Ahed Tamimi was just released from Israeli prison in the latest prison swap for hostages held in Gaza. I  have been following the stories of her and her family from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh since she first gained celebrity (or infamy depending on one’s perspective) as an 11 year-old for raising her fist in a very close encounter with a heavily armed Israeli soldier.   Since well before that incident, her family and village have been  protesting the appropriation of their land and the water by an illegal settlement that encroaches by holding weekly demonstrations.

Here is the indigenous town of Nabi Salih which is near the largest Palestinian City of Ramallah.

And this is the illegal settlement of Halamish which is the local source of the problems giving rise to the Tamimis’ protests.

As with most of the multitude of illegal settlements that have cropped up in the West Bank, they threaten the existence of the indigenous Palestinians living there and have killed the hopes for a Palestinian state. This is all being done with the support of the Israel army. As these illegal settlements swell, so do the numbers of heavily armed soldiers posted to “protect” the settlers yet not a finger is ever lifted by them when violence is perpetrated against Palestinians by the settlers. Read about the death of Ahed’s 2 1/2 year old cousin who was “accidentially” shot by an Israeli soldier. Youngest Tamimi killed summer 2023 The trigger happy soldier purportedly thought he was firing at a car purportedly driven by two man who purportedly fired a gun toward the settlement. Of course there will never be a meaningful investigation. This is what the Tamimi family have been protesting for decades.

In 2015, another photo and video went viral when Ahed was assisting in wrestling down an Israeli soldier to try to free her 12 year old brother whose healing broken arm was in was in a cast .

I look at this photo and I can only laugh at comments I’ve read from indignant Zionists at how Ehad Tamimi doesn’t properly respect their valiant Israeli soldiers .

The incident that landed Ahed in Israeli prison for 8 months was in 2017. It was after she had learned that her cousin, Mohammed was shot in the head with a rubber bullet. These are no nerf balls, rather they are steel with a thin rubber coating, and they can kill. This one took out a large section of Mohammed’s skull which left him with a grotesquely misshapen head. If that isn’t bad enough, while he was still suffering from this grievous injury, he was detained and interrogated by the Israeli army where he signed a forced confession that his injury was a result of falling off his bike.

It is now well documented that a rubber bullet was extracted from Mohammed’s head. He ultimately had to undergo cranial reconstruction surgery.

#شاهد l #فيديو
أخت رجال 💪
الطفلة عهد التميمي 17 عام لحظة صفعها ظابط صهيوني بوجهه pic.twitter.com/PcQqOhXaKq

— Omar El Qattaa 𓂆 🇵🇸 📸 (@OmarElQattaa) December 19, 2017

And what happens when a Jewish settler slaps an Israeli soldier? Well, “a slap on the wrist” best sums it up.

What happens when an Israeli settler slaps an Israeli soldier?

This obnoxious woman/repeat offender (and I encountered some of these people in Hebron who defy the term fantatics, when I spent a month in the West Bank) and others in her enclave have made it their life’s mission harassing the Palestinians whose lives they’ve displaced and disrupted. You can read about some of my experiences with such oppression in Hebron in earlier posts here.

“DON’T YOU KNOW IT’S DANGEROUS THERE?” said the fox to the chicken

There is admittedly some inherent reverse racism in the wide publicity Ahed has garnered because of her atypically blonde locks and blue eyes. There is something a little too close to home for many westerners in seeing this blue-eyed girl going mano-to-mano with heavily armed soldiers. The Zionist propaganda machine detests her. She is a fly in their hasbara ointment. On the mild side, she’s been tagged as “Shirley Temper” and on the other end of the spectrum is the likes of a Twitter post from Knesset member, Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich saying that Ahed should have been crippled by being shot in the knee after slapping an IDF soldier. Thankfully, at least Twitter had the sense to suspend his account.

Ahed’s most recent jailing stemmed for a claim that she incited terrorism from a Twitter account that didn’t even belong to her. Apparently there have been numerous fake Aheds on Twitter and I have no doubt that some of these were created to land her in more hot water. For this latest allegation, she was held in prison for 50 days until she was recently released in one of the swaps of Palestinian prisoners for for hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Contrast her treatment for a post from a fake Twitter account with the statement from the Knesset member urging someone to shoot her in the knees.

Ahed with her mother upon her latest release from Israeli prison.

She told her story a few years ago in Ahed’s Open Letter in Vogue Arabia, describing how her first awareness of the increasing peril her family was facing was when she was 3 years old and her father, Bassem was arrested.

I met her father, Bassem in Portland, Maine a few years ago when he doing a tour in the U.S. trying to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians under occupation. He was a kind and articulate man doing everything in his power to awaken the world to the daily injustices he and all Palestinians in the West Bank suffer under Israeli occupation. He has been labeled a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International for his many terms of imprisonment by Israel for his protests. He has paid dearly for his activism as has Ahed and all of her family.