Israel Tackles Existential Threat Posed By 16-Year-Old Palestinian Girl

[Dominus Atheos]

The Intercept

ON WEDNESDAY, AN Israeli military court extended the detention of Ahed Tamimi, a 16-year-old girl who has become the face of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank for many who follow the weekly protests in her village through social media.

**snip tweets**

The girl was arrested in an overnight raid of her family’s home in the village of Nabi Saleh early Monday.

The arrest, and images of the less-than-daring raid released by the Israeli police to broadcasters, appeared to be an effort to placate far-right Israelis who were angered by video recorded last Friday, as the Palestinian teenager and a female cousin forced two heavily armed Israeli soldiers from her front yard, slapping and kicking them.

**snip tweets**

Too tweet-heavy to quote, sorry.

[Simon_Jester]

One of the chronic problems faced by occupying armies in the face of this kind of thing is that there is no non-ridiculous, non-horrible way to control the situation. This child is humiliating the IDF, but not in a way that would make killing even remotely justifiable... So either the IDF looks like a hopeless joke of a force, or they look like an abominable child-abusing brute squad. There is no middle ground for them, amusingly.

Which is why nonviolent and very-slightly-violent (i.e. slapping armed soldiers) protests tend to work better than heavily armed terrorist campaigns and bombings and rocket bombardments, despite our intuition suggesting that it should be the other way around.

[Edi]

Israel with its current government is a fascist theocracy, masquerading as a supposedly enlightened democracy, that lies about every aspect of its occupation of Palestinian land and allows settlers and soldiers to murder at will as long as ity is not caught on live camera, so why is anyone surprised about this?

[Simon_Jester]

Not particularly surprised at the disproportionate hammering being applied by the Israelis.

Given the way I often hear them described, perhaps I should be surprised they didn't simply shoot the girls dead on the spot when they started slapping IDF soldiers?

[The Romulan Republic]

Not particularly surprised at the disproportionate hammering being applied by the Israelis.

Given the way I often hear them described, perhaps I should be surprised they didn't simply shoot the girls dead on the spot when they started slapping IDF soldiers?

Hell, quite a few American cops would willingly gun down a teenager (especially one from an oppressed/minority group) that hit them.

[Simon_Jester]

I... dunno, I think it depends on what you mean by "quite a few."

My money's on it being a really small percentage- but for all I know from what you said, you might think it's a double-digit minority or even more...

[Tribble]

Israel with its current government is a fascist theocracy, masquerading as a supposedly enlightened democracy, that lies about every aspect of its occupation of Palestinian land and allows settlers and soldiers to murder at will as long as ity is not caught on live camera, so why is anyone surprised about this?

Even if everything said here is true I'm kind of disappointed that a Governor of all people would post this kind of comment since it can very easily spawn an "Israel vs Palestine" debate.

[Ace Pace]

Israel with its current government is a fascist theocracy, masquerading as a supposedly enlightened democracy, that lies about every aspect of its occupation of Palestinian land and allows settlers and soldiers to murder at will as long as ity is not caught on live camera, so why is anyone surprised about this?

Even if everything said here is true I'm kind of disappointed that a Governor of all people would post this kind of comment since it can very easily spawn an "Israel vs Palestine" debate.

That cow is beaten to death so much it can come back to life as Jesus.

I think the best I can add to this thread is a telling comment on the Israeli Police and IDF Military police. "This is a remarkable show of restraint from the IDF, if it'd been an Israeli citizen she'd already have been shot."

A more sociological note, is what happens when you have an entire generation (soon two) of young males whose formative experience included, among others, filtering and watching over an entire captive population? Whose training lead them to regularly arrest and beat up teenagers while fearing that those same teenagers will try to kill you regardless of harm to them.

[Thanas]

Israel with its current government is a fascist theocracy, masquerading as a supposedly enlightened democracy, that lies about every aspect of its occupation of Palestinian land and allows settlers and soldiers to murder at will as long as ity is not caught on live camera, so why is anyone surprised about this?

Even if everything said here is true I'm kind of disappointed that a Governor of all people would post this kind of comment since it can very easily spawn an "Israel vs Palestine" debate.

Comments like that are absolutely fine if they are within the context of this thread.

If I bring up "fascists often kill people" in a thread about one victim of fascist oppression then I will not violate a fascism vs communism moratorium for example.

[Tribble]

Israel with its current government is a fascist theocracy, masquerading as a supposedly enlightened democracy, that lies about every aspect of its occupation of Palestinian land and allows settlers and soldiers to murder at will as long as ity is not caught on live camera, so why is anyone surprised about this?

Even if everything said here is true I'm kind of disappointed that a Governor of all people would post this kind of comment since it can very easily spawn an "Israel vs Palestine" debate.

Comments like that are absolutely fine if they are within the context of this thread.

If I bring up "fascists often kill people" in a thread about one victim of fascist oppression then I will not violate a fascism vs communism moratorium for example.

I didn't say that the comment was a direct violation of the Israel vs Palestine moratorium. I stated that it could easily spawn an Isreal vs Palestine debate because the natural retort to that kind of comment would be "you are wrong about Israel and anyways Palestine does X Y Z which makes them just as bad etc."

Or perhaps we should just lift the moratorium rather than beat around the bushes?

That cow is beaten to death so much it can come back to life as Jesus.

Hence the moratorium, but it does still seem to be a popular (indirect) topic of discussion. Mind you, if that cow did get resurrected it'd be promptly beaten to death again.

[Ace Pace]

I'd like to selectively quote from a good essay on how a left winger (AKA a realist) saw things, but specifically the difference in coverage to help understand the context these soldiers are serving in.

The conversation between the three men is salutary because it provides real insight into the mentality of mainstream Israeli society. First we hear Or Heller, an experienced military affairs correspondent, repeating the army’s narrative. He expresses pride in the soldiers, makes the claim that the Tamimi family provoked the confrontation as a means of creating an anti-Israeli propaganda video, and asserts that the soldiers were only in the vicinity to prevent Palestinian residents from throwing rocks.

Yaron London, an intelligent and educated man who does, I am sure, identify as a liberal, fails to question Heller’s narrative. Both men are completely focused on the challenge those unarmed adolescent girls supposedly present to “their” soldiers, rather than on the actual violence that those soldiers visit upon the village week after week.

Jonathan Pollak was in Nabi Saleh when the incident occurred. Watch as he calmly provides the context, and note how shocked Heller and London are when Pollak refers to “your” army — rather than “our” army. (Pollak refused to serve, which is a radical act in Israel.)

This segment encapsulates the Achilles heel of the Israeli media — i.e., its willingness to report communiqués issued by the army as straight news, without any fact checking. Even though the Israeli security establishment has been caught lying on countless occasions, journalists who report for mainstream media outlets continue to accept without question the information they are given about events they neither witnessed nor verified independently.

Throughout the many months I attended Friday demonstrations in Nabi Saleh, I never saw a single reporter from an Israeli media outlet. And yet, during the drive home after those long and distressing days, the news presenter on Israel Radio would report that there had been “riots” in a West Bank village and that “our forces” responded with crowd control measures.

...
And then I would go back to Tel Aviv and be told by my friends that I could not have seen what I saw, because “our soldiers” do not behave that way. Soon, I had to distance myself from those friends in order to keep my own emotions in check.

[AniThyng]

I'm curious as to how you feel about mainstream Arab and Muslim media in general coverage of the situations, e.g. Al Jazeera and it's contemporaries.

[Ace Pace]

So that's a complex answer. I keep track of several Arab websites and their coverage is on general, even worse than the Israeli media because they're pretty much all government owned media orgs that serve to stoke nationalist sentiment while ignoring reality.

I'm also going to try and answer a larger question, which is western media (sorry K.A. Pital, I can't read Chinese or Russian) and arab media view. I'll do it in a too short fashion because I'm currently incapable of whipping up a good essay.

In peacetime, external media is often blind to reality on the ground. Whether it means calling a riot with molotov cocktails a "demonstration", or ignoring that buses inside Israel need to have their windows hardened against rocks. Or the day to day terror of being a Palestinian trying to get a work permit in Israel, keeping it and actually showing up to work, all non trivial tasks thanks to Israel making it hard to earn a living. While the other side of having a 19 year old girl watching over Palestinians in border checkpoints wondering if the crazy grandmother is wearing a suicide belt (happened), is the 10 year old boy, with no permit, holding a ceramic knife in order to stab you.

Whether it's because of an editorial line (as common with Arab media) or a wish to keep your sources (most western media), there's a general lack of any investigative reporting. Three random examples. The rampant and horrid educational racism in the Palestinian territories, where kids are taught there is no such thing as Israel (the same doesn't happen on the other side). Or the utter collapse of any moral fiber or dreams in the Israeli side as teenagers grow up, knowing they need to keep track of where the nearest missile shelter is. Another is a good, honest reporting on the negotiation challenges faced by any set of peace talks (hard to call them that in any serious manner), because ignoring the reality on the ground and saying "yeah, territorial swaps why don't they get it over with" ignores simple geography. To my mind, the biggest story that isn't being told is that this is the third generation, on both sides, growing up faced with a situation that hasn't changed and this is the generation coming to power.

In wartime, the amount of sheer bullshit being spread on Arab media is amusing, if only because the Israeli media is intensely critical of the government on a day to day basis (while accepting its reality) and during wartime, keeps up the criticism. Meanwhile, western media simply doesn't report things, whether it's because it doesn't fit a narrative, example A or because the journalists, for good reason, fear for their lives if they don't toe the line, example B.


A quick summation would be, that the IvP conflict is covered horribly by nearly all the media organisations involved, for various reasons, some legit some less so. This makes it harder for people outside the region to build an understanding of the facts, nevermind the possibilities or lack thereof.

[Edi]

Thanks, Ace. One can always count on you to tell things as they are over there and you have both local perspective and impartiality.

[The Romulan Republic]

I... dunno, I think it depends on what you mean by "quite a few."

My money's on it being a really small percentage- but for all I know from what you said, you might think it's a double-digit minority or even more...

Probably dpends on the department in question, I'd say. Some departments run themselves as little more than racist police states (Sheriff Joe Arpaio might be the most extreme example of this, but hardly the only one). Others make an effort to be better than that, and actually work with the community. Unfortunately, the shit heads tend to overshadow the ones who actually try to behave responsibly.