AHED TAMIMI
When is an Arab female heroic in the public eye, and not reviled? It’s a trick question, because the answer is never. It seems that by definition, the Arab Muslim woman or girl is the hated one no matter what she’s doing, and her existence is inherently suspicious.
Take the case of Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager who has been the subject of viral images and videos in the last couple of years. In 2015 at 14, she was biting the hand of an Israeli soldier who had her brother in a headlock. Most recently, now at 16 years of age, she was on video slapping an Israeli soldier who was occupying her family’s yard. There seems to be much hand-wringing in Israeli circles over a slapped soldier and this sense of emasculation, this sense of a country humiliated by a teenager. Never mind that Ahed’s 15 year old cousin was shot by soldiers and a rubber bullet lodged in his brain, putting him in a coma. That detail isn’t important. What matters is the face of the soldier. Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett suggested Ahed serve life in prison. Journalist Ben Caspit suggested “we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras…”
Just what we needed: more toxic masculinity and hyper-virility that we’ve already seen all year long, to sickening overload. There’s a tinge of the enabling that the Trump administration offers with its own language of violence and dismissive disregard, their language of racist sexist bullying. Not that the right-wing in Israel ever needed an enabler in that department – they’ve been doing well all on their own.
I’d like to think that there will be some humane intervention on behalf of this high-profile case of a wild-maned Palestinian girl whose confidence and self-possession I admire and wish I’d had at 16 – or even now. I’d like to think that someone will step in, maybe set her up with a modeling career and then she and Gigi Hadid can somehow help carry Palestine to a better future from the glossy pages of a high-end fashion magazine. Maybe Palestinians will become more palatable to Americans and the world at large, if they’re dressed up and adorned in glamour.
The truth is, even the victims of rape in the United States are ignored, let alone those vaguely threatened with rape. Rape kits sit untested on shelves for years (see the HBO documentary, “I Am Evidence”) and the perpetrators spend minimal time in jail, if at all. The public either doesn’t believe what women say, or else blames them.
So the words of journalist Ben Caspit sadistically suggesting that Ahed Tamimi should be raped to heal his wounded masculinity, to heal the soldier’s wounded virility and Israel’s wounded pride makes me shudder at the fragility of all of the above. Israel is a helpless bunny-rabbit of a country that nevertheless wields the most powerful war machinery in the Middle East?
It’s yet another depressing display of just how everyday misogyny permeates our lives no matter what part of the world one is in. Normalization isn’t even the right word – because, when hasn’t it been normal? A good woman is a destroyed one, and a strong man implies a man with crime in his blood. There is not much room to breathe in such a paradigm.
And no matter what she’s wearing (Former ambassador Michael Oren hissed that Ahed was dressed in “Western clothes” as if that was some sort of Tamimi family hoax), Ahed is portrayed in some media outlets as a force of darkness, when really she’s just a girl who is struggling to survive.
There is a lot of tired throwback in all of this. I guess it makes sense with everything else we’ve seen in 2017. Palestine, sadly as always, has the terrible role of being mostly ignored – or else vilified.
I have become almost numb to all of the horrible words uttered in this past year. But the vengeance-tinged sadistic sexual fantasy rustling behind the words of this journalist plunge me into the abyss. A tragically misguided grown man wants to extract spiritual and sexual payment from a 16 year old girl, to crush her vitality and violate her physically. This should inspire far more shame than a slap. He wrote this in print, and felt he had the moral high ground to discretely propose child abuse to redeem a country’s pride. Perhaps that pride is better off lost.
by Rasha Refaie
