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.
Connected in the archive
11 connected records11 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- The Women of the Movement
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Ahed Tamimi, jailed at sixteen after a viral confrontation in Nabi Saleh. The same arrest pattern, one generation on, written from inside it.
on a related subject — 10 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "prisoners".
- Fuad Hijaziفؤاد حجازي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "prisoners".
- I Saw Ramallah
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- Khalida Jarrarخالدة جرار
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "prisoners".
- Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- and 4 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/they-called-me-a-lioness/.- MLA
“They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/they-called-me-a-lioness/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-they-called-me-a-lioness, title = {They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/they-called-me-a-lioness/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }