Ahed Tamimi Quotes

Laughter sends a powerful message: We’re still alive, we’re still laughing, and we love life.

Janna always says that her camera is her gun. And truly, what she’s able to shoot with it is far more powerful than any weapon.

Growing up, I’d heard that Israel’s founders said of the Palestinians they forced from their homes to create their state, “The old will die and the young will forget.” But my generation is living proof of the contrary. The resistance of our grandparents lives on through us, and in truth, we perhaps have even more patriotism and energy than our elders.

There is no justice under occupation, and this court is illegal.

The main rule was that our grassroots resistance movement had to be unarmed. The aim was to struggle and resist without hurting or killing anyone.

We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build our homes, to travel, to work—all the basic rights and freedoms you might take for granted living in a civil society simply don’t exist when you’re living under military occupation. It’s not an easy life, and yet, it’s the only one I’ve ever known.

A stone, for us, is a symbol. It represents our rejection of the enemy who has come to attack us. To practice nonviolence doesn’t mean we’ll lie down and surrender to our fate submissively. We still have an active role to play in defending our land. Stones help us act as if we’re not victims but freedom fighters. This mindset helps motivate us in the fight to reclaim our rights, dignity, and land.

Thank you for your tears,” I began. “But I don’t want your sadness. Nor do I want your money. Please save that for the people in your own country who need it. My people have dignity and don’t want your pity. We’re not the victims. The brainwashed Israeli soldier who carries his rifle and shoots with no humanity—he’s the real victim. We want you to see us as the freedom fighters we are, so that you can support us the right way.” I went on to explain how important it was for them to show their solidarity by boycotting Israel politically, economically, and culturally.

But whereas previous U.S. administrations at least pretended to possess some degree of neutrality, Trump burst onto the scene fully embracing Israel’s right-wing policies and appointing Zionists to key positions. He tapped his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, as his ambassador to Israel. Friedman threatened the International Criminal Court over a war crimes investigation into Israel and declared that the illegal settlements did not violate international law. Trump’s own son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was a personal friend of then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and even had financial ties to the illegal settlements. And this was the man Trump had tasked with leading the “peace process.

Watching television in our cells, we became glued to news of the Great March of Return in Gaza, a series of demonstrations that had begun while we were attending our classes. Beginning on March 30, 2018, which Palestinians commemorate as Land Day, the besieged people of Gaza had protested weekly along the fence separating them from Israel. They were demanding an end to Israel’s crippling air, land, and sea blockade, which had effectively trapped them for over a decade inside the world’s largest open-air prison. And they were demanding the right to return to their homes, which Zionist militias had forcibly removed them from to clear the way for Israel’s creation in 1948. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population are, in fact, refugees.

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

When Palestinian prisoners are released, Israeli authorities typically drop them off at a checkpoint, where their families excitedly wait to greet them and bring them home.

Yasser Arafat

We drove to Ramallah, to the presidential compound called the Mukata’a, where former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is buried in a mausoleum and where the current president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is headquartered.

As my family and I were preparing to embark on our European trip, we got word from a Palestinian Authority committee that liaises with Israeli counterparts that Israel planned to ban me from traveling. There was no legal basis for it to ban me; this was just its latest method of political harassment, an attempt to suppress me and to keep me from continuing to tell my story—their story. A large international media campaign blasting Israel for banning me from travel became just the latest public relations nightmare for the Zionist state. After a heavy backlash and the threat of my family suing, Israel eventually announced that it had not banned us from traveling abroad, but that I was banned from entering the 1948 territories because I posed a security threat to the state. As soon as we heard this news, my father told us all to hurry up and pack what we could, because he wanted to put their statement to the test immediately.

The BDS movement, which was inspired by South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, was formally launched in 2005 by 170 Palestinian grassroots and civil society groups. The aim is to put political and economic pressure on Israel to respect Palestinian rights and comply with international law. The three goals of the BDS movement are to end Israel’s military rule over the Palestinian land it occupied in 1967, full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were driven out of their homes in 1948.

Some of our Zionist critics even alleged that we were paid actors in a make-believe industry they dubbed “Pallywood.

Al-Aqsa is the third-holiest site in Islam,

And any sort of construction that occurs without a proper government-issued permit gives Israel the pretext for issuing a demolition order—which is precisely what happened to us.

By this point, the villagers and activists had become more accustomed to evading the tear gas and rubber bullets. And so, the Israeli army brought in a new method of crowd control: skunk water.

The Israeli army’s own regulations forbid soldiers from firing tear gas directly at people. It must be fired from a distance of roughly one hundred feet and pointed upward, so that the canister lands at the feet of demonstrators

Like the Quran says, martyrs are not dead. They’re alive with God. Mustafa will always be alive because he lives on in all of our hearts and in the hearts of everyone here who loves him.

Israel can murder us, displace us, ethnically cleanse us, and usurp our land and resources—all with impunity.

Even more infuriating is knowing that practically any Jewish person in the world can immigrate to Israel and get citizenship, even if they had never previously stepped foot in the country.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish quarters are home to some of the holiest sites of the three major Abrahamic faiths. There’s the Western Wall, sacred to the Jewish people; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians believe to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus; and the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Muhammad prayed with the souls of all the other prophets and ascended to heaven. Jerusalem is the third-holiest city in Islam and preceded Mecca as the first qibla, the direction toward which the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community faced to pray. Beyond that, the city is central to the Palestinian struggle and integral to the soul of every Palestinian, Muslim and Christian alike. It’s our eternal capital.

But under international law—and like the West Bank—East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, is considered occupied Palestinian territory. It has been so ever since it fell under Israeli military rule in 1967.

This was also the United States’ position until 2017, when the Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, an inflammatory move that had far-reaching repercussions for the Palestinian people, the region, and for me personally. For it was during the aftermath of this announcement amid heightened tensions that I was arrested.

Waed was ultimately sentenced to fourteen months in prison for stone throwing.

IT WAS STILL DARK when we pulled up to the prison, but I could see the imposing high walls with their barbed wire and watchtowers. As I’d later learn, international law prohibits an occupying power from transferring prisoners outside occupied territory. But Hasharon Prison is in Israel, and like other Palestinian prisoners, I felt as though I were being kidnapped.

We focused a lot on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with humanitarian protections of civilians in a war zone or under occupation. I was astounded to learn the various ways Israel had systematically violated its obligations under this convention, including through its use of collective punishment, extrajudicial killing, torture, destruction of property, and population transfer, as in how it enabled and incentivized its citizens to move to settlements in the occupied territory.

For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.

The fact that we were imprisoned in Israel, rather than in the occupied territories in which we lived and had been arrested, was a blatant violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That same article states that the occupying power is obligated to provide adequate medical care and special protection for women and child prisoners, which was not the case.

The plea deal, she explained, would require me to plead guilty to four out of the twelve charges brought against me: attacking a soldier, two counts of disrupting a soldier, and incitement. I would also have to pay roughly $1,500 and accept a three-year suspended sentence, which could be activated at any time if I said or did something Israel didn’t like. This meant that once I got out, I’d have to tread lightly and be cautious. The time I’d already served was included in the eight-month sentence, meaning I’d likely be released sometime in July.

In the weeks following my arrest, many of my family members were rounded up by the military as a form of collective punishment for what I had done and for the global attention it had garnered. In a single night, six of my relatives were arrested in predawn raids. Israel’s notoriously racist far-right defense minister justified the arrests by saying, “Dealing with Tamimi and her family has to be severe, exhaust all legal measures and generate deterrence.” And so, the occupation forces continued to target and punish my relatives. It got so bad that some of the parents, with the help of local activists, organized teach-ins to prepare the youth in the village for arrest, blindfolding them to simulate the experience. They also carried out mock interrogations and educated them about their rights.

The only Hitler of Germany was one who adopted the way of atrocities and cruelties for a limited period; he was evil-minded, whereas every leader of Israel was and is characteristically similar to Hitler for several decades of victimising; despite that, they are not evil characters. The Western states eliminated Hitler, but those countries supported and perpetuated the leaders of Israel, and still, they remain on such distinctive policies; it is the worst hypocrisy in human history. Virtually, it will be a self-suicidal move of the Muslim world, especially the Arab States, as religiously, politically, morally, and principally, to recognize Israel, ignoring the Palestinians, in the presence of the United Nations resolutions. Indeed, Israel exists; however, it is an unreal reality as the concept and context of the real validity of Palestinians. Factually, recognition of Israel by the Muslim States and Arab dictators means a license of hegemony, allowing Israel to dominate the Muslim world. The Muslims of the world absolutely will never agree with it and dismiss such a move of Arab dictators. The tiny democracy of the world, Israel seems as an authority upon the United Nations since it does what it wants. Israel is not afraid nor frightened; its state is just the warmonger and the hate-sponsor within humanity. Israel is the creation of the West, supported by the West, and licensed to kill by the West; the Muslim rulers expect a fruitful solution from them; I realize it is an endless stupidity. Spirit of Palestine *** If you do not understand The international law that You constituted yourself If you do not obey and respect Your laws and resolutions We have the right to defend our land By our way, by all means, Whether you call it terrorism Or something else For us, It is the fight for freedom You cannot accept the truth We cannot accept the lies Truth always prevails We will never surrender Nor yield to the evil And genocide forces We are the spirit of Palestine Long live Palestine, Long live Palestine At every cost. Palestine Never Disappears *** They stole Palestine Our land and then our homes They threw us out At gunpoint For our determination And rights We throw the stones They trigger bullets The champions of human rights Watch that, Clapping and cheering As like it is a football match And the football referee is Israel However, Palestine will never disappear Never; never; never We will fight without fear Until we recover and have that Palestine is Crying *** Under the flames of the guns Palestine is crying The Arab world is cowardly silent, West and the rest of the world, Deliberately ignoring justice Even also they are criminally denying Whereas Palestinians are dying If there are no weapons: There will be neither terrible wars Nor criminal deaths, nor tensions Manufacture oxygen of life expectations It is a beautiful destination For all destinations I wish I could fragrance peace and love In the minds and hearts of two Generations of two real brothers. Day Of Mourning, Not Mother’s Day *** A lot of Mothers of Palestine are crying And burying their children, who became The victim of Israel’s cruelty Those mothers have no children To celebrate their Mother’s Day It is a Day of Mourning for those mothers Not Mother’s Day Oh, Palestine, cry, cry, not on Israel But on Muslims who are dead sleeping. Ahed Tamimi Of Palestine The Voice Of Freedom *** You can trigger bullets Upon those, Who stay determined You can shoot Or place under house arrest Hundreds of thousands As such Ahed Tamimi However, You cannot stop The voices, for the freedom And Self-determination You will hear In every second, minute Every hour, every day Until you understand And realize, Voices of the human rights

Some Palestinians still hold on to the old iron keys of the houses from which they were expelled, in the hope of finally being granted the right of return—

Zionism is a nationalist movement that began among some European Jews in the late nineteenth century.

The partition plan gave 55 percent of the land of historic Palestine to the Jewish state and only 42 percent to the Palestinian Arab state. But Palestinians at the time made up 67 percent of the population and owned the vast majority of the land, while Jews made up 37 percent of the population and owned only 7 percent of the land.

Israel declared its statehood on May 14, 1948, but not on empty, uninhabited land. The state was established on the land of my grandparents: historic Palestine. European Jews created a state on territory where the majority of residents were the indigenous Palestinian population. And in order to achieve this state in which they would be the majority, the Zionists had to violently evict the Palestinian majority. Even today, many Zionist thinkers freely admit that without the ethnic cleansing of 1948, they would not have had their Jewish state.

Israel captured even more Palestinian land in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. After swiftly defeating neighboring Arab armies in a matter of days, Israel seized Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and began a military occupation of these Palestinian territories that, to this day, has no end in sight.

The root problem is Israel’s colonial settler project, which seeks to control us, steal our land, and ethnically cleanse us from it. The problem is the occupation itself. And so, exposing the injustices of the occupation for the world to see was one of the most important goals of our movement.

Zionism is the ideology that says that historic Palestine must be a country for Jews only. Zionism is what led to the dispossession of our land, which continues to be seized and occupied. But more dangerous than that is how Zionism has occupied the minds and the humanity of far too many Israelis. That occupation is truly more frightening and intractable.

One of the many horrible consequences of the Oslo Accords is that it gave Israel full control of the water supply in the West Bank.

Skunk water was invented by an Israeli company called Ordotec, which hails itself as a “green” company and calls its product “100% safe for people, animals and plants” in addition to being “the most effective, cost-efficient and safest riot control solution available.

Palestinians from the West Bank, like my family, must remain only in the West Bank. The 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave that Israel has blockaded by air, land, and sea since 2007, are literally trapped there, in what’s called the world’s largest open-air prison. Those of us in the West Bank and Gaza are disconnected from one another and from our Palestinian brethren who live in occupied East Jerusalem and in the cities within ’48.

I later learned that the interrogator soon went back to find my mother—but not to fill her in on the interrogation of her child, which she had the legal right to sit in on. He wanted to interrogate her. “Come with me. I want to ask you some questions,” he said to her. “I’m not under arrest, so you have no right to ask me anything,” she asserted. My mom knew her rights, even if they were seldom honored by the Israelis. “Just a couple of questions, and then you can go,” he tried again. But my mom was no fool. She told him, “You have no legal right to.” “Okay,” he replied. “Well, as of this moment, you’re under arrest.” And just like that, he slapped handcuffs on her wrists and took her in for questioning.

To make matters worse, some of these inmates were legitimately insane. On that first bosta ride, an Israeli man in that larger cell stood up and exposed his penis to me while staring at me with a crazy look in his eyes. Later, two other men took off their clothes and had sex with each other for all the riders to see. As a sixteen-year-old girl who hadn’t witnessed anything beyond a kissing scene in a Hollywood movie, I was appalled. I closed my eyes and tried my hardest to fight back the tears.

Ofer is an Israeli military court located inside a military base, and despite the fact that I was a civilian, I was tried there.

Just as my mother said this, Nour slouched back in the metal chair she was sitting on and placed her hands below the seat. She paused for a second, looking puzzled as her hands felt something beneath the chair. “Ahed, come look,” she whispered. I lowered my head to see what she was touching. And that’s when I saw it: a voice recorder taped to the bottom of her seat.

And as we followed the news, we learned that the Israeli government was debating the controversial and racist “Basic” or Nation-State Law, which it ended up passing in July 2018. The law declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as the official language of the country, with Arabic downgraded to “special status.” Finally, the law mandates that the state regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israeli apartheid was now more official than ever.

After some of the girls were released or transferred to another cell because they turned eighteen, I, along with Hadiya, was moved to a new cell with another set of minors. For a while, we were eleven girls in a cell with only six beds, but even just six people would have felt overcrowded given the size of the cell.

And why am I supposed to trust that you’re going to translate it honestly?” “Excuse me,” he scoffed, looking terribly offended. “We’re the Israeli police here, not the Palestinian Authority, which you can guarantee would deal with you dishonestly.” “Excuse me,” I replied. “So, I’m just supposed to trust you’re being honest with me and sign this paper?” “Exactly.” “Well, I’m not going to sign something I don’t understand. What are you going to do about that?” “Don’t sign it, then! You think you’re dealing with the Palestinian Authority? We have integrity here, and your people need another hundred years to get where we are!

I knew all about administrative detention, from all the times it had happened to my father. It meant that neither Khalida nor her lawyer knew the reason for her arrest and imprisonment, nor when she’d get out. As is always the case with administrative detention, all they knew was that Israel had a secret file on her that classified her as a security threat. Any “evidence” they allegedly had was never disclosed to her. And so her detention was indefinite.

We learned that its full name was the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and that it was ratified by Israel in 1991. Article 1 of the convention defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information, or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity…

For my classmates from Jerusalem, this included living under the constant threat of Israel revoking their residency permits and forcing them out of their homes. In fact, in March 2018, the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the interior minister to revoke the residency rights of any Palestinian in Jerusalem on the basis of a “breach of loyalty” to Israel. This was merely one of Israel’s many calculated policies and part of a decades-long plan to maintain a solid Jewish majority in the city.

The Israelis had set us up, placing us together in the same cell and my mom right next to us, within earshot. They were trying to entrap us, thinking we’d be sitting there attempting to get our stories straight, discussing important matters pertaining to our village. I’m sure they assumed we would inadvertently implicate other relatives, who would then also be arrested. We were already being cautious with our words, to avoid falling into any trap they might have set. But after discovering that everything we said was being taped, I wanted to make sure they knew they couldn’t outsmart us. So, I began deliberately saying things to spite them.

THE ISRAELI EQUIVALENT TO a U.S. parole hearing is the shleesh, which translates to “one third.” A prisoner gets this hearing when they have completed two thirds of their sentence. They’re expected to apologize to the court for their crimes, and if the court deems them worthy, they can have up to a third of their sentence deducted and be released early. For Palestinians, this is a very rare outcome, but many of us roll the dice and attend our shleesh hearings regardless.

Corresponding through letters isn’t an option, either. Regular mail delivery is one of many luxuries Palestinians don’t have under occupation. Most of our houses and buildings aren’t numbered, which means incoming mail is usually sent to post offices. But that mail first must be processed, and likely inspected, by Israel, and there’s no guarantee if or when it will arrive to its intended recipient. There was no official way that prisoners like me could send letters out. Only the girls from Jerusalem or who lived within Israel had that option. But even then, the letters they’d try to send out or receive from their families would be stuck for months with Israeli intelligence officials, who probably read everything and would sometimes sit on mail for weeks.

Israel’s civil courts deny bail to Israeli children in only 18 percent of cases. But in cases involving Palestinian children, the military courts deny bail 70 percent of the time.

Any Palestinian prisoner will tell you that the bosta journey is one of the most difficult parts of their experience of being incarcerated. To call it hell on wheels is an understatement. To help you picture it, imagine a bus divided into narrow cells. The interior is all metal, including the seats. Many of the cells, like the one I was in, are barely big enough to fit one person. My cell was essentially as wide as the seat I was in, making it impossible for me to move at all. Never mind the fact that I was also shackled at the wrists and ankles. The cell was so tight that my knees hit the metal door in front of me, and if the driver accelerated or swerved, my body would bang into the sides. Other than forcing prisoners to sit in an extremely uncomfortable physical position for hours, the bosta was poorly ventilated, and its odors were revolting. It often reeked of vomit from passengers who had thrown up on themselves or of urine from inmates who had peed themselves, unable to hold it in any longer. The stench of the police dogs who patrolled the bus was also always in the air. The temperature in the bosta was another major hardship. In the winter, which is when I was arrested, it was freezing. The cold metal chair made it feel like I was sitting on a giant block of ice—for hours. I later learned that layering two pairs of pants, three shirts, and a jacket would help me survive, and I began to dress accordingly. But despite all the layers, each time I returned to the prison, my hands would be swollen and blue and it would take hours for them to regain normal sensation.

In defiance of Israel’s prison administration, which bans education for prisoners as a form of collective punishment,

Before the interrogation began, I was led into an office belonging to a female officer. When I entered, a male uniformed soldier appeared to be finishing up whatever business he had to do in there. I immediately recognized him as the soldier I’d slapped. Our eyes locked for a moment, and as soon as he recognized me, his facial expression grew angry and he swiftly walked out of the room. I sensed he was ashamed of himself, as he should have been.

She wrote about the apartheid wall, which, in a nonbinding decision, the International Court of Justice had declared illegal in 2004. We all knew firsthand that the wall cut right through Palestinian towns and villages, dividing communities and separating many farmers from their land. Israel contends that the wall is needed for security, to prevent attacks, but it didn’t construct the wall along the pre-1967 Green Line, which is recognized as the boundary between Israel and the West Bank. Rather, the wall was built deep within the West Bank, enabling Israel to annex even more Palestinian land. The same classmate also wrote about how Israel’s many permanent and temporary checkpoints prevent Palestinians from moving around freely and add painful delays to what should be short, direct journeys. She interviewed some of us about our own experiences with checkpoints. I told her about the spontaneous checkpoints the military regularly erect at the entrance to our village and how we’d sometimes sit in the car for hours trying to go to school or work or whatever appointment we had. Another aspect of her research project looked at the identification cards we are forced to carry at all times and present at the checkpoints. She interviewed some of our classmates from the West Bank about how they aren’t allowed to go to Jerusalem or any city inside ’48 without a permit from Israel, which isn’t easy to obtain.

I’m letting you know that we have begun to interrogate your daughter,” he said and hung up. He was speaking to my mother. She had come to attend my interrogation, which was her legal right as the parent of a minor under arrest. But as is commonly the case, the Israeli authorities didn’t allow her to do so.

The women’s cell block we were in was designated for what Israel calls “security prisoners.” Israel classifies all the Palestinians it detains in its custody as “security prisoners,” regardless of their alleged offense or criminal activity. But Palestinians use “political prisoner” to describe those of us detained in relation to the occupation.

Some of the girls who served time with me had been arrested in the uprisings of 2015, accused of possessing knives and trying to carry out attacks against soldiers. But the overwhelming number of children are detained for participating in demonstrations and clashes, for creating social media posts Israel deems as incitement, or for “insulting the honor of a soldier.” Most of the time, they’re accused of throwing stones. Once a girl turned eighteen, she’d be transferred to another cell, one with adult women. Meanwhile, new girls would come and go, as some didn’t have long sentences. The other sections of the prison housed Israeli civilians who had committed criminal offenses. Despite their being housed in different cell blocks, we could easily hear their shouts and cries at all hours of the day and night.

Because most cases end with the defendant accepting a plea deal to avoid the harsher sentence that would result from going through the full trial, we experience a near–100 percent conviction rate.

Some Palestinians still hold on to the old iron keys of the houses from which they were expelled, in the hope of finally being granted the right of return—a right that is supported by international law but vehemently denied by the state of Israel.

Israel is a nuclear-armed country. It has had peace treaties in place with its neighboring Arab countries Egypt and Jordan since 1979 and 1994, respectively, and has normalized relations with a host of other Arab countries in recent years.

Every Palestinian knows that there can never be peace in the absence of justice—so this false concept of “peace” wasn’t just elusive; it was farcical.

It happened in the middle of the night, while the young family of four was fast asleep in their home in the West Bank village of Duma. Two Israeli settlers threw a firebomb into their house, setting it ablaze. Flames engulfed the home and baby Ali, just eighteen months old, was killed. His father, Sa’ad, was so badly burned that he died a week later. That left the mother, Reham Dawabsheh, and her four-year-old son, Ahmed, as the only surviving members of the family. Reham, who was a teacher in an elementary school, suffered third-degree burns on 90 percent of her body—and after nearly five weeks on life support, she also died. And so, four-year-old Ahmed became the sole surviving member of his immediate household. Second- and third-degree burns covered 60 percent of his body. And this little boy was now motherless, fatherless, and brotherless.

I discovered other parallels with South African apartheid. I learned that to control the movement of Black people, the apartheid regime had imposed a “pass” system forcing every Black person to carry an identity document indicating whether they had permission to be in a given area—and permission to be in any city was granted only to those employed by white farms, mines, or businesses. Black people who lacked a pass to be in a city could be summarily deported to a rural economic wasteland known as a Bantustan. Similarly, to control our movement as Palestinians in the occupied territories, Israel imposes color-coded identification cards and license plates, has installed an elaborate permit and checkpoint system, and has designated specific roads we’re allowed to drive on—not to mention that Israel erected an apartheid wall.

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.

While I believe that it’s the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I’ve always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can’t serve the Palestinian cause if I’m dead.

I imagined playing outside, maybe even on a real playground or an actual soccer field with grass, without armed soldiers interrupting my game. Instead, I played in streets and on hills and in front and back yards littered with the remnants of bullets and explosives fired at us by Israeli forces, much of this ordnance marked “Made in the United States.” It’s impossible to play without accidentally kicking or stepping on these artifacts.

At the time, Israel was pummeling the besieged Gaza Strip yet again with air strikes, in what it called Operation Pillar of Defense.

Once again thanks to the ill-fated Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three noncontiguous areas: A, B, and C. Area A, which today constitutes 18 percent of the West Bank, falls under the control of the Palestinian Authority. That means the PA is in charge of education, health, the economy, and policing there. In Area B, which constitutes 22 percent of the West Bank, the PA is similarly in charge of civil affairs, but its police presence exists only in coordination with the Israeli army. In both Areas A and B, the Israeli army can enter whenever it wants to carry out raids and arrests, and it does so frequently. Finally, there’s Area C, which makes up an overwhelming 60 percent of the West Bank and is fully under Israel’s civil and security control. This includes all matters related to land allocation, planning and construction, and infrastructure. Area C is where all of Israel’s illegal settlements are located, in addition to the accompanying bypass roads built exclusively for the settlers to use. Area C is also richly endowed with natural resources, like the main water aquifer for the entire country, which Israel controls.

Even though most of us didn’t know one another, we felt a sense of urgency and unity in partaking in this rebellion. We kept our faces wrapped in kuffiyehs as a safety precaution, to avoid being identifiable to the Israeli army and, in many cases, to our parents.

An unspoken rule at these clashes was that the Palestinian guys weren’t allowed to wear long shirts, and whatever shirts they wore had to be tucked into their pants. They did this to distinguish themselves from the undercover Israeli agents, or mista’rabeen, who dressed in plainclothes to disguise themselves as Palestinians in order to ambush and arrest us. They’d even wear kuffiyehs to try to fully assimilate with us. What often gave them away, though, was that they pulled their shirts down over their waistbands, to conceal the guns they’d hidden there.

Often, in between throwing stones, the guys would do things just to get a rise out of the soldiers, like sing and clap and dance the dabkeh. They had mastered such antics to spite the soldiers, all while unintentionally entertaining the rest of us. When a soldier fired a tear gas canister, one of the guys might wait for it to land on the ground and then run over and place a bucket over it to contain the smoke. He’d then take a seat on the bucket, cross one leg over the other, and stare at the soldiers with a big smile on his face. Once he stood and picked up the bucket, the tear gas would be fully extinguished. It was a brilliantly hilarious little victory.

It might strike some as odd for a young Palestinian girl to put her body on the line to defend an Israeli, but that’s not how I see it. Miko is on the right side of history. Even though it means going against his society and the army in which he once served, he puts his body and privilege on the line to support us and fight for justice. His allegiance is not to a particular country or flag, but rather to those who share his values. Miko puts humanity over nationality, and that fact alone makes him one of us.

After that viral confrontation, Waed was arrested and jailed for ten months.

THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump as president of the United States was one of the worst things to happen to the Palestinian people in recent years.

Before leaving office, President Barack Obama signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel that included a record $38 billion to provide the country with military assistance over a ten-year period. It guaranteed a steady flow of American-funded and -manufactured weapons—which Israel uses, among other applications, to kill us.

For example, the Trump administration cruelly cut virtually all humanitarian aid to Palestinians, including funding for Palestinian hospitals and for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, to which the United States was the largest donor. UNRWA was set up after Israel’s creation in 1948 to help Palestinian refugees and had served as a lifeline to millions of Palestinians ever since.

But the true moment of reckoning came on December 6, 2017, when Trump announced plans to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital. This was a profound betrayal of Palestinians and a significant break from previous U.S. administrations, which had considered, yet put off, making such a bold move.

Palestinian officials have repeatedly sat at the negotiating table with the goal of making East Jerusalem, currently illegally occupied by Israel, the capital of a future Palestinian state.

So, when Trump claimed that moving the embassy was “a long-overdue step to advance the peace process and to work towards a lasting agreement,” it wasn’t just a slap in the face to us; it was an outright lie.

If Jaysh o ‘Arab reflected our trauma and goals to liberate Palestine, playing house expressed our dreams of a normal life.

This has been one of Israel’s worst fears, so much so that the state launched a vigorous campaign to criminalize BDS through legislation. Its top ally, the United States, has also attacked and criminalized the movement. Since 2014, state and local legislatures and even the U.S. Congress have enacted more than one hundred measures penalizing groups and businesses that boycott Israel. Thirty-two U.S. states have passed anti-boycott laws—this in a country that claims to uphold free speech. In its fierce crackdown on the movement, the United States has followed Israel’s lead in dishonestly branding BDS as anti-Semitic. But it’s not anti-Semitic. It’s anti-Zionist, and conflating the two not only is dangerous, but it dismisses our valid grievances as a population denied our human rights and our rightful land. Once again, as Palestinians, we are punished if we protest violently and nonviolently.

I’m a firm believer that the international community must boycott Israel and pursue it for war crimes in the international courts. I also believe that the only possible and acceptable resolution at this point is a one-state solution. My vision is for us to live in a single democratic state where everyone is equal, Muslim, Christian, and Jew. Judaism is a religion, just like Islam. It is a different way of worshipping the same God we call Allah, and we respect that. But Zionism is a political ideology that says Judaism is not only a religion, but primarily a nationality—and that it needs a country. Not just any country, but our country, and that it needs this country to be for Jews alone. Zionism has taken our country, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims have lived for centuries, and made it a country that is ruled by and for Jews alone.

There’s even a color-coded identification system to help facilitate this apartheid. We’re forced to carry green identification cards at all times, which dictate the limited possibilities of our lives. The white license plates that Israel assigns to our cars stipulate which roads we’re allowed to drive on.

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.

administrative detention.” Israel uses this designation to imprison Palestinians for up to six months without having to charge them or give them a trial. After six months, the state can renew the detention through a military administrative order. Some Palestinians end up serving years under administrative detention without ever knowing why they’re being held.

Salam, in Arabic, means “peace,

And just as Black people under South African apartheid weren’t allowed to vote for the government that controlled their lives, we don’t get to vote in Israel’s elections. Palestinian citizens of Israel do have voting rights, but they are subject to more than fifty discriminatory laws affecting everything from immigration and family reunification to land ownership rights, simply because they’re not Jewish.

On top of that, the number of Israeli settlers had doubled between 1993 and 2000. The occupation was more entrenched than ever.

Finally, at around noon, I was taken into an interrogation room—the first of several times I’d be forced to sit through hours of nonstop interrogation alone, as a minor, which I’d later learn was a violation of international law.

We believe the length of his sentence was retaliatory—revenge for what I had done and the attention it had caused.

Israel’s response to these demonstrations was deadly. Each week, Israeli snipers opened fire on the protesters, ultimately killing hundreds and wounding thousands over the course of the year-long protests. The scenes of bloodied protesters, journalists, and medics were shocking and heart-wrenching. In our classes, we had learned that, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, it was illegal for Israel to target unarmed civilians like this, and that, in so doing, it may have been committing a war crime.