It is has been a very bad week
for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small
sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was
caught lying.
A child horrifically injured
by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he
was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas
inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a
mob of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a
Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military
invasion of their village.
In the early 2000s, at the
dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence
of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” –
a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.
In truth, however, it was the
Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more
convenient version of reality.
Last week, it emerged, Israeli
officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked
up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping
journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.
Israel’s deceptions have a
long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become
one of Israel’s most celebrated actors, was assigned the job of carrying a
weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When
Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.
In one incident, when soldiers
playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the
12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their
remains.
That occurred before the
Palestinians’ first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late
1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later given a Hollywood-style
makeover himself as a peacemaker – urged troops to “break the bones” of
Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.
The desperate, and sometimes
self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were
underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed
in a night raid.
Back in December he was shot
in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh.
Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of
skull missing.
Mohammed’s suffering made
headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was
shot, a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapping a soldier
nearby after he entered her home.
Ahed, who is in jail awaiting
trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol
too of Israel’s victimisation of children.
So, Israel began work on
recrafting the narrative: of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.
It emerged that a government
minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that
Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to “make
Israel look bad”. The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.
Last week events took a new
turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still
gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a
lawyer or parent.
Shortly afterwards, Israel
produced a signed confession stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not
Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a bicycle crash.
Yoav Mordechai, the
occupation’s top official, trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies
and incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the Israeli media
dutifully reported.
Deprived of a justification
for slapping an occupation soldier, Ahed can now be locked away by military
judges. Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital documentation,
including brain scans, all prove that Mohammed was shot.
This was simply another of
Israellywood’s endless productions to automatically confer guilt on
Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s incarceration production
line each year have to sign confessions – or plea bargains – to win
jail-sentence reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.
It is more Franz Kafka than
Hollywood.
A second army narrative
unravelled last week. CCTV showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank
range during an invasion of Jericho, then savagely beaten by soldiers as he lay
wounded, and left to bleed to death.
It was an unexceptional
incident. A report by Amnesty International last month noted that many of the
dozens of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of extra-judicial
executions.
Before footage of Saradih’s killing
surfaced, the army issued a series of false statements, including that he died
from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid treatment and was armed with a
knife. The video disproves all of that.
Over the past two years,
dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been shot in
similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army concludes that they
were killed while attacking soldiers with a knife – Israel even named this
period of unrest a “knife intifada”.
Are soldiers today carrying a
“knife bag”, just as Meir-Khamis once carried a weapons bag?
A half-century of occupation
has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been
allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed an industry of lies
and self-deceptions to make sure the consciences of Israelis are never clouded
by a moment of doubt – that maybe their army is not so moral after all.
A version of this article
first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
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