At the regular Friday protest in Nabi Saleh on the West Bank last week, an Israeli soldier chased an 11-year old boy in a cast around on a rock outcrop and then held him down in a headlock. The boy's name is Mohammed Tamimi and his mother and sisters tried to pull the soldier off (his sister bit the soldier's hand). Eventually the soldier's commanding officer pulled him off. The soldier threw a tear-gas grenade at the family as he walked away. David did a diary about it.
There is a lot of meta-commentary about the incident, the video and the images. Vox asked whether this was Israel's Eric Garner Moment. The Guardian did a story on how the images are being spun by both sides, and Anshel Pfeiffer had a perceptive piece in Haaretz which I will quote below.
There has also been some exultant commentary about this being "Pallywood Propaganda" (some of it in DKos comments). A Daily Mail article cast doubt on the authenticity of the encounter following an organized comment/e-mail campaign orchestrated by the website Israellycool. In some places, this is coupled with "concern" for Palestinian children who are being brought to protests by their parents. Some of the concern might even be sincere, but I wonder where all these people were when children in Gaza were dying by the hundreds in Israeli bombing raids. Probably repeating "human shields" as a mantra.
Clearly, these weekly protests are staged and are meant to attract attention. And yes, the Tamimi family in Nabi Saleh are "well-known activists". That is not a knock against them, it is the entire point of direct action.
You know who else was a "well known activist" with a knack for propaganda? Gandhi.
Gandhi's
Salt March was an elaborately staged event where he walked for hundreds of miles till he reached the ocean. Over the course of twenty days, he milked the global media covering his progress, his small band grew to a trail of followers thousands strong as word spread and people joined in. When he arrived at Dandi, he walked into the sea amid a crowd of thousands, immersed himself, walked around and picked up a piece of salt and declared "With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire." It was an
anti-tax protest.
And yes, there were a number of children who participated in the Salt March.
And yes, British antagonists also censored Gandhi's propaganda, calling him "cunning as a cartload of monkeys". And yes, they imprisoned many of his followers without trial. And yes, British forces also fired on a gathering of protestors at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in 1919. And yes, the British investigation condemned General Dyer's actions as a "grave error" and "un-British" but imposed no penalties.
Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not means meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means the putting of one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant.
-- MK Gandhi, Doctrine of the Sword
So the next time someone tells you Palestinians protesting the occupation are "just" propagandists, tell them they're in good company.
From A Picture of a Headlock That's Worth a Thousand Words, Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz, August 31, 2015:
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.
This is exactly the weakness direct action seeks to expose.
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?
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.
[...]
Whatever these men and their immediate commanders are telling themselves, the true underlying reason more soldiers are covering their faces is shame.
If it is shame, that is a sure sign the
protestors are winning.
Bassem Tamimi says he has settled on non-violent, direct action after seeing his share of violence and death. His sister died while visiting him in IDF custody, she was allegedly pushed down stairs by an Israeli army administrator. His cousin Sa'id was convicted of killing the Beit-El settler Haim Mizrahi (Sa'id's father was reportedly killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon when he was an infant). A woman from his village, Ahlam Tamimi drove the suicide bomber in the Sbarro restaurant bombing which killed 15, including 7 children. Bassem's cousin Mustafa was killed by a gas-grenade fired at close range by IDF soldiers in 2011. Then in 2012, his brother-in-law Rushdi was killed by IDF soldiers using live fire. Another 14 year-old cousin (Islam Tamimi) was beaten during an interrogation (which was filmed). Bassem was imprisoned based on this interrogation.
Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. The "turn the other cheek" philosophy and the "love your enemies" philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict, a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.
-- Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom
And we'll leave it to Churchill to express the British imperialist's view of Gandhi.
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.
-- Winston Churchill as quoted in "Mr Churchill on India" in The Times (24 February 1931)