Ahed Tamimi: illegally blond

Ahed Tamimi on the wall of separation in Bethlehem. Picture by: Richard Gray/EMPICS Entertainment/PA images. All rights reserved. Ahed Tamimi, the new blond icon of Palestinian resistance, who was
released on 29 July 2018, after spending eight months in Israeli
prison, raises for Israelis the tormenting question: can a
Palestinian be (genuinely and legally) blond?  

The widely circulated images on social and mainstream media of the
defiant Ahed Tamimi, a 16 years old girl with blond hair and blue
eyes surrounded by heavily armed big dark-skinned Israelis (Israeli
soldiers from the Givati Brigade and later members of the Israeli
police force who are usually Mizrahi) is a big blow not only to the
Israeli well-oiled propaganda (hasbara) machine but also, and perhaps
even more crucially and dangerously, to its self-image or the way it
perceives itself and would like to project itself to the so called
western public and media.

Are not the Israelis the fair-skinned enlightened westerners and
the Palestinians the dark oriental barbarians?  How dare
the Palestinians have blond ambition?  How do they have
the chutzpa to invert the light/dark formula so deeply
ingrained in the Israeli psyche as well as in the western public
imagination? 

A telling anecdote regarding this formula is the confusion that
was caused at the 1984 Venice Film Festival when the blue-eyed Blond
Muhammad Bakri who plays Issam Jabarin, a Palestinian resistance
fighter in Uri Barabash’s Beyond the Walls (1984), was
taken to be the Israeli Jew and the dark-skinned Arnon Tzadok, an
oriental Jew who plays Uri Mizrahi, an Israeli Jewish criminal, was
mistaken for the Palestinian.  

For the western, and particularly American, consciousness, the
“blond icon of resistance” to the oppression and destruction of
Palestine was Rachel Corrie, an American member of the International
Solidarity Movement (ISM) who was killed in Rafah in the Gaza Strip
by an IDF bulldozer when she was standing in front of a local
Palestinian’s home, thus acting as a human shield, attempting to
prevent IDF forces from demolishing the home. The unsettling
blond resonance between Rachel Corrie and Ahed Tamimi disrupted
Israel’s mission to be the blond spearhead of the west in the
Middle East.  

As Alain Badiou, Eric Hazan and Ivan Segre argue
in Reflections on Anti-Semitism (2013), Israel is
identified “as an advance outpost of the west.  It is
‘more one of us than we are ourselves’, out there on the front
line. If, before the Second World War, Jews were viewed as
foreigners without a homeland and incapable of integration, now, on
the contrary, those established in the Middle East are more European
than the Europeans here, as they are defending our values against
‘Islamic’ barbarism, on an exposed frontier that is also our
own.” For this reason the authors forward the hypothesis that for
the people they are talking about, what matters “is not the ‘name
“Jew”’ but rather the ‘fate of the west’. This is the
reason they identify ‘Jew’ with the state of Israel, and so
eagerly support this state’s war against the Palestinians and other
Arabs.”  

Blondness is part of this identification mechanism.  To
be blond is to be identified with the west and, therefore, the new
Jew is assigned the role of the white of the Middle East.  It
is important to mention in this context that the cult of blond in
Israeli culture has even deeper historical roots.  In
traditional Eastern European Jewish literature the blond Shiksa
(non-Jewish woman) is the fantasized object of desire for the
dark Jewish man who, in the European mind, historically (though not
now) has not been perceived as white but as oriental and even
black.  

Furthermore, blond is also a cultural performance that under
specific circumstances (like Nazism) became a demarcation line
between life and death.  Aryan looking Jews (i.e. blue-eyed
blonds), particularly in Warsaw, had more chance to escape encampment
in the Ghetto and consequently deportation to concentration and death
camps, by living as blond Poles in the Aryan side of the city beyond
the Ghetto walls.  As such, in the post-Holocaust Jewish
imagination blond has been perceived as a signifier of survival.  

In her book Lama Lo Bat Lifnei Ha’milhama (1998,
Why Did Not You Come Before the War), Lizi Doron describes how her
Holocaust survivor mother, who was saved from death on several
occasions because she took great care to peroxide her hair, forced
her since she was a teenager to dye her hair blond.  For
her mother, blond was a ticket to life, a guarantee of survival.  It
is not surprising therefore, that Israel has one of the world’s
highest percentages of women dying their hair blond as well as having
plastic surgeries to change the shape of their “Jewish” nose. 

Their ultimate goal is to achieve an “Aryan” and “non-Jewish”
look. Mizrahi Jewish women, on the other hand, dye their hair blond
to look more Ashkenazi and to mask and hide their dark oriental
roots. The racialisation of blond, thus, operates on many levels
in Israeli society and is related to a complex and multilayered
structure of oppression. 

Being blond in Israeli culture is also associated with the myth of
the Sabra, the incarnation of the new Jew. The Israeli heroes
of Amos Oz, particularly in his early literary work, are almost
always handsome blue-eyed blonds.  Elik – the protagonist
of the Israeli writer Moshe Shamir’s Bemo Yadav (With
His Own Hands, 1954) is considered by critics and scholars to be the
prototypical Sabra in the literature of the Palmach
generation, a mythic Sabra, a Rousseau-like “noble
savage” born from the sea, who, like Sandro Botticelli’s Venus
in Birth of Venus boasts a crown of golden hair.

Blondness, as Kathy Phillips writes in her book on blondes,
suggests, among other things, lightness and the glow of gold, a
crowning glory invoking heavenly luminosity or even a solar
radiance.  This conception of blond, ingrained in western
culture, is most notably manifested in Italian Renaissance
paintings.  

As I previously demonstrated
Israel deliberately selected a team of peroxide blonde women as
their masbirim (misinformation spokespersons) so as “to
project a feminine and softer image” during their 2008-9 attack on
Gaza. 

But the Jewish State’s attempt to monopolize blond for its war
against the Palestinian people was sabotaged by Ahed Tamimi, a young
girl with a blond ambition and a big chutzpa. In
today’s world the desire for blondness reflects the balance of
world power.  The west is associated with blond, and
therefore blond is associated with power.

Ahed Tamimi is a powerful icon of resistance and it is therefore
not so surprising (though, obviously, infuriating) that Ben Caspit an
Israeli journalist in Maariv, one of Israel’s major
newspapers, suggested
that “in the case of the girls, we should exact a price at
some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”.

Yet, as in the famous Banksy’s image of a girl in a pink dress
searching an Israeli soldier with a machine gun laying to his side
and leaning against the Apartheid Wall the role reversal enacted by
the Banksy girl and echoed by the defiant young blond girl Ahed
Tamimi invites us to reflect on, or rather to resist, the ongoing
failure of Israel to recognize the humanity of others.