The ‘Pallywood’ smear: Viral images of Palestinian boy’s brutalization brings backlash [View all]

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/09/palestinian-brutalization-pallywood

Let us be clear about the media trend: Israeli hasbara is fighting back against the exposure afforded to activists as a result of last week’s embarrassing photos and video. No doubt the Tamimi’s are getting famous. But that is because they refuse to stop protesting the theft of their village land and spring. Denied any means of self defense, they dare to expose the world to the reality of their lives while the cameras are rolling. They have no guns or bombs, they fight with media and exposure. But the scenes they record are very real. And the whole point is to capture the violence they face, as a matter of routine, on camera. Rosa Parks also planned her heroic action on a Montgomery bus in 1955. But was it staged? Of course not.

It appears that some people are just now waking up to this reality. That these protests, like other protests and demonstrations throughout history, are intended to garner attention and change facts on the ground. If the cameras were not there, armed Israeli forces would still chase, capture, arrest and detain Palestinians, including their children. The point of the recordings for the Tamimi family is to get the message out to the world.

The reason the video went viral is that most people object to a policy of targeting, abducting and imprisoning children. But in Palestine, soldiers enter villages, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in the middle of the night, and take children away. Here’s another example of grabbing a child in Nabi Saleh:

Are the soldiers being set up to star as villains in a “Pallywood” video? If so, one would think Israel should stop targeting Palestinian children. And stop invading villages in the middle of the night. But no. Ayed Abu Eqtaish, account­ability program director at Defense for Children Internation­al-Palestine (DCIP), told The Arab Weekly 700 children were put on trial in Israeli military courts in 2014.