Cowardly brutality exposed: The viral video that should change the Israel/Palestine debate forever - Salon.com

23.9.15

Cowardly brutality exposed: The viral video that should change the Israel/Palestine debate forever - Salon.com: The scene sums up on a small scale the past decades of Israeli violence, and it captures the lesson that the Israelis seem incapable of getting into their heads once and for all: that the sheer capacity for brute force—at which they admittedly excel—does not, in itself, translate into political gain, and can, indeed, backfire politically to produce the opposite result from what was intended: courage instead of fear; steadfastness instead of collapse; defiance instead of submission.

One would have thought that the video would have occasioned some circumspection, or at least awkward silence, among Israelis and what remains of their rapidly thinning fan club in the U.S., but no—of course not. Israel’s minister of culture took to the media to declare that the army’s open-fire regulations ought to be changed to officially permit shooting unarmed Palestinians in order “to put an end to the humiliation.” Better, then, for the soldier to have gunned the family down in cold blood than to have failed to snatch their 12-year-old. Such are the choices to which Israel now finds itself reduced.