After eight months in an Israeli prison, 17-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi and her mother Nariman Tamimi were released on 29 July.
The Tamimis were arrested in December, after Israeli television screened a video, shot by Nariman, of Ahed and her cousin Nour confronting a heavily armed Israeli soldier who had intruded into the Tamimis’ home. Nour was also arrested, but released after 16 days.
Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev, a former military spokesperson, was among those who called for retribution against the Tamimis, saying that after watching the video: “I felt humiliated, I felt crushed”.
According to Regev, the footage of a teenage Palestinian girl standing up to an Israeli soldier – which occurred less than half an hour after her 14-year-old cousin Muhammed had been shot in the head by another soldier – was “damaging to the honour of the military and the state of Israel”.
Israeli education minister Naftali Bennet called for Ahed and Nour to “spend the rest of their days in prison”. Prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit hailed the soldier’s “restraint” and called for violence against the young women. “In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”, he wrote.
After Nariman and Ahed were jailed, settlers from the nearby Israeli colony of Halamish, built on land belonging to the residents of Nabi Saleh, the village in which the Tamimis live, staged protests. They carried makeshift coffins and chanted, “Death to Ahed Tamimi!”
Read the article by Kim Bullimore in Red Flag.