{"id":19342,"date":"2018-10-21T21:22:45","date_gmt":"2018-10-21T21:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19342"},"modified":"2018-10-21T21:22:45","modified_gmt":"2018-10-21T21:22:45","slug":"palestinian-protest-ahed-tamimi-icon-goes-from-jail-cell-to-vip-suite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19342","title":{"rendered":"Palestinian protest Ahed Tamimi icon goes from jail cell to VIP suite"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nJERUSALEM: When Israel locked up Ahed Tamimi for slapping a soldier last year, it hoped to finally silence the teenage Palestinian activist. Instead, it created an international celebrity.
Less than three months after walking out of prison, Tamimi is on a victory tour, crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East as a superstar of the campaign against Israeli occupation. She has spoken to throngs of adoring fans, met world leaders and was even welcomed by the Real Madrid soccer club.
The VIP reception has dismayed Israeli officials and is prompting some to ask if Israel mishandled the case.
\u201cWe could have been smarter,\u201d said Yoaz Hendel, a media commentator and former spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Tamimi gained international attention last year when she confronted an Israeli soldier in front of her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. She kicked and slapped him, and then took a swing at a second soldier in a videotaped incident that spread quickly on social media.
Tamimi\u2019s extended family has long been on Israel\u2019s radar screen. Nabi Saleh is home to some 600 people and for years, they have held weekly protests against the expansion of a nearby Israeli settlement, gatherings that sometimes turn to stone-throwing, prompting Israeli troops to respond with tear gas, rubber bullets or live fire.
For Israelis, the Tamimis are a group of provocateurs but among Palestinians, they are seen as brave heroes standing up to Israel.
But neither side anticipated the fallout from last December\u2019s standoff, which occurred during one of the weekly protests.
The military said it moved in after villagers began throwing stones at troops. In the video, Tamimi and her cousin, Nour, walk toward the two soldiers. Tamimi tells the soldiers to leave, pushes and kicks them and slaps one of them.
As the cousin films the scene on her mobile phone, Tamimi\u2019s mother, Nariman, arrives. At one point, she steps between Ahed and the soldiers, but then also tries to push back the soldiers, who do not respond. Ahed Tamimi later said that she was upset because a cousin had been shot in the face by a rubber bullet fired by Israeli troops.
As the video spread, Palestinians celebrated Ahed as a hero. Cartoons, posters and murals portrayed her as a Joan of Arc-like character, confronting the Israeli military with her mane of long, dirty-blond curls flowing in the breeze.
In Israel, the incident set off its own uproar. While the army praised the soldiers for showing restraint, politicians felt the army had been humiliated and called for tough action against the young firebrand. Days later, in an overnight raid, troops entered Tamimi\u2019s house and took her and her mother away. Both were given eight-month prison sentences.
Israel has traditionally been obsessive about defending its image \u2014 making the term \u201chasbara,\u201d which roughly translates as public relations, part of its national lexicon. But as the country has moved toward the right under the decade-long rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, charm has been replaced increasingly with confrontation.
Under his watch, Israel has tried to weaken liberal advocacy groups critical of his policies, detained Jewish American critics at the airport for questioning and banned people who boycott the Jewish state from entering. It attempted to expel an American woman who will be studying at an Israeli university, accusing her of being a boycott activist. She was held in detention for two weeks until Israel\u2019s Supreme Court overturned the expulsion order.
While widely supported at home, these policies risk backfiring on the international stage.
Weeks after her release from prison, Tamimi began a tour that has taken her to France, Spain, Greece, Tunisia and Jordan. At nearly every stop, she has been welcomed by cheering crowds.
\u201cI don\u2019t like living as a celebrity. It\u2019s not an easy life to live. I\u2019m exhausted,\u201d she said in a telephone interview from the Jordanian capital, Amman. \u201cBut what I like more is delivering the message of my people. That makes me feel proud.\u201d
She kicked off her tour on Sept. 14 in Paris, where she participated in the Communist Party\u2019s \u201cHumanity\u201d rally. The popular weekend festival attracts rockers, rappers and other entertainers and celebrities. On the festival\u2019s last day, she spoke to thousands of cheering supporters. She traveled to other cities around France at the invitation of the France Palestine Solidarity Association.
In Greece, she was a headliner for the 100th-anniversary celebration of the country\u2019s Communist party, KKE. Addressing a crowd of thousands, she was interrupted by several long ovations and chants of \u201cFreedom for Palestine.\u201d
\u201cYour support means a lot to me. It gives me a big push to return to my homeland and continue my struggle vigorously against the occupation,\u201d she told the crowd. \u201cFree people unite to face capitalism, imperialism and colonization … We are not victims. We are freedom fighters.\u201d
Her family was invited as official guests of Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Israeli bombing of what was then the Palestine Liberation Organization\u2019s headquarters. At the ceremony, Essebsi gave her a statue of a silver dove with an olive branch.
Meetings with Jordan\u2019s King Abdullah II and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are in the works, said her father, Bassem Tamimi, who has been accompanying her.
\u201cOn the Champs-Elysees in Paris, we were surrounded by hundreds of people who wanted to talk to Ahed and take pictures with her,\u201d her father said. \u201cThe same thing happened in every other city we visited.\u201d
In a sign of her mainstream appeal, Tamimi recently wrote a first-person account of her time in prison for Vogue Arabia, a Middle Eastern edition of the popular fashion magazine.
\u201cI want to be a regular 17-year-old. I like clothes, I like makeup. I get up in the morning, check my Instagram, have breakfast and walk in the hills around the village,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBut I am not a normal teenager.\u201d
Israeli officials have remained silent throughout her tour \u2014 with one exception. Tamimi\u2019s reception at Real Madrid, where she met the legendary striker Emilio Butragueno and received a team jersey with her name on it, was too much to bear.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon called the team\u2019s embrace of Tamimi \u201cshameful\u201d in a Twitter post. \u201cIt would be morally wrong to stay silent while a person inciting to hatred and violence goes on a victory tour as if she is some kind of rock star,\u201d he said.
Israel faces a dilemma \u2014 wanting to respond but fearing criticism will attract even more attention.
Michael Oren, Israel\u2019s deputy minister for public diplomacy and a former ambassador to the United States, learned a bitter lesson when he acknowledged earlier this year leading a secret investigation into whether the Tamimis were \u201creal\u201d Palestinians.
He said their light features, Western clothes and long history of run-ins with Israeli forces suggested that they were actually paid provocateurs out to hurt the country\u2019s image. The investigation concluded that the family was indeed real \u2014 prompting mockery and racism accusations from the Tamimis.
Tamimi is reflective of changing Palestinian sentiment. Where an older generation of political leaders sought either armed struggle or a two-state solution with Israel, many younger Palestinians have given up on the long-stalled peace process and instead favor a single state in which Jews and Arabs live equally. Israel objects to a binational state, saying it is merely an attempt to destroy the country through a nonviolent disguise.
\u201cIsrael is unhappy because she highlights to the world both how unjust the occupation is and how absurd their legal system is,\u201d said Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority. \u201cIsrael instead wants subservient Palestinians who simply stay quiet in the face of the denial of freedom. Ahed shows that won\u2019t happen \u2014 including not with this generation.\u201d
Hendel, the former Israeli government spokesman, said he initially supported Israel\u2019s tough response to the slapping incident but now thinks it was an error. He said issuing a fine or punishing her parents for their daughter\u2019s actions might have generated less attention.
He acknowledged there is a broader problem for which Israel does not seem to have a good answer.
\u201cShe\u2019s powerful, part of a sophisticated machine that tries to delegitimize Israel by using photos and creating scenarios that portray Israel as Goliath and the other side as David,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is much easier to fight terrorism than to fight civilians motivated by terrorist leaders. I think Tamimi in this story is a kind of a front line for a much bigger organization, or even a process.\u201d
Tamimi could continue to frustrate the Israelis for many years to come. She completed her high school studies in prison and now hopes to study international law in Britain. She dreams of one day representing the Palestinians in institutions like the International Criminal Court.
\u201cInternational law is a strong tool to defend my people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are under occupation and we have to rely on international law to get the world behind us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM: When Israel locked up Ahed Tamimi for slapping a soldier last year, it hoped to finally silence the teenage Palestinian activist. Instead, it created an international celebrity.Less than three months after walking out of prison, Tamimi is on a victory tour, crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East as a superstar of the campaign against…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}