Ahed Tamimi - They Called Me a Lioness : A Palestinian Girls Fight for Freedom

I SIT SHIVERING IN the tiny, freezing cell of an Israeli interrogation center, my wrists and ankles sore from the tightly clasped shackles digging into them. I inhale deeply, trying to suppress the flow of tears streaming down my cheeks now that I finally have a moment to myself, away from the taunts and jeers of the soldiers whove been harassing me for hours. Here, I allow myself to momentarily let down my guard. Im all alone in this cell, but I feel no privacy. I spot cameras above me, on two opposite corners of the ceiling, pointed right at me. One seems to capture the cells bathroom, which has a partially exposed ceiling. Ive been dying to empty my bladder for hours, but with the risk of being filmed, I have refused to go.

For a second, I ask myself how I ended up here. How did it come to this? But I know better than to agonize over this question. This moment was inevitable, something I expected my whole life. Getting arrested by the Israeli army was always a matter of when, not if.

Days earlier, I slapped a fully armed Israeli soldier in the face in front of my house, a slap that reverberated around the world. It wasnt the first time I hit one of them; nor was it the first time it was captured on film, but it was certainly the most noticed. In a state that controls every aspect of my life, I have become the object of widespread enmity. Some even want me dead for daring to insult the central symbol of their occupation. But what I did was a natural reaction to seeing belligerent foreign occupiers on my familys land, an immoral army that had just nearly killed my cousin and was now shooting at children from the entrance of my home. And now I must pay for what I did.

Still, I ask myself, Why now? Im only sixteen years old and in my senior year of high school. I should be taking my English final exam today, and I worry how much Ill fall behind by missing it. How long will I be forced to be away from school? Ive worked so hard to get to this point, and my entire future rides on the test scores I pull off at the end of the year. Im supposed to be studying right now, not sitting here under arrest. Im supposed to graduate in a few months, not be locked up in prison. This thought makes me cry even more.

I close my eyes to try to plug the tears now pouring, but also because I can no longer bear the sight of the feces-stained walls surrounding me in this repulsive cell. Instead, my mind flashes back to the inflection points that brought me to this moment. The memories Ill never be able to shake, no matter how hard I try, now revisit me in an ambush. There I am, a five-year-old, sobbing in the middle of the night because Israeli soldiers have once again barged into our house to arrest my father. I see my mother falling on the concrete road after being shot by a soldier in a jeep; my younger brother pinned to the ground by another soldier, who is squeezing his little neck in a chokehold; my favorite uncle bleeding to death on the rocks behind our home.

This was the price my village paid for the unarmed resistance movement we dared to wage against our occupiers, the violent punishment we incurred for holding weekly protests to defend our rights and our land. I see the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber-coated steel bullets, and the live rounds I grew up constantly having to dodge, sometimes more successfully than others. I replay all the visits to the hospital and all the funeral processions we marched in when the army killed one of our own. I hear the wailing sobs of our mothers and aunts in anguish and the defiant chants of our grieving loved ones demanding justice. I think about all the stories Ive heard from my relatives, young and old, who were held captive in Israeli prisons. There are far too many of them for me even to attempt to count. Being arrested by Israels army has always been a fact of life for us, practically a rite of passage thats impossible to avoid.

And now my turn has come.