Rights and Accountability 5 May 2014
Israeli soldier David Adamov has become an overnight hero in Israel. Why? Because he cocked his assault rifle at unarmed Palestinian youths in Hebron.
Adamov’s actions were caught on camera and posted to YouTube by the activist group Youth Against Settlements. In the video, Adamov is seen talking trash to a Palestinian teen in Hebron, a city in the occupied West Bank, as several onlookers watch with cameras in hand.
Adamov then loads his assault rifle and points it at the teen’s face and takes aim at several others while threatening them with “a bullet in your head” if they don’t stop recording.
Sadly, the video’s content is not unusual or surprising. The Internet is teeming with visual representations of Israel’s occupation enforcers dishing out vicious cruelty against unarmed Palestinians of all ages with total impunity.
But this particular video struck a nerve among soldiers following rumors that Adamov was sentenced to 20 days in military jail for aiming his gun at civilians. The Israeli army quickly clarified that Adamov was being held for assaulting a superior officer for the second time. In fact, it was the Palestinian youth who was arrested and interrogated. But it was too late to stop the backlash.
Within hours a storm of outrage erupted within the Israeli army, culminating in the Facebook page “David from the Nahal brigade” — or “David Hanahlawi” in Hebrew. With more than 129,000 likes as of this writing plus thousands of photos of Israelis, mostly soldiers, holding up signs in Hebrew that say “We are with David Hanahlawi,” the page is still gaining traction.
A dangerous victim complex
Several Israeli politicians have expressed solidarity with Adamov, including economy minister Naftali Bennett of the far right Jewish Home party.
“I would have done the same as David the Nahal soldier,” Bennet declared. “Violence was directed at him. He was alone, surrounded by violent, provocative Arabs. He didn’t shoot. He defended himself and those surrounding him reasonably and ended the incident.”
Construction and housing minister Uri Ariel, also of the Jewish Home party, added his voice to the chorus of incitement from high level officials, saying, “The reality in which soldiers have to absorb harm and humiliation on a daily basis without being able to respond, even when their lives are really in danger, because we’re afraid of criticism, is intolerable.”
Ariel was echoing the main complaint from Israeli soldiers that their “hands are tied” in the face of Palestinian aggression. But the facts tell a far different story.
According to reality, Israeli soldiers are free to act as belligerently as they wish toward the mostly defenseless population they are tasked with dominating. Sure, Palestinian children sometimes throw rocks, but they are aiming at heavily-armed Israeli soldiers who have a habit of launching tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian school children, not to mention the live ammunition routinely fired at unarmed Palestinians.
Trigger-happy impunity
In a damning investigation released in February, Amnesty International found that “trigger-happy” Israeli soldiers and security forces since 2011 have critically injured 261 Palestinians, including 67 children, in the West Bank with live ammunition.
In 2013 alone, Amnesty documented 22 Palestinian civilians, including four children, killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank. They found that none of them posed a threat and that some were “willful killings” that “amount to war crimes.”
Nevertheless, Israeli soldiers, whose hands are supposedly tied, are rarely — if ever — prosecuted, let alone convicted. As Amnesty notes, not one soldier has been convicted for willfully killing a Palestinian since 1987.
With this in mind, the notion that Israeli forces are the victims in this scenario is laughably absurd. It is Palestinians whose hands are tied (or more accurately, shackled) in the face of checkpoints, land theft and forced displacement executed by trigger-happy soldiers with a callous disregard for Palestinian life.
Media’s troubling tone
In typical biased fashion, The New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren characterized the incident as “an aggressive confrontation with Palestinian teenagers,” as though the encounter was between two equally powerful parties rather than a heavily armed occupation soldier and unarmed civilian youths.
Rudoren went on to report as fact an Israeli army lie that one of the Palestinian youths in the video was holding brass knuckles. This was disproven the following day when a second video emerged (embedded below) showing the Palestinian teen, whose name is Saddam Abu Sneinah, holding prayer beads, not brass knuckles.
Other media outlets — like Reuters, the BBC and The Guardian — centered the story around Israeli reactions to the Facebook campaign, an unfortunate reminder that Israeli opinions about the occupation take precedence over the often-ignored daily violence inflicted against Palestinians.
Israeli extremism
This entire episode should serve as a warning about the extremism and anti-Palestinian fervor permeating Israeli society, where reality is so warped that heavily-armed occupiers genuinely see themselves as victims to defenseless population they are actively wiping off the map. It is a scandal that the world is silent while Palestinians are at their mercy.
Comments
OBJECTIONS OF MANY ARE TRUTHS FOR THE FEW
Permalink Peter Loeb replied on
Some responded in horror to my earlier reference to Machel Prior's work
on "the Exodus Paradigm" and colonialism. It is inappropriate to cite
long extracts about Priors' major contributions here. I referred instead to a brief
yet thorough explanation in Prior's essay "The Right to Expel: The Bible and
Ethnic Cleansing" which is the first essay in a book edited by Naseer Aruri,
PALESTINIAN REFUGEES: THE RIGHT OF RETURN: Prior was indeed
anti-Zionist (not "antiSemitic") but he was a Catholic Priest and first
and foremost concerned about the obligation to a divinity to cleanse and or
exterminate those in an area not of a specified and by implication "inferior"
strain. Should you prefer Prior's longer development, read his THE BIBLE AND
COLONIALISM: A MORAL CRITIQUE (1977).
It is much more that only "relevant". It is essential to understanding how one
group (Israelis above) can consider themselves empowered to cleanse,
exterminate, depopulate, (the Israeli word is "transfer"). This view is
as Prior notes a central part of the Puritans against the indigeonous in
North America and indeed in all similar colonial expressions not only "Jewish"
but also Christian within what has been called "The Judeo-Christian Tradition"
It is a central key to the above and explains why this kind of behavior continually
repeats itself "Jewish" or not. The "Saints" (aka "Puritans") who came to the
"empty" North American continent were hardly "Jewish". Yet according to the
"Exodus Paradigm"they sought to make their "New Israel"in North America by conquest and removal/extermination of the indigeonous people who were inferior by their definition.
With Prior's death in 2004, a great theologian was lost. (Even for non-Catholics!)
----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
THE RIGHT TO EXTERMINATE...I
Permalink Peter Loeb replied on
In addition to my earlier remarks ("Objections of Many are Truths for Few") I feel
obliged to add the brief work of Nasser H. Aruri, DISHONEST BROKER: THE
US ROLE.... Aruri, born in Jeruselum which Israel unilaterally now claim
to be "Israel", makes a cogent analysis of the many intricacies of policy toward
Israel. It is also a serious indictment of the leadership of the PA (then Arafat) .
The slogan "Kill an Arab" which is not uncommon in today's Israel sums up
the extermination drive of the State of Israel.
The struggle and resistance attempts will not be able to master the military
collosus which Israel has become with US help.
After all, to kill an Arab (Palestinian) presumes the moral inferiority of
Palestinians . And the prospect of change either in Israel or in the US seems
unlikely.
Peter Loeb
I speak Hebrew and the
Permalink max replied on
I speak Hebrew and the translation in your article for that first video is inaccurate. The soldier doesn't threaten to shoot the boy if he continues filming - he literally threatens to give him a ball in the head, or less literally a blow to the head, which when used among Hebrew speakers, typically as hyperbole, refers to punching someone in the face. In fact there is a lot to say about the language used by both the soldier and the civilian that is interesting for many reasons.
I don't think Rudoren's language in the NYT describing the encounter as an aggressive confrontation is understatement. If an Israeli civilian were to confront an Israeli soldier in the manner that that Palestinian civilian did, the scene would play out exactly as it does in the video. Furthermore, I don't appreciate how without context the clip is - we have no idea what what said to incite the aggression, or how long it had been going on, etc.
I appreciate the work being done here on this website, but it seems ridiculous to call out the NYTimes on a charge of bias when this website so obviously one-sided.
Gaza and Israel
Permalink Paul Siemering replied on
the u.s. has brought tons of death and destruction to many parts of the world. I get very angry about this.
Israel though, while it makes me angry, also makes me sick. As it does the whole world except for the u.s. enablers