A slap that reverberated around the globe

By Gulamhusein A. Abba

One fine day, Friday, December 15 to be exact, a teenaged girl, 16 years old, saw two fully armed soldiers, in battle gear, with guns in their hands, standing in the front court of her house. She did not want them there. She went up to them and asked them to leave. They did not budge. She started prodding and pushing them. There was a scuffle. At this point the mother of the girl came out of the house and intervened to calm the situation. Then the teenaged girl, acting with the recklessness typical of teenagers, did something unimaginable. She slapped one of the fully armed soldiers! The scuffle escalated. The mother pulled the girls away and pacified the soldiers. The scuffle ended. The soldiers stayed where they were. The incident was closed.

However, five days later, on Tuesday 19, the soldiers came back. This time they did not just stand in the front court. They soldiers burst into the home and dragged the grl out of bed. They placed her in handcuffs and put her in the back of their military jeep and drove off

Ahed Tamimi

 It did not stop there.  The next day, her mother was arrested at the police station trying to find her daughter. The following afternoon, her 21-year-old cousin was taken into custody.

On Monday 25, the court refused to allow bail for her and on Tuesday Dec.26 it extended her detention for a period of 10 days ,

Ahed Tamimi and her mother Nariman Tamimi

Arrest a teenager for slapping a soldier? And the mother who intervened and pulled away the teenager? And why days after the slapping incident? And why were there armed soldiers in the front court of a private house?

First, why the arrest took place days after the incident?. It turns out that the teenager was a Palestinian girl, 16 years old, named Ahed Tamimi and the soldiers were IDF soldiers. The whole scuffle between the teenager and the soldiers, including the slap, had been videotaped. It was put out on social media and went viral

There was a furor. The Israeli public and the politicians were demanding that this chit of a Palestinian girl be punished. Words like “castrated” and “impotent” were bandied about to describe how they felt when they saw one of their soldiers, with his helmet and his body armor and his gun, being slapped by 

this chit of a Palestinian girl. There were calls for her being raped. Joining them was an Israeli journalist.

Why were the soldiers in the front court of Ahed Tamimi’s house?

On the day of the slapping incident, Friday Dec.15, there was the usual Friday protest by the villagers at Nabi Saleh against the confiscation by Israeli settlers of the al-Qus spring and other village-owned land. The spring lay in the valley between the village and the settlement of Halamish, and Nabi Saleh had joined a handful of other villages that chose the path of unarmed resistance, marching to protest the occupation every Friday, week after week. These peaceful demonstrations have been held from December 2009.

Ahed’s cousin, Mustafa Tamimi, had already been killed, shot in the face with a tear-gas canister. Her mother’s brother, Rushdie Tamimi, was killed In November of 2012, shot in the back by an Israeli soldier just down the hill from her house. But the tiny village didn’t stop. They kept marching, every Friday, to the spring. The soldiers kept stopping them with tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets. The army came during the week too, “making arrests, searching houses, spreading fear”

Mohammed Tamimi lying in a medically induced coma in a hospital to which he was rushed after being shot in the face  shortly before Israeli Occupation Forces went to Tamimi residence and it led to Ahed slapping one of them

At the December 15 demonstration 14-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was shot directly in the face by an IDF soldier with a rubber coated steel bullet.  The boy was rushed to surgery and had to be placed in a medically induced coma. Moments after the shooting, armed Israeli soldiers came to Ahed Tamimi’s house.

Why did Ahed “foolishly” slap the IDF soldier? It was not just the trespassing by the soldiers. It was all that had gone before it. The Tamimi family has been repeatedly targeted by Israeli forces because they refuse to stand down in the face of their invaders. 

Billboards of Ahed have been posted at bus stope and train statins in London

Despite attempts by Zionist media to downplay the story of her arrest, it has drawn international attention. She has made news in Pakistan, India, and Singapore, and her face can now be seen on billboards at bus stops and train stations in London.