested) and Bassem. Throughout their show trial in Ofer military court, police officers stood in front of him so that he could not see them and they could not see him. Photo by Jaclynn Ashly, Al Jazeera
Ahed and Nariman Tamimi’s detentions extended
By Jaclynn Ashly, Al Jazeera
December 26 2017
Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – On a day when millions of people around the world spent time with their families, laughing and exchanging gifts, Bassem Tamimi sat for hours in an Israeli court anticipating the fate of his daughter, wife and niece.
For the second time in less than a week, the Tamimi women’s detentions were extended for another four days as the police prosecution continues an investigation into a case that has attracted worldwide attention.
Bassem told Al Jazeera that the court sessions, held in Israel’s Ofer detention centre in Ramallah, went on for more than six hours on Monday.
“Ahed looked so tired,” he said, referring to his jailed 16-year-old daughter, and expressed worry concerning her treatment in Israeli jail.
Three Israeli officials stood in front of Bassem the entire court proceeding, blocking his view of Ahed.
“I wasn’t even allowed to see her,” he said. Bassem attempted to speak to his daughter, eager to hear her familiar voice that could assure him she was continuing with the strength the teenager is famous for.
However, “any time I tried to speak to her, the Israeli officers would tell me to shut up and would threaten to kick me out of the court”, he explained.
“They just want to show us that Israel controls everything.”
Multiple arrests
Ahed was detained by Israeli forces on Tuesday following a raid on the family’s home in the village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied West Bank during the pre-dawn hours.
Hours later, his wife Nariman travelled to the Binyamin detention centre, where Ahed was being held, to check on her condition and insist on being present while her daughter was being interrogated.
She too was arrested upon arrival. Israeli authorities are accusing Nariman of “incitement” for filming a video showing Ahed slapping and kicking two Israeli officials outside her home.
Ahed’s 21-year-old cousin Nour, who studies journalism at Al Quds University, was also arrested during a raid on her home the following morning.
An Israeli army spokesperson previously told Al Jazeera that Ahed was suspected of “assaulting a soldier and an IDF officer”.
Tear gas canisters collected by residents of Nabi Saleh village [Jaclynn Ashly/Al Jazeera]
The video went viral and spurred an Israeli social-media campaign demanding the arrest of the teen, who has been an icon for the village’s long-standing resistance since she was 13.
Nour also appeared in the video. Following the arrests, Israeli authorities summoned Bassem for interrogations and questioned him for two hours about the video.
According to Bassem, Ahed and Nour were attempting to push the soldiers away from their home in the video after their 15-year-old cousin Mohammad was struck point-blank in the face with a rubber bullet, which left him in a coma for 72 hours.
The Tamimi women have not yet officially been charged with a crime.
According to Gabi Laski, Ahed’s lawyer, the women are also being investigated for other incidents unrelated to the recent video.
Laski said the teen is being held in the first section of Israel’s HaSharon prison in Israel, which holds child “security prisoners”.
No change of clothes
Nariman and Nour are being held together at HaSharon in the third section designated for Palestinian women prisoners, Laski said.
Ahed has not been provided with a change of clothes since she was detained almost a week ago, Laski told Al Jazeera.
Since her detention, Ahed has also been transferred between several prisons in Israel.
According to Laski, such Israeli policies are meant to “break your spirit”.
Palestinian detainees are typically handcuffed and have their feet shackled during prison transfers. The trip between prisons is often uncomfortable and can result in serious physical and emotional exhaustion.
These prison transfers occur despite being a violation of international law, which prohibits the transfer of Palestinians from the occupied territory into Israeli territory.
Nevertheless, 60 percent of Palestinian child detainees are transferred into Israel from the occupied territory, according to prisoners’ rights group Addameer.
Addameer has reported that many Palestinian children are interrogated while “sleep deprived and often bruised and scared”, and called the process “coercive”.
‘Abuse and humiliation’
According to the group, Palestinian children are often “shown, or made to sign, documentation written in Hebrew”, despite most Palestinians in the occupied territory not understanding the language.
Defence for Children International – Palestine noted in a new report that out of 520 cases of Palestinian children being detained by Israel between 2012 and 2016, 72 percent faced physical violence and 66 percent experienced “verbal abuse and humiliation”.
Nour’s father Naji told Al Jazeera that the threats his family has received from Israelis have left him anxious and concerned about Nour’s safety in prison.
According to Naji, Israelis have demanded that the Tamimi women be held in the “darkest cell” of Israel’s prisons and have expressed their hope that the women “get raped”.
“What if some right-wing Israeli is working in the prison, and they actually follow through with these threats?” he said.
In the early morning hours on Monday, as the Tamimi families were resting before another long day at an Israeli court, Israeli forces crept into the village once again and raided Naji’s home.
Manal Tamimi, a relative of the women, told Al Jazeera that Israeli forces broke into Naji’s home and ransacked the place, before raiding two more homes in the village.
Izz al-Din and Mutasim Tamimi, both 20 years old, were detained during the raid.
Both had previously spent time in Israeli prison – between five to eight months, according to Manal.
Neither of the youths was involved in the case that Ahed, Nariman, and Nour are being held for.
Residents interrogated
Manal said that for the past two weeks, Israeli forces stationed at the checkpoint positioned at the entrance of Nabi Saleh have been stopping the young residents of the village and interrogating them for hours.
“This has nothing to do with anyone breaking the law. This is just harassment and collective punishment on the village,” she said.
Bassem agrees, telling Al Jazeera that the Tamimi women’s court proceedings are a form of Israeli “propaganda”.
“Israel wants to show the world that they have a trial, a court, and a legal system. They want people to believe they have laws and a democracy,” Bassem said.
Bassem said that the village did not see Israel’s courts as “legitimate”.
“It’s all fake. The courts are just another component of the occupation. There’s no difference between this court and an Israeli settlement,” he told Al Jazeera.
“They are targeting us because we are Palestinian and we resist Israeli occupation and its colonisation of Palestinian lands. They want to break Nabi Saleh.”
That Palestinian Girl’s Viral Video? The Real Scandal Is That Israeli Troops Were There At All
By Lara Friedman, Forward
December 20, 2017
The video is striking — no pun intended. A 16 year-old Palestinian girl in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh grapples with Israeli soldiers in full combat gear and armed to the teeth. Despite the fact that she swats and kicks at them, the soldiers, likely hardly older than their tormentor, show admirable restraint, doing nothing to escalate the situation from a scuffle into something much worse. Days later, more video emerged, this time of the IDF raiding Nabi Saleh in the middle of the night to pull this same teenager, Ahed Tamimi, from her bed and arrest her. Since then, her mother and a female cousin have also been arrested.
In Israel, and among defenders of Israel, two questions dominate the debate: How could any Palestinian have been permitted to abuse and humiliate the IDF in this manner? And what can Israel do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?
Israel’s Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett and Defence Minister Avigdor Leiberman, both of whom support pardoning an Israeli soldier who was caught on video killing a Palestinian who no longer posed any threat, have ideas. Bennett called for Ahed and those who joined her in the attack to be jailed for the rest of their lives. Lieberman threatened ominously:
“Everyone involved, not only the girl but also her parents and those around them, will not escape from what they deserve.”
Knesset member Oren Hazan, from the Likud party, suggested that the soldiers’ failure to react with force was a mistake:
“Restraint is a failed and dangerous policy. Next time it must end differently.”
Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich, of the Jewish Home party, called on the IDF Chief of Staff
“to order that every encounter or friction between the enemy and our troops end with a painful and decisive outcome.”
All of these reactions gloss over the key question: How did Israeli soldiers come to be grappling with this Palestinian teenager in the first place? Were they minding their own business, taking care of the security of Israel or Israelis, when Ahed and her relatives suddenly turned up to “provoke” them? Or rather, since the action in the video takes place in the front yard of Ahed’s house, were the soldiers in Nabi Saleh at the Tamimi residence to arrest someone, hunt for weapons or foil a planned attack against Israel?
The answer to all of these questions is: no. The reason IDF soldiers are regularly in Nabi Saleh, and regularly haunt the Tamimi family — week after week, for nearly the past decade — has nothing to do with the security of Israel.
It is because the inhabitants of this village, in existence since long before the establishment of the modern state of Israel, refuse to submit quietly to the Occupation. They refuse to cease protesting against an authority that over time has taken their lands and resources for the benefit of settlements, and has seen soldiers, year after year, arrest, injure and kill village residents and especially Tamimi family members as they engage in unarmed protest.
To be clear: this isn’t just about Nabi Saleh. What is happening in this one village encapsulates the ineluctable and self-defeating logic of Israeli occupation. According to this logic, all Palestinian protest, including unarmed protest, is intolerable, undermining the IDF’s absolute authority and its deterrence.
Consistent with this logic, quashing Palestinian protest is a top priority of the IDF, not because such protest threatens Israel’s security, but because occupation requires that the Palestinians never forget who is in charge. In support of this logic, Israel maintains laws in the West Bank that render virtually all Palestinian protest illegal and permit Israel to impose heavy penalties on those who refuse to submit.
And as a consequence of this logic, unarmed or non-violent protest — including by young Palestinians like Ahed Tamimi — represents in many ways an even greater challenge to the IDF than armed attacks; as one senior Israeli defence official admitted, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”
If Israel continues to seek military solutions to quash Palestinian resistance to the occupation, the results will be predictable and tragic. While Israeli leaders worry about the political costs of videos showing soldiers abusing, or being abused by, Palestinian children, Israelis as a whole will continue to pay the ever-growing costs — moral, financial, social, security, and diplomatic — imposed on them by governments that prioritize occupation over virtually all else and undermine the humanity of the nation’s own sons and daughters by sending them on missions the sole purpose of which is to humiliate, subjugate, and break the spirit of fellow human beings.
And as the costs to Palestinians continue to be measured in blood — deaths and injuries — and time lost in Israeli jail, Palestinian grievances will only deepen, and the determination to resist will only grow stronger. In short, Nabi Saleh and villages like it are where Israel’s occupation logic hits a wall (no pun intended): there is no military answer to Ahed Tamimi or others of her generation, who see that they have no hope and no future under Israeli rule. The only solution is an end to occupation.
Lara Friedman is the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (www.fmep.org).
PLUS, read
Haaretz Editorial, December 23rd, 2018
The government has to start caring more about what the international community thinks and less about extremists on the far right, which is why the detained 16-year-old Palestinian girl should be released…….
and
To the IDF she’s a ‘shameless woman’ who must be brought low