Interviewing Ahed Tamimi for my television show Sputnik on RT yesterday it was frankly difficult to believe she is only 18 years old. She is the most famous teenager in the world – because the world is the whole world and not just our tiny corner of it – and was legally and actually a child when she burst upon the scene after slapping an Israeli soldier two years ago on her homestead in Nabi Salih near Ramallah in the occupied territories of the West Bank of the River Jordan.
Her defiance – honed from the age of 8 – is not of course unique indeed it is commonplace in the long resistance to Israeli occupation (in her village’s case since 1967). Her punishment is no more unique, there are thousands of Palestinian political prisoners and many of them are female many of them are minors. So what was it about Ahed Tamimi that was responsible for he sudden elevation to international attention?
A very great deal of effort has gone in to the “othering” of Palestinians an effort often assisted by Palestinian groups themselves who seem ever-ready to put up spokespeople on bad lines in bad English, equipped with clumsy phraseology, ill-fitting suits and badly needing a shave to speak to international television stations.
In Ahed Tamimi the Occupation forces, their quasi-legal apparatus, their western-trained and accented spokespeople had picked on a very different-looking Palestinian.
Tamimi looked just like your daughter looked at 16, skinny jeans, a shock of curly blonde-hair, blue eyes and a gaze that suggested she’d be as ready to settle down to play with a puppy or listen to Justin Bieber as to confront the heavily armed soldiers trespassing on her land. This was a problem for an Israeli occupation long used to western public opinion passing “the other” by on the other side of the road…
It is, of course a shocking indictment of the orientalism in western countries that if Ahed Tamimi had looked eastern not western had worn a hijab and not Levis had black hair and dark eyes not blonde hair and blue eyes she could have been shot down dead on her doorstep or left forever to rot in her jail cell so far as western news media is concerned.
But she was who she is and thus was propelled first by social media and then through virtually every major newspaper and television network in the land to iconic status.
Since when she hasn’t put a foot wrong. My interview which will be shown in two parts on June 8th and June 15th on Sputnik on RT (and everywhere else thereafter I think) will show that if Prison is a university for political inmates anyway, Tamimi has graduated with a first class degree.
Firstly though her family has lost 25 martyrs and provided a hundred prisoners, has given more of a single family’s blood collectively than I have ever heard of in their cause, the story is NOT about her or the Tamimi clan (500 of them in her single village). She reels off the names of the other female prisoners who looked after her in the jail and who unlike her may never see the light of day outside. And though she clearly has issues with the political leadership of the Palestinians today (few don’t) she carefully skirts around any trace of personal political bias. Its all about the nation. Everything for the nation. In fact at just 18 she is already Ambassadorial class – literally – and if the Palestinian leaders were smart they’d already have sent her as part of their diplomatic effort at the United Nations. But when I ask her if she might be a president one day she smiles becomingly and eschews all personal political ambition. Just like an 18 year-old future president should.
When I learnt that Tamimi was in London to learn English I imagined – with thirty years of parliamentary experience under my belt – that the traditional Arabism of the Foreign Office had kicked in, that she’d been talent spotted, identified as a future leader, and adopted by the old colonial power as an investment in the future.
But that was the Britain I knew and not the Britain we have now.
It turns out that she is here privately, that the funding for the course is donations from American well-wishers not the British government and the course is for three weeks only (her fellow students are Taiwanese and Korean debutantes) scarcely enough time to learn restaurant English (and in Ramadan too).
All of which confirmed to me that British policy towards the Arab middle-east today is not just knavish but foolish. It’s difficult to know which is worse, but probably foolish if you forced me to choose.
George Galloway
London