Of Their Own Volition: Situating Palestinian Girl Activists As the Israeli occupation of the West Bank churned into its six decade, a young Palestinian girl named Ahed Tamimi garnered international media attention for her bold, fearless protests against Zionism and its military suppression of her nation. Headlines sensationalized her dramatic confrontations of the Israeli troops that had assaulted, imprisoned, and harassed her family members and the rest of her village, often spending as much or more time commenting on her “Western” appearance as her civil disobedience. A common thread ran through the coverage, a classic question regarding politically active children: was she acting of her own volition, as a child victim of a violent military occupation, or was she an actor/pawn being manipulated by her parents, in an effort to embarrass Israel and advance the Palestinian cause through an “unfair” machination? In this paper, I examine a variety of tropes used in international media discussions about Tamimi and other Palestinian girl activists, in an effort to situate the complicated ways that girls figure in popular imaginings of Palestine and the Israeli Occupation. What is often missing from reportage about child activists are presentations of girls’ political engagement and civil disobedience as the result of their own actualized decision-making. Beyond the polarizing knee-jerk reactions that come from people on the extremes of Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, even media that purport “neutrality” will often fall into a variety of dismissive tropes: their analysis will fall back upon Orientalist and sexist stereotypes regarding gender, ethnicity, or religion, they will try to explain away child activism as the result of unwitting parental and societal manipulation, and they will attempt to psychoanalyze girls to rationalize their actions. All of these efforts strip agency away from these girls, who are part of a long line of Palestinian girl activists. How should we situate their activism in our discussions of Palestinian historical and contemporary resistance and nation building? I analyze and historicize contemporary representations of Palestinian girls’ activism against the Israeli occupation in this paper, pushing past the tropes to better understand how scholars may better situate and interpret their important position in the Palestinian national struggle.