Malala and Ahed are both young women who have been targeted for standing up against threats to their security and freedom. Malala is a Western hero, Ahed is invisible to us. This article examines why.
https://tinyurl.com/y97ey9uy
I will support the most obvious answer: their causes are different. Malala is a champion of the right of girls to have access to have education. It's universally popular. Everyone supports that, except for the Taliban and Boko Haram and certain members of the alt-right perhaps.
Ahed is a champion of the end of Israeli occupation of the West Bank. That's a cause that people feel a lot more ambivalent about.
As for Ahed... why Ahed, and not some other Palestinian girl? I bet that everybody who opens your article will be immediately struck by the same thing: she's blonde, blue-eyed, light-skinned. That has to be pretty unique among Palestinians. She's photogenic, and she looks and dresses like a typical white western teenager. And it's not a coincidence that the Palestinian freedom-fighter who is becoming a social media phenomenon happens to be the Palestinian who looks and dresses like a typical white western teenager. Media have taken an interest in Ahed, as opposed to some other Palestinian girl, in at least some measure because of how she looks and not what she has done. And that's not lost on Palestinian activists, who are trying to leverage her photogenic looks to gain attention and sympathy.
-k