IDF defeated by Tamimis, cameras, social media
We have selected these commentaries out of the many published. Each has a different point to make within the common theme of the difference made by one camera and social media:
1) Haaretz: A Picture of a Headlock That’s Worth a Thousand Words Anshel Pfeffer on the stupidity of using soldiers trained for dangerous combat as ‘glorified riot police’;
2) Times of Israel: Family ‘proud’ of soldier’s restraint in West Bank scuffle, soldier’s father defends his behaviour;
3) Guardian: Nabi Saleh images illustrate changing asymmetry of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, power of camera over brute force – plus more background information;
4) AFP: Video of Israeli soldier arresting boy becomes latest in war of perception;
5) IB Times: Israeli minister says IDF soldier should have fired on unarmed Palestinian women, the Israeli point of view;
6) LA Times: A Palestinian child’s detention becomes a Mideast Rashomon, Rashomon being a film that tells a story from different viewpoints;
7) Vox: Is this disturbing video Israel’s Eric Garner moment?, Max Fisher wonders if the video will ‘start a conversation’ in the way that the suffocation of black man Eric Garner did in the USA;
11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi in a headlock.
A Picture of a Headlock That’s Worth a Thousand Words
Why hasn’t the IDF, one of the most sophisticated and advanced militaries in the world learned a damned thing since the first intifada?
Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz
Aug 31, 2015
Look at this picture of an IDF soldier holding a Palestinian boy in a headlock. If you hadn’t been paying attention to the news over the last three days, would you have known it was taken recently? Of course, if you know a bit about military hardware or the changing fashions of IDF combat fatigues, you could tell by the fact the soldier was carrying a Tavor rifle and by the stitching of his uniform that it had taken place in recent years, but aside from these minor clues, there is nothing to indicate that the picture wasn’t taken at any point over last 28 years, since the first intifada broke out in 1987. (There was stone-throwing in the West Bank of course before, but that uprising saw the average age of the stone-throwers go down into the early teens.)
Which raises the question: Why hasn’t one of the most sophisticated and advanced militaries in the world learned a damn thing in all this time? Let’s set aside for a few paragraphs the question of whether Israeli forces should be in the West Bank, the competing claims between the Nabi Saleh villagers and the neighbouring settlement over the local spring, around which the weekly protests take place, and even stop asking for a moment which side’s leaders are more at fault for the lack of a viable solution. Let’s just ask why that picture is so unsurprising.
Shouting for help
Look at it again. Only one part of the soldier’s body radiates confidence. His right hand is holding on to the assault rifle, correctly pointing it towards the ground, and even though you can’t see it, you absolutely know all his fingers are around the handle, outside the trigger-guard. He’s a pro rifleman. All the rest of his body is shouting for help. He’s overpowered a child half of his size, who may or may not have been correctly identified as throwing stones, but the soldier doesn’t know what to do next. He’s been intensively trained by a crack infantry battalion to go after Hezbollah fighters in the Lebanese underbrush, but nothing in the few days he spent mastering the use tear gas and stun grenades before this deployment could have possibly prepared him for what he’s doing now.
And that’s before the mother and sisters of the boy start jumping on him and biting his hand. Unlike him, they’ve been in this situation dozens of times in recent years. They know he’s going to keep on using his strong arm to cling to the useless rifle, the other one to cling inexpertly to the wriggling child, while trying to keep balance on the rocky slope.
Deployment after deployment, year after year, decade after decade, some of the IDF’s most accomplished combat units are sent to places like Nabi Saleh, Na’alin and Bil’in, where these dramas have played out with depressing regularity every Friday at noon, and insisted that they’re soldiers doing a soldier’s job, not glorified riot police. It’s no longer a tactical mistake, it’s a national headlock in which an entire army, and behind it a nation, remains in a state of denial that there are military solutions to the conflict.
Military ethos demands that a soldier never put down his sidearm while out in the field. But what happens when a soldier is in a position where he won’t possibly use his rifle? Sure, you can make an argument that a gunman or sniper will use the opportunity to open fire on the soldiers, but the sensible precaution against this is to position a second force well outside the perimeter of the rioting. Those who are tussling with civilians will find it very difficult to return fire anyway. But tactical common sense goes out the window when we’re in a national headlock.
Right-wing apologists of course have been quick to brand this as another “Pallywood” production and pointed out that the Palestinian family are known “troublemakers” who routinely stage such scenes.
Let’s go along with their argument just for a couple of sentences. Whatever you think of the Palestinian national struggle, you don’t get to choose the other side’s weapons. The people of Nabi Saleh, with the help of foreign volunteers, put on the weekly show for the media because it’s compelling, it works. Anyway, if the only issue here was one of appearances, then why is the IDF providing extras every week for the show? There are much more effective ways of handling these situations which don’t necessitate such scenes. For a start, using properly-equipped police instead of soldiers who should stay on the perimeter.
Morally bankrupt
But it’s a morally bankrupt argument anyway and we shouldn’t indulge these stooges. No amount of PR and media management will make the occupation of another nation look good, regardless of whether you think this is all their fault and it’s not an occupation because, as Naftali Bennett says, a nation cannot be an occupier in its own land. If we’re not occupying territory, then we sure as hell are occupying another people, and at the end of the day Israel is doing a bad job of it because deep down the majority of Israelis know it’s wrong. They just haven’t found a way to get out of the headlock which makes them hope that we can just continue chucking the IDF at the problem and somehow, one day, it will go away.
Actually, looking again at the picture, there is one other detail which you wouldn’t have seen a few years ago. The soldier is trying to conceal his identity behind a badly constructed mask. Until very recently, you almost never saw servicemen in the West Bank covering their faces while trying to suppress riots. This isn’t for fear of being hauled in front of an international court – those tribunals never indict anyone beneath the level of senior commander. And while the soldier belongs to an elite battalion, it isn’t a special forces unit that needs to preserve its members anonymity.
Taking their toll
The mask is proof that the Palestinian stage managing, the dozens of cameras and the results immediately uploaded to YouTube, and in cases like this also broadcast in the media, are taking their toll. Whatever these men and their immediate commanders are telling themselves, the true underlying reason more soldiers are covering their faces is shame. They know our politicians have put them in an impossible situation where they can never win. No decent person, no matter his politics, wants to go home for Shabbat and see himself online manhandling children and women. Today’s young soldiers are by now a third generation enforcing an occupation that is eating away at our army and our society. Perhaps their shame will one day motivate them to demand real solutions from the politicians.
Family ‘proud’ of soldier’s restraint in West Bank scuffle
Father says tussle with Palestinian women, children who stopped his son arresting a boy could have ‘ended very differently’
By Josefin Dolsten, Times of Israel
August 30, 2015
The father of an Israeli soldier who was attacked in the West Bank while trying to arrest a child said Sunday that he was proud of his son’s restraint, even as the child’s family accused the soldier of using too much force.
A video of the soldier being attacked Friday by Palestinian women and children near the village of Nabi Saleh has received some two million views on Facebook and other social media. In the video, the soldier appears to forcefully restrain the boy, whose arm is in a cast. And on several occasions, he chokes the kid and presses his head against a boulder to keep him still. Activists said the boy is 12 years old [his family say 11].
A group of women and children begin grappling with the soldier and punching him repeatedly, while he holds down the boy. At one point, a girl bites his hand.
“We are very proud of what we saw, proud of the restraint that he demonstrated, because without a doubt if [the] women had been injured, it would have ended very differently,” Arnon, the soldier’s father, told Army Radio.
The father criticized those who questioned his son’s actions. “Anyone can sit in their living room and judge the soldiers,” he said.
The mother and sister of the boy were part of a group that can be seen hitting the soldier in the video. They defended their actions in an interview aired Sunday on Israel’s Channel 2, saying the soldier had been using too much force on a child who has his arm in a cast.
“I cannot stand by and see my brother near death,” said the boy’s sister, A’hd Tamimi. “Of course, I will go and help him. The soldier used way too much force. He is a young child with a broken arm, what is he able to do?”
“I am a mother. If a soldier attacks a young child and is doing something to him, I will do everything in order to release him from the hands of the soldier and free him,” the boy’s mother added.
The boy himself told Palestinian television that “I started fleeing from the soldier. In the end, he caught me and threw me on the ground, and hit me and my arm. He slammed my head on the rock.”
Culture Minister Miri Regev, of the Likud party, criticized military protocol, saying current regulations left soldiers defenseless, with their “hands tied behind their back.” She called upon Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to change the protocols regarding opening fire, and claimed that the current rules are “shameful,” according to Channel 2.
“Anyone who tries to harm Israeli citizens and Israel Defense Forces soldiers needs to know that he has forfeited his life. We need to establish immediately that a soldier who is attacked is authorized to respond with fire — period,” Regev said.
According to the IDF, Palestinians were throwing stones at Israeli soldiers during a protest. Weekly demonstrations against the settlements are held near Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah. It is regularly a site for altercations between Israeli security personnel and pro-Palestinian activists.
The boy in the video was seen throwing stones “and therefore it was decided to arrest him,” the military said in a statement. Due to the confrontation by the women and children, however, it was decided to halt the arrest, the IDF said.
After the group attacks the soldier, another IDF soldier arrives, and helps push some of the attackers off, and the first soldier steps out of the fray, leaving the boy. As he walks away, he pulls the pin on a tear gas grenade and throws it into the crowd of activists and journalists.
The IDF said it arrested two other Palestinians who threw stones, but that the commanding officer called off the arrest of the boy because of the “violent confrontation.” Haaretz reported that one of the two arrested was a foreign activist.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
Nabi Saleh images illustrate changing asymmetry of Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Photos and video of family grappling with soldier trying to arrest son show how power of social media is challenging military might
By Peter Beaumont, The Guardian
September 01, 2015
Late last Friday a series of photographs from a protest in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh dropped on the news wires.
They portrayed a masked IDF soldier trying to arrest a boy accused of throwing stones (denied by villagers) before his mother and teenage sister intervened.
The pictures, taken by agency photographers, were striking, if not the fact of the demonstration and scuffle itself.
The soldier, armed with an assault rifle, holds the boy in a headlock while sitting on him; the family claws at his mask; the daughter bites him on the wrist.
In the 24 hours and more that followed, the pictures and video footage of the scuffle shot by another member of the family went viral, prompting comment in the Israeli and international media as well as on pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian websites.
Seen in different ways by different commentators with different agendas, the only thing they could agree on was that the images represented a vivid summation of some idea: of the brutality of occupation; of the weakness of the soldier involved; of the need to use more or less violence on demonstrators; of the use by Palestinians of children as a propaganda tool.
Amid the disagreements, a pressing question has emerged: what did the images show? The reality is as complex as it is unsettling and contradictory.
Bassem Tamimi in a headlock during a protest at an Israeli settlement supermarket, 24 October 2012. Photo by Issam Rimawi / APA images
Demonstrations on Fridays in West Bank villages are commonplace, in some cases having taken place every week for years. Small-scale affairs, often accompanied by Israeli and international activists, they follow a similar format, often ending with stone throwing on one side and the Israeli military response of teargas, arrests and plastic or even live rounds.
Nabi Saleh, a village dominated by members of the Tamimi family, is one place where such confrontations are a regular occurrence.
Bassem Tamimi’s most recent arrest in Nabi Saleh, September 2nd, 2015.
The Nabi Saleh Solidarity Campaign – led by Bassem Tamimi, who was once designated a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International when he was jailed by Israel for his activism – hold their demonstrations to protest against the theft of their land and water by Israelis who live opposite the hilltop village in the settlement of Halamish.
They are clashes that have sometimes cost the lives of Palestinians. Bassem Tamimi’s brother-in-law Rushdi died after being shot at another protest in 2012 while Tamimi was in prison. Another member of the extended family died after being hit in the face by an Israeli teargas canister.
Friday’s photos and video show Tamimi’s 11-year-old son, Mohammed, with his broken arm in a cast. His wife, Nariman, is seen grappling with the still-unidentified soldier, and his 15-year-old daughter, Ahed, is biting the soldier’s hand.
Explaining her actions afterwards, Nariman Tamimi said: “If you are a mother, you will protect your children without thinking. They weren’t just trying to arrest him, the way the soldier’s hand was around my son’s neck he could have killed him.”
For their part, the Israeli military – and some media – described the event as a violent assault on the soldier.
None of the Tamimi family involved are unfamiliar figures in the story of Nabi Saleh. Family members, including Ahed, have been profiled in the New York Times and the Guardian. Ahed was the subject of another viral video recorded in Nabi Saleh in 2012 when she was seen berating Israeli soldiers for arresting another brother at a demonstration, an act for which she was given a bravery award by the Turkish government.
The prominence of the Tamimi children in these confrontations has inevitably raised questions – not least among pro-Israeli commentators – about how much they have been pushed by the family into the rontline of potentially dangerous encounters. And how much those encounters are designed to produce images such as those on Friday.
The settlement of Halamish built near Nabi Saleh on what had been land belonging to the villagers. Photo ActiveStills.
In truth it is almost impossible to tell, not least because of the long history of the politicisation, and involvement, of Palestinian children in demonstrations going back to the first intifada and before, many with their parents’ acquiescence.
Having interviewed Ahed two years after she first shot to prominence, the Guardian’s then Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood, wrote last year about her youthful political awareness.
Her answers to questions about what the protests are over and the role of the army seem practised, the result of living in a highly politicised community.
We want to liberate Palestine, we want to live as free people, the soldiers are here to protect the settlers and prevent us reaching our land.
With her brothers, she watches a DVD of edited footage showing her parents being arrested, their faces contorted in anger and pain, her own confrontation with Israeli soldiers, a night-time raid on the house, her uncle writhing on the ground after being shot. On top of witnessing these events first-hand, she relives them over and over again on screen.
On the opposite side of the equation is evidence that the Tamimis are acutely aware of the value of such footage in their activism.
Following the same formula, week after week and year after year since 2009 the demonstrations have become performative, an almost ritualised encounter, in which, for all the brutality, there is an intimation on both sides much of the time of a kind of restraint.
In a conflict where young Palestinian stone-throwers are too often shot dead by Israeli soldiers, this was a confrontation that remained on the threshold of more serious violence.
If that is the context of the images themselves, the reactions they have prompted have been easier to unpackage, coloured by competing ideologies that have supplied their own stories.
Israel’s rightwing culture minister, Miri Regev, was quick to suggest on Facebook that soldiers should have shot the Tamimi family members.
“We need to decide immediately that a soldier that is attacked is permitted to return fire. Period. I call on the minister of security to put an end to the humiliation and change the open-fire regulations immediately!”
Others saw the apparent panic in the soldier as he struggled with the Tamimis as a sign of weakness, among them the hawkish former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who claimed the images portrayed “helplessness on the part of the IDF and Israel”.
The soldier’s father, also unidentified, said he thought his son demonstrated cool.
A pro-Palestinian website painted the Tamimi mother and daughter as “determined lionesses”; Israeli ones as manipulative “Pallywood” frauds playing for the cameras.
Perhaps one of the most interesting commentaries was supplied by Anshel Pfeffer, whose editorial in Haaretz condemned the image of Israeli soldiers chasing children.
Pointing out, like others, the dreary commonplace of the Friday clashes, and concluding that the soldier was masked because of shame, Pfeffer wrote of the image: “It’s no longer a tactical mistake, it’s a national headlock in which an entire army, and behind it a nation, remains in a state of denial that there are military solutions to the conflict.”
He dismissed suggestions that the images might be less powerful with suspicions of a degree of orchestration.
“Whatever you think of the Palestinian national struggle, you don’t get to choose the other side’s weapons. The people of Nabi Saleh, with the help of foreign volunteers, put on the weekly show for the media because it’s compelling, it works. Anyway, if the only issue here was one of appearances, then why is the IDF providing extras every week for the show?”
Perhaps that, in the final analysis, is as much as you can say about the images: they are “compelling” because they illustrate the long drama of occupation, an aide memoir to daily events which depict an underlying reality.
They speak of the asymmetry of the conflict. And they speak too of Israel gradually losing a global battle of narratives over the occupation where a different kind of asymmetry – the leverage of social media – can propel a single incident into an international scandal.
Video of Israeli soldier arresting boy becomes latest in war of perception
By Hossam Ezzedine with Laurent Lozano in Jerusalem / AFP
August 31, 2015
Nabi Saleh (Palestinian Territories) – A soldier pins a boy down and is assaulted by his family: The scene might have gone unnoticed if not for footage that has turned it into another weapon in the Israel-Palestinian war of perception.
Palestinians see it as proof of Israel’s abuses in the occupied West Bank, while many Israelis say the soldier fell into a media trap laid by activists.
The incident played out on Friday in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh and footage of it has since gone viral, generating a bitter debate both online and off.
As is often the case when it comes to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, there has been little room for middle ground.
The video and pictures, including those taken by AFP, show a masked Israeli soldier trying to arrest an 11-year-old boy who has a cast on his left arm.
According to the Israeli military, the boy was suspected of having thrown stones during a protest.
As the soldier holds him against a rock, his automatic rifle at his side, members of the boy’s family, including his mother and sister, along with other activists rush over and try to pull him off the child.
A wrestling match ensues, with the soldier’s ski mask pulled off and the boy’s sister biting the soldier on the hand. The soldier yells for help, and eventually a superior officer arrives and orders him to let the boy go.
While walking away, visibly frustrated, the soldier throws down a stun grenade.
The images quickly made the rounds.
Palestinian papers reproduced a cartoon showing the soldier with a dog’s head, while some in Israel saw the decision not to arrest the boy as a sign of weakness.
Left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, referring to the headlock the soldier had put the boy in, lamented the situation in which the military has found itself in the West Bank.
“It’s a national headlock in which an entire army, and behind it a nation, remains in a state of denial that there are military solutions to the conflict,” it said.
– ‘I wasn’t afraid’ –
Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, has for years been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Each Friday, Palestinians, foreigners and even Israelis protest against the expansion of the nearby Halamish settlement. Stones are typically thrown by the protesters, while tear gas and rubber bullets are fired by the security forces.
In the past three years, two people have died and 375 been injured, with nearly half of them minors, according to protesters.
According to his father, the child in the video, Mohammed Tamimi, broke his wrist while fleeing an Israeli tank in his village, which was why he was wearing a cast.
“I wasn’t afraid,” the boy told AFP, “but I cried to call my family to come get me away from the soldier.”
His mother Nariman said she thought “only one thing: free my son from the soldier’s hands.”
The Tamimi family has been at the forefront of the protests in Nabi Saleh. The father, Bassem, said he has been arrested nine times.
Ahed, the boy’s teenage sister wearing a Tweety Bird shirt in the video, is known to some for older photos showing her raising her fist at Israeli soldiers. It resulted in her being received by then Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2012.
Some Israelis have accused the family of being agitators who put their children in danger.
An Israeli officer familiar with the situation called Friday’s protest a “PR stunt” where demonstrators “try to provoke soldiers by hurling stones at them that can be deadly”, forcing them to react.
Arnon, the soldier’s father, told Israeli journalists that he regretted that his son’s restraint was not being given more praise.
The Haaretz analysis however sought to put the episode into context.
“No amount of PR and media management will make the occupation of another nation look good,” it said.
Israeli minister says IDF soldier should have fired on unarmed Palestinian women
By Jack Moore, International Business Times
August 30, 2015
An Israeli minister has said that the Israeli soldier seen being bitten and struck by Palestinian women and children in a viral video released earlier this week, should have been able to fire on them. The soldier was attempting to arrest an 11-year-boy for stone-throwing in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.
Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev condemned the group of Palestinians for assaulting the soldier in order to prevent the detention of the child and lamented the fact that the soldier had his hands tied legally and could not shoot at the women and children.
“I was shocked to see the video this morning of Palestinians hitting an IDF soldier,” Regev said in a Facebook post. “It cannot be that our soldiers will be sent on missions with their hands tied behind their backs. It’s simply a disgrace!”
“We must immediately order that a soldier under attack be able to return fire. Period,” she added.
She called on Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon to allow soldiers to be able to fire their weapons in such situations. She said that he must “change [military] policy to permit opening fire immediately”.
The video shows the masked soldier holding the 11-year-old boy down while women attempt to pull the soldier off of him. Some of the women slap him on the head and bite him while he strikes out at the women and shouts for assistance from his fellow troops.
The soldier’s weapon can be seen clearly, but he does not point his gun at any point. The village of Nabi Saleh is the scene of regular clashes between the Israeli military, which occupies the West Bank, and Palestinian civilians.
On Facebook, the 11-year-old boy’s father, Bassem Tamimi, revealed that his son had to receive treatment in hospital and issued a call for international help for the Palestinian people. “We protect our family and our land through the resistance,” Tamimi said. “People of the world, stand with Palestine. Stand with the human rights.”
The Israeli military issued a statement following the incident confirming that “the commander decided to not go ahead with the detention” of the boy.
Mohammed Tamimi rests on his mother’s lap after his return from hospital. Photo by AFP / Getty
A Palestinian child’s detention becomes a Mideast Rashomon*
By Batsheva Sobelman, LA Times
August 30, 2015
A video documenting a violent scuffle between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian child and his family in the West Bank went viral over the weekend, becoming a sort of Rorschach test of the passions and perspectives of the Middle East conflict.
Shot on Friday by Palestinians in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, site of weekly demonstrations since 2009, the footage shows an Israeli soldier wrestling 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi down to the ground in rocky terrain and pinning him as the child’s mother, aunt and sister thrash at the soldier and bite him to pry the child from the soldier’s grip.
The scene appears to continue for about a minute before the soldier’s commander appears on the scene and intervenes to release the boy.
Besides the boy’s young age and the presence of cameras, the incident was not unlike many other encounters between Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers at this location and others.
Capturing an almost random incident from one physical angle, the video became open to widely differing interpretations.
A statement from Israel’s military described the demonstration as a “violent riot” during which crowds threw rocks at the soldiers in an “ongoing assault.”
“The forces decided to detain one of the Palestinians identified hurling rocks,” the army said, referring to Mohammed, and a “group of rioters, amongst them women and children, attacked the soldiers in [an] attempt to prevent the arrest.”
The commander on the scene said the boy was arrested “to prevent an escalation of violence.”
From the family’s perspective, the army acted with excessive violence against a child, whose relatives were trying to protect him. Noting that he had a broken arm in a cast, the family denied that Mohammed had been throwing rocks.
“If you are a mother, you will protect your children without thinking,” Nariman Tamimi told the Middle East Eye website. “They weren’t just trying to arrest him, the way the soldier’s hand was around my son’s neck he could have killed him.”
The soldier’s parents also defended their son. Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 by phone, his mother (who was not identified in order to protect the soldier’s identity) said she was proud of her son for showing “great restraint” in a very difficult situation.
“It might have ended very differently if he had not conducted himself with restraint,” his father said.
The image of the soldier holding a Palestinian child in a stranglehold has reached millions of viewers on social media and international news outlets, sparking outrage at Israeli policies in the West Bank, in particular involving minors.
In Israel, many looked at the same footage from the other direction, that of a soldier being beaten by Palestinian women. While many sympathized with the soldier, some criticized army policies for being too weak.
Opposition lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon of “lax leadership” and failing to back Israeli soldiers; the incident, he said, gravely undermines the Israeli army’s deterrence.
The images of a soldier being beaten by Palestinian women and children and ultimately backing down from arresting the suspect “convey weakness and helplessness” of the army and Israel, Lieberman wrote in a Facebook post, adding his intent to ask for an urgent discussion of the incident in parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee.
“The Palestinians have understood that the camera is a weapon,” Chen Bareket, a former commander of an army unit assigned to the West Bank, told Israeli television Sunday. He suggested soldiers be equipped with portable cameras to document such encounters from their angle as well.
The extended Tamimi family is among the leaders of the Nabi Saleh campaign; at least one member of the clan was killed in clashes with soldiers in recent years.
The campaign has also made wide use of media during the six years of weekly protests, with dedicated websites and frequent footage.
In 2012, Ahed Tamimi, Mohammed’s older sister, became a famous symbol of the Nabi Saleh protests when filmed defiantly shouting at an Israeli soldier, demanding a different brother be released. Friday’s footage shows her biting the soldier.
Sobelman is a special correspondent.
* The term Rashomon effect refers to real-world situations in which multiple eye-witness testimonies of an event contain conflicting information.
Is this disturbing video Israel’s Eric Garner moment?
By Max Fisher, Vox World
August 31, 2015
For a few years now, Palestinians in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh have held a weekly demonstration to protest the Israeli occupation that has confiscated village land for a nearby Israeli settlement. These protests don’t usually make international news.
But last week’s was different. Friday’s demonstration in Nabi Saleh escalated into a violent confrontation between an Israeli soldier and a young child — all caught on camera by the press who had attended the protest. The result was a video of an IDF soldier placing an 11-year-old child in a chokehold, holding a gun near his head, and then sitting on him as he screamed in fear and pain.
This isn’t the first time something like that has happened in the West Bank. But with this video of a panicking soldier crushing a screaming child beneath him, Israel may have the opportunity to learn the lesson that the United States learned last year when a New York City police officer choked a black man named Eric Garner to death: video forces a conversation. When a bystander with a camera captured Garner choking, “I can’t breathe,” on a Staten Island sidewalk, it forced a conversation about police brutality and systemic racism in the United States. Now that a camera in Nabi Saleh has captured the panicked screams and gasps of 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi, maybe this will force a conversation about the moral costs of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians.
What the Nabi Saleh video shows
On Friday, during the latest Nabi Saleh protest, small clashes broke out between the protesting villagers and Israeli soldiers, as they often do. An 11-year-old Nabi Saleh boy named Mohammed Tamimi, whose left arm was in a cast, did something to anger one of the Israeli soldiers. The Israeli military says the boy was throwing stones; Tamimi’s family denies this. But whatever sparked it, the soldier began to chase the boy, which is when the boy’s father switched on a camera and captured the moment.
In the video, the soldier throws himself on Tamimi, putting the boy in a headlock and holding him over a rock as he screams for help. There is a moment, at 1:06 in the video, when the soldier holds his rifle next to the boy’s head and, disregarding the most basic weapons safety training, places his finger over the gun’s trigger. Thankfully, after a moment he slings the rifle behind his shoulder, but then tries to wrestle and carry the boy off. After a short struggle, the soldier places his hand around the back of the child’s neck and pushes his face into one of the rocks.
Several nearby women from the protest then attempt to intervene. One woman tries to pull the soldier’s arms behind his back; he panics and grabs the boy again. Tamimi’s young sister curls around her brother, shielding his body with her own as she attempts to drag him away, but the soldier pushes his hand into her neck and shoves her away. The nearby women again throw themselves on top of the soldier and, at this point, another soldier, reportedly the first’s commander, intervenes, eventually pulling him away. The soldier punches and slaps at several of the Palestinians as he’s led away, throwing what appears to be a tear gas grenade or other non-explosive grenade on the ground.
Why the Nabi Saleh video is so controversial
As with everything in the Israel-Palestine conflict, there are two narratives to this video. The Israeli narrative is that it shows an Israeli soldier being attacked by a mob of angry Palestinians. The Palestinian narrative is that it shows an Israeli soldier brutalizing an 11-year-old child. You can judge for yourself based on the video, but it is difficult to imagine any universe in which this soldier’s treatment of an adolescent child is even remotely justifiable.
But the video’s real controversy is not over what it shows, but what it represents. Both Israelis and Palestinians feel that the international community and the international media have failed to understand the conflict and are biased against them. This video is thus another opportunity to show the world the truth as each side sees it, and to litigate global public opinion on the conflict.
So, for example, when the right-wing Israeli outlet Israel Hayom published a column defending the Israeli soldier — and alleging that the entire scene had been deliberately staged by the Palestinian children who are beaten in the video — the point was not just to defend the soldier, but to defend Israel’s moral standing vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The argument around the video, then, is really an argument about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that has been ongoing for almost half a century, and of the story this video tells about that occupation. Is it a story in which violent Palestinians provoke and attack well-meaning Israelis, dragging Israel into a conflict it doesn’t want? Or a story in which cruel and inhumane Israelis are so committed to forcibly maintaining their occupation of Palestinian land that they will attack even children?
Is this an Eric Garner moment for the Israel-Palestine conflict?
But there is perhaps something more than that going on here, something that explains why this video has attracted attention beyond the dozens of prior such videos of West Bank clashes gone wrong. Because the video is so brutal in the particulars, and yet so very typical of the daily norms of the occupation, it has taken on a symbolic quality somewhat akin to the July 2014 video of New York City police arresting Eric Garner.
In that video, a policeman put Garner in a chokehold while attempting to detain him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner died as a result. The video became a focal point for an argument about something much larger: police violence against black men and boys in America.
For some, the video showed NYC police taking regrettable but understandable actions against a 6-foot-3, 350-pound criminal — and showed that police are underappreciated for the daily dangers they face. But for many others, it showed the propensity for American police to use excessive and extreme force against black men and boys, part of a larger problem of racism in policing that does terrible and sometimes fatal damage to black communities.
That conversation is still unfolding, and likely will be for many years. But the conversation itself is an important step, and is calling greater attention to the problem of racial disparities in policing.
There are of course many, many differences between Nabi Saleh and Eric Garner specifically, as well as Israel-Palestine and American racial disparities generally. My point is not to argue that the issues are even remotely the same, but rather to draw a parallel between these two videos and their potential to demonstrate a larger injustice, as well as to call attention to how that injustice affects both its victims and the people who, willingly or not, enforce it. As with Eric Garner, the Nabi Saleh video may help to force a similar conversation about the terrible toll of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, about the brutalities of military occupation that could lead to a moment such as this.
There are hints, just barely, that the Nabi Saleh video may be forcing something like an Israeli version of this conversation, even if only among a few Israelis. Not that the occupation is wrong for its harms to Palestinians — yes, a number of Israelis do oppose the occupation, though they are a minority with relatively little political influence — but rather that the occupation is wrong for the moral toll it takes on Israelis who must enforce it.
There is something to this. It is easy to watch this video and fume at the Israeli soldier for assaulting a child, and indeed his behavior is wrong, and one hopes he will be appropriately punished under Israeli law. But he could be considered a victim of the occupation as well. Many Israeli soldiers in the West Bank are only 19 or 20 or 21, speak little or no Arabic, and are conscripted into enforcing a settlement policy they didn’t ask for and protecting a settlement that may be full of ultra-Orthodox Israelis probably exempt from military service.
“It’s a strange thing that conscript (draftee) soldiers who are paid wages of between $150-$300 a month are asked to be both expert soldiers, riot control professionals and sometimes a kind of social worker and media relations expert to deal with daily duty in the West Bank,” Seth Frantzman writes at the Jerusalem Post. “What no one seems to wonder is why, after 48 years of Israel running the West Bank, is the regular conscript army sent in to deal, again and again, with stone-throwing children.”
Frantzman concludes that the problem is the Israeli military should stop using regular army conscripts — as many as 3,000 of whom are sought for possible desertion, he says — for the West Bank occupation.
I’d reach a slightly different conclusion: that the occupation itself is dehumanizing, that it dehumanizes both the enforcers of the occupation and its subjects, and that it makes moments like Nabi Saleh inevitable, regardless of the character of whichever 20-something Israeli conscript happens to be on camera at that particular moment.
David Zonsheine, a former Israeli soldier and a co-founder of the anti-occupation group Courage to Refuse, explained this well (thank you to Lisa Goldman of the New America Foundation for translating from Hebrew):
The bad news is that the Israeli public, including those who send their children to serve there in the army, don’t really care about what goes on in the occupied territories. Whether they’re leftists or rightists, people don’t really care if we have a presence there or not. There are a few soldiers who are there due to the fact that they must obey orders, so they shit on the Palestinians. And they eat shit too, but under far better conditions. Every image like the ones you see here [of Nabi Saleh] just contributes to the predictable, stuck discourse. This is nothing new. Soon we’ll mark 50 years of control. Only a change in the power structure will convince Israelis to lift their control over the Palestinians. For example, a halt to the transfer of enormous sums of money from Europe and the United States to Israel and the Palestinians.
Zonsheine’s point about Israeli apathy toward the occupation reminds me again of the Garner video, which was shocking to black and white people alike in America, but shocking in a special way to white Americans who had heard about racism in policing but perhaps had not seen it play out quite so explicitly. The video was so powerful for showing the horrifying and unnecessary death of Garner, but also for showing a New York City police officer whose actions are shaped by social forces much larger than himself.
For a white American watching the Eric Garner video, it was possible to see the effects of racial disparity not just on Garner, but on the police officer as well, the way they were both trapped in a larger system of injustice. Could it be possible that Israelis who support or are indifferent to the occupation could watch the Nabi Saleh video and have a similar realization of the occupation’s moral and human toll? It is too much to expect that one video alone will change anything. But as Eric Garner’s death showed, a video can start conversation. And having that conversation matters.
For all the photos, published by Reuters and AFP, see
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