Nabi Saleh images illustrate changing asymmetry of Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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.
Ahed Tamimi bites the soldier’s hand. Photograph: Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Bassem Tamimi and his wife, Nariman, arrive at an Israeli military court
in 2012 where he was sentenced to 13 months’ jail for urging youths to
throw rocks at soldiers. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
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 frontline
of potentially dangerous encounters. And how much those encounters are
designed to produce images such as those on Friday.
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.
Ahed Tamimi pictured in her bedroom at the age of 12. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/Guardian
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.
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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.
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