From The National
From youtube.com: Israeli troops are encircling Arab neighborhoods and blocking roads with concrete cubes
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It is has been a very bad week for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here's a small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was caught lying: a child horrifically injured by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a mob of soldiers and left to die. Soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military invasion of their village.
In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called "Pallywood" -- a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.
In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more convenient version of reality.
Last week, it emerged, Israeli officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.
Israel's deceptions have a long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become one of Israel's most celebrated actors, was assigned the job of carrying a weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.
In one incident, when soldiers playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the 12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their remains.
That occurred before the Palestinians' first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late 1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin -- later given a Hollywood-style makeover himself as a peacemaker -- urged troops to "break the bones" of Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.
The desperate, and sometimes self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed in a night raid.
Back in December he was shot in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh. Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of skull missing.
Mohammed's suffering made headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was shot, a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapping a soldier nearby after he entered her home.
Ahed, who is in jail awaiting trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol too of Israel's victimisation of children.
So, Israel began work on recrafting the narrative: of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.
It emerged that a government minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to "make Israel look bad." The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.
Last week events took a new turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a lawyer or parent.
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