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Rashomon on the West Bank: Israelis and Palestinians Debate Images of Soldier and Child

Not much of what happened last Friday during a demonstration near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh is in doubt. But in thousands of social media arguments since then, Israelis and Palestinians, and supporters of the two sides around the world, have interpreted one charged encounter in very different ways.

After a protest against Israel’s military occupation became an exchange of tear gas and stones, an Israeli soldier tried to arrest a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, one arm in a sling, accused of hurling rocks.

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An Israeli soldier briefly detained a 12-year-old Palestinian boy at a protest near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Friday.Credit...Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

The soldier was quickly set upon by five female protesters, as at least eight journalists or activists photographed the confrontation.

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At a demonstration in the West Bank on Friday, female Palestinian protesters struggled with an Israeli soldier to prevent the arrest of a boy suspected of throwing rocks.Credit...Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

Then, over the course of a few minutes, the women and girls, including the boy’s 14-year-old sister, who bit the soldier on the hand, scuffled with him until he released the boy.

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A young Palestinian protester, Ahed Tamimi, 14, bit an Israeli soldier during a scuffle on Friday in the West Bank, as she tried to prevent her brother’s arrest.Credit...Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That much is clearly known, because the foiled arrest of the boy, Mohammed Tamimi, also known as Abu Yazan, was so extensively documented in images that have been seen around the world.

Footage of the incident, recorded by Palestinian and Israeli activists and reporters from at least five angles, has been broadcast repeatedly on Israeli and Arab television, and viewed more than eight million times on Facebook and YouTube.

The most complete account was captured on video by Bilal Tamimi, the village videographer and a relative of the boy, who has been documenting protests there for years.

A Jordanian broadcaster’s footage was posted on the official Facebook page of the nearby Palestinian city of Ramallah, where it has been seen 2.4 million times.

Another angle on the scene, recorded by Hisham Abu Shaqrah, a journalist from Bethlehem, was broadcast by Al Jazeera and viewed more than 1.6 million times on the Qatari satellite channel’s Facebook page.

More footage of the clash, shot by Eric Cortellessa, an American reporter, to go with his account of the protest, was posted online by The Times of Israel.

An Israeli activist who frequently documents West Bank protests, Israel Puterman, showed much of the confrontation from another angle, as well as some of what came before and after.

A one-minute report produced for Al Jazeera’s AJ+ mobile app, combining footage shot by a member of the Tamimi family with news photographs and dramatic music, has been shared more than 100,000 times on Facebook and Twitter, generating 3.7 million views.

The final moments also were caught on video recorded by an Israeli activist, David Reeb, who was following the arrest of another protester, Vittorio Fera, an Italian from the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Photographs of the same scene, distributed by international news services, have illustrated hundreds of news articles, opinion pieces, blog posts and updates on social networks.

Despite broad agreement about the central facts — a spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces said that the soldier “attempted to detain an individual who had been identified as throwing rocks” and was foiled; the boy’s mother, who participated in the struggle to free him, said he had been throwing rocks — there is an intense debate about what, precisely, the images convey about the Israeli military occupation of this territory, which has now lasted nearly five decades.

Supporters of the Palestinian cause say the images of an armed soldier placing a 12-year-old boy with a cast on his arm in a headlock is important evidence of what they call the brutality of life under military rule.

Many Israelis, including some senior officials, concurred with domestic media accounts that depicted the soldier as showing great restraint as the victim of a violent attack by the female protesters.

In the many thousands of arguments over the images still unfolding on social networks, pro-Palestinian commenters focus on the boy’s youth and arm injury — his mother said he had fallen while fleeing Israeli soldiers on a previous day. Israelis pointed instead to photographs of his sister, Ahed, biting the soldier’s hand after he pushed her in the face.

At the heart of the battle over the meaning of these images is that the weekly demonstrations in Nabi Saleh, led by Mohammed’s father, Bassem Tamimi, and his extended family, have, for many who follow them primarily through footage posted every week on YouTube and Facebook, come to feel something like a reality show.

The essence of the dispute, over what happened last week and what has happened in previous months and years when the somewhat ritualized confrontations have spilled into deadly violence, is essentially over what viewers of the clips think is more important: the reality or the show.

For the villagers of Nabi Saleh, and the small band of Israeli and international activists who join them in protesting each Friday, even the most theatrical of their protests — like a recent one in which children in soccer jerseys showed soldiers red cards — is shadowed by the threat of real danger from the conflicts with Israeli soldiers. At one demonstration in 2011, a protester hurling rocks at an Israeli armored vehicle, Mustafa Tamimi, died after he was struck on the head with a tear gas shell fired at him by a retreating soldier. The next year, another member of the family, Rushdi Tamimi, 31, was shot and killed by soldiers who had run out of tear gas.

After the confrontation last Friday, supporters of the Tamimis shared images of the women hitting the soldier, and a Brazilian editorial cartoon celebrating their fight to free Mohammed in which the Israeli was portrayed as a dog.

In the aftermath of the encounter, young Mohammed was lionized in the local media and interviewed, along with his family, by both Israeli television and Press TV, Iran’s state-owned broadcaster.

For many Israelis, the weekly confrontations look like attempts by the Tamimi family to goad soldiers into using excessive force just to generate images that could tarnish Israel’s reputation in the eyes of the world.

In an interview with Israel’s Army Radio on Sunday, the soldier’s father, who said that he was “very proud of the restraint he showed,” suggested that the incident was just such an attempt.

“Whoever watches the video can see that a number of women set upon him when photographers are gathered around, men are standing around,” the soldier’s father said. “This provocation that I.D.F. soldiers are frequently exposed to is an unpleasant one that I am sure they know how to deal with. The photographers were not there for nothing.”

Shmuel Rosner, an editor for The Jewish Journal, a weekly newspaper based in Los Angeles, argued in a blog post: “This was a trap, and the soldier did not fall into the trap.”

“So next time when someone tells you that the I.D.F. is merciless — that its soldiers show no restraint when dealing with Palestinians — remember this photo of a soldier that did not use his gun and did not hurt the civilians around him,” Mr. Rosner said. “Would they dare attack a soldier of a truly merciless military in such a manner?”

Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev, described the incident as humiliating for the soldier and called on the military to change its rules of engagement. “We need to decide immediately that a soldier that is attacked is permitted to return fire. Period,” Ms. Regev wrote on Facebook. “I call on the minister of security to put an end to the humiliation and change the open fire regulations immediately!”

From the other side of Israel’s political spectrum, Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for Haaretz, argued that the mask worn by the soldier was a sign that the extensive documentation of the protests in Nabi Saleh online was weighing on the minds of the young men in uniform:

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.

“Whatever you think of the Palestinian national struggle,” Mr. Pfeffer added, “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 I.D.F. providing extras every week for the show?”

The online dispute was particularly lively because of the central role played by Mohammed’s sister, Ahed, who has become something on an Internet celebrity in recent years, because of the popularity of video clips of her screaming at Israeli soldiers. She was even flown to Turkey to receive an award and meet the country’s prime minister in 2012, after she was captured on video raising her fist to an Israeli soldier following the arrest of her older brother, Waed.

The same images of Ahed venting her anger at Israeli soldiers are viewed quite differently by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and their supporters. One Israeli blogger who accuses the Tamimi family of using Ahed in scenes staged for the cameras refers to her as “Shirley Temper,” and mocked her appearances on camera in a YouTube remix that portrayed her as a child actress.

After Friday’s confrontation in Nabi Saleh made the international press, that blogger, an Australian-Israeli who edits the blog Israellycool, took credit for getting Britain’s Daily Mail to entirely recast a report that was initially sympathetic to the Tamimi family so that it suggested that the event had been staged for propaganda purposes.

After the wave of publicity generated by the images, Bassem Tamimi said that he and his wife, Nariman, were stopped on Tuesday at an Israeli checkpoint outside Nabi Saleh. According to Mr. Tamimi, he was ordered to wait for about an hour and a half as an Israeli soldier took his identity papers and asked questions about his son.

“A soldier opened his phone and showed me a photo and video, and said, ‘Is this your son?’ ” Mr. Tamimi said in a telephone interview. “I think they were trying to provoke me.”

An Israeli military spokeswoman said she was unaware of the incident.

Diaa Hadid contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

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