In the 1997 fictional film “Wag the Dog,” a
Hollywood producer and a Washington spin doctor fabricate violence in
Albania in order to divert attention from the president’s sex scandal.
To persuade the country of the need for war, they manufacture footage of
a young orphan girl fleeing from mayhem.
On a media stage far away from Hollywood, in the West Bank village of
Nabi Saleh,
where photographers gather every Friday to document repetitious scenes
of Palestinian residents and international activists clashing with
Israeli soldiers, Palestinian activists are placing their children in
ever-more-visible roles. Unlike scenes in “Wag the Dog,” a black comedy,
there’s nothing funny about parents exploiting their own children to
score propaganda points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Days later, photos of the distraught girls
appeared in Australia’s Fairfax media outlets alongside a Page-1 article
charging the Israeli army with the routine abuse of Palestinian
children. “An Israeli soldier restrains a Palestinian girl crying over
the arrest of her mother during a protest over land confiscation in
al-Nabi Saleh,” stated one caption in the
Age and the
Sydney Morning Herald.
Slamming
the article’s “unnamed sources, hearsay and propaganda,” Philip
Chester, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, also charged
that the Palestinian leadership “blatantly use[s] children” and
“presents a fable where Israel’s curtailing of violence is tantamount to
abuse of children.”
Chester was not specifically addressing the
photographs of the appealing young Tamimi girls under the thumb of the
Israeli military, but he may as well have been.
A’hd is the daughter of Narimen and Bassem,
prominent activists in the Popular Resistance, and Marah’s father is
Naji, another leader in the weekly demonstrations.
In other words, the girls’ parents are among
those who determine the protests’ strategies. Rather than keeping their
children at a safe distance from the often-violent clashes, the parents
encouraged their children to play highly visible roles in the
confrontation with the army.
Narimen is a participant in B’Tselem’s video
project, in which the prominent Israeli NGO distributes video cameras to
Palestinians to “present the reality of their lives to the Israeli and
the international public.”
This is not the first time she has exploited children and distorted reality. In a 2011
video
of the arrest of an 11-year-old stone-thrower, Narimen filmed as a
Palestinian man instructed the boy’s mother not to join him on the
police vehicle, even while Israeli authorities repeatedly asked her to
board the van. Later media reports falsely claimed that the Israeli
police forbade his parents from accompanying him.
Despite complaints about her cynical
exploitation of Palestinian children in order to produce anti-Israel
propaganda, Narimen has not stopped using children as props. To the
contrary, she has since enlisted her own daughter.
In a 16-minute video posted on the
Nabi Saleh Solidarity blog,
the two girls can be seen leading a crowd marching toward a spring that
the army has deemed off-limits. A’hd and Marah are filmed at length,
cursing the soldiers and trying to get around them. Marah can be seen
running some distance to approach and confront soldiers. And when
Narimen and two other women are arrested, the girls refuse to let go,
interfering with the arrests. An army spokesman later said that the
detainees, who were held for a few hours, had been throwing rocks.
Though photographs of the crying and
constrained A’hd and Marah are actually products of Palestinian
manipulation and exploitation of children, the Australian media outlets
publish them unquestioningly as ostensible evidence of Israeli abuse of
Palestinian children.
In other words, the Tamimi girls pulled off a
photographic coup, as their parents had hoped. For this, they were
rewarded with a meeting with Laila Ghannam, the Palestinian Authority’s
Governor of Ramallah, and President Mahmoud Abbas, who congratulated
them for their “bravery.”
But what if next time their parents send them
out into a violent confrontation they are injured, or worse? This would
be tragic — but think of the pictures and articles incriminating Israel
in the next day’s paper.
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