They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri
The memoir of Ahed Tamimi, jailed at sixteen after a viral confrontation with Israeli soldiers — a girlhood in Nabi Saleh and an intimate portrait of life under occupation.
Ahed Tamimi grew up in Nabi Saleh, a small West Bank village whose weekly protests began after the neighboring settlement of Halamish took over the community’s spring. In December 2017, at sixteen, she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier who refused to leave her front yard — hours after soldiers had shot her cousin in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet. Arrested in a night raid days later, she spent her seventeenth birthday in Israeli prison and was sentenced to eight months. The video made her, almost overnight, a global icon of Palestinian resistance.
Written with journalist Dena Takruri, the memoir reaches beyond the viral moment: a childhood of home raids and arrested parents, a father born in 1967 who grew up in the resistance movement, and a girlhood split between the ordinary life of a daughter, sibling, and student and the demands of a struggle she did not choose.
About the authors
Ahed Tamimi is a Palestinian activist from Nabi Saleh whose 2017 arrest made her one of the most recognizable faces of Palestinian resistance. Dena Takruri is an award-winning journalist and a senior presenter and producer at AJ+, where she hosts the documentary series Direct From with Dena Takruri.
Details
- Published by One World (Penguin Random House), 2022
- Winner of a Palestine Book Award
- ISBN 9780593134580
The edition
Support a local independent bookseller or your library first. The publisher’s page is given for the edition and its details.